How To Pick A Title For Your Novel
Transcript:
Today’s video topic is viewer submitted! My first ever suggested video.
Today we’re going to talk about how to title your novel.
This idea was suggested by a twitter follower who just randomly tagged me asking if I had a video on this topic, which made me feel super popular and excited. Please feel free to suggest video ideas to me whenever you want, I am always looking for new topics and I love to plan ahead.
Anyway, titles are an important part of the writing process. Possibly much more important than you think they are.
Titles can help you stand out from the crowd, but they can also do the opposite if you don’t pick wisely enough.
A good title needs to memorable, easily understood, and original.
First off, a title should be thematically relevant.
This means, if your book is about a group of evil penguins, it probably shouldn’t be titled something like A Quiet Day In The Park.
It should also be thoughtful to genre, so avoid picking a typically contemporary title for a heavily genre book.
You should consider the seductiveness of your romance title, the creepy in your horror novel and so on. There are lots of factors that influence whether or not a potential reader will pick up your book. Cover is a really obvious one, but titles are really important too.
A boring title won’t stand out among a sea of competing titles.
However, it’s important not to pick a misleading title.
Like the evil penguins book, if someone was genuinely seeking a story about a quiet day in the park, they’d be really surprised and probably disappointed by the actual story.
That’s not to say you can’t have an ironic title, or even a title that seems opposite to the topic, you just have to make sure it ties into your story in an important way.
Consider the layers of your title.
Does it mean something else in the context of your story?
If, perhaps, the penguins book was about someone trying to have a quiet day at the park, only to have it consistently ruined by evil penguins, the title makes sense. However, if not, it’s just confusing. No one likes being confused. But you don’t want to be too obvious.
Don’t give away your plot with your title.
A Quiet Day At The Park Ruined By Penguins is a little too on the nose.
It’s also smart to be wary of lyric or poem based titles for copyright reasons. This isn’t to say you can't have them, just that they may not always get to be your final title if a copyright issue comes up. Another reason to think twice about lyric titles is for popularity and originality.
You want to be the top search result when someone googles your title. You want to stand out. This is also a possible reason to avoid one word titles. You probably won’t rank in search for titles like Heartbreak, Betrayal, and so on.
It’s totally fine to leave your book untitled until you finish your first draft or even through revisions, it's only important to finalize a title for querying purposes because if you query an untitled novel I'd say that sorta gives a bad first impression of your levels of creativity and imagination.
Sometimes waiting can do the work for you!
You may find a perfect title just waiting to be lifted from a scene or conversation in your novel.
That’s how The Silence of The Lambs got its name, from a conversation about a childhood memory that had an ironic relevance to the story at hand.
You can totally rely on a code name before you make your final decision. All my books have code names and I tend to still refer to them by those names even after settling on a more official title. This is also a good trick if you need to refer to your book publicly without giving away spoilers.
Your code name could be a joke title or the name of a song that really fits your book. Little Boxes is a codename for one of my novels. #SecretResistanceBook is another.
A point I'd say is really important is to understand that unless you are self publishing it's probably best not to become irreplaceably attached to any title because your future agent or publishing house might have other ideas and they have more industry experience.
If you’re really struggling to come up with a title, ask your family or friends for ideas.
Carrie Ryan’s husband named all the books in her Forest of Hands and Teeth series.
Most importantly, don’t let stress over a title keep you from writing a great book. It's really what’s on the inside that matters most. So write and worry about titles afterwards.
What are some of your favorite titles? What’s your best tip for titling your own books? Let me know.
Thank you so much for watching. I’ll see you soon. Bye.
