Meredith's Monday Musings: Book Titles

Hi All!

Happy Monday and the beginning of December! Omg! Can you all believe that we’re in the last month of 2017? I feel like it was literally yesterday and I was saying I can’t believe that it’s already the end of 2016. Where did this year go??

Today’s Meredith’s Monday Musings post is all about: Book Titles

I’m not sure if readers are aware, but it’s really hard (for me, at least) to come up with book titles for your stories. Not gunna lie, the past couple stories of mine, I’ve had one of my friends name them. She has an easy time coming up with titles for stories that aren’t hers, go figure. 

Here’s why it’s hard to come up with a title. First, you have to pick a catchy one. If you chose something like, “Blake Got Married”, that isn’t catchy at all and no one is going to want to buy it. Plus, the title gives away the whole plot to the story. As an author, we don’t want that. If our plot is already given away, what reason do readers have to buying our book? None. 

Once you have a catchy title in mind, you’ll want to make sure that it fits into the genre that you’re writing in and that it has easy searchable words. For instance, say I wrote a history book on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and titled it, “The Dictator and His Wife”. This title would fit into a history genre and dictator is a searchable word, so it could work for a book about Hitler and Braun. However, Dictator is such a generic word, in this case, you might want something more specific in the title. 

Lets take an erotic romance age play book. If we used the title, “Daddy’s Little Spy”, this would be good. For starters, it has the word Daddy and little in it, so readers will know 1) It’s an erotic book and 2) It has age play components in it. Then the word spy is going to let readers know that the heroine is a spy, but what is she spying on? Her Daddy? An enemy? What? It leaves the readers wanting more. Lastly, Daddy and little are searchable words. I could type “Daddy books” or “Daddy romance” or “little romance” into an Amazon search engine and several age play books, possibly including this one would pop up. So, readers who aren’t looking for a specific book could find this one and fall in love with it and you. 

Now do y’all have a better understanding of why it’s hard for authors to come up with titles for their stories? It takes a lot more thinking than one would expect to pick out that perfect title. 

That’s all I have for this week. I hope y’all have a great rest of the week!