Your Book’s Most Powerful Marketing Tool
By Greer Macallister | October 2, 2023 |
There are thousands of posts out there, including a few written by yours truly, on how to market your book. Marketing isn’t a dirty word; it’s just the process of helping people who might want to read your book find your book. There are already more books in the world than any of us could possibly read, with more published every day. So anything you can do to get your book visibility, to make readers aware that it’s out there, that’s a necessary part of the process.
And there’s one marketing tool that every single book has. Yes, yours too. Doesn’t matter whether the book is a classic or a current lead title for a Big Five publisher or a self-published book with no publicity or even a book you haven’t finished writing yet. It costs no money and has no opportunity cost. You only get one, but one should be all you need.
Are you ready to find out what this magical marketing tool is?
It’s your book’s title.
Think about it. Titles are tough, yes, and a good one is no guarantee of success. Not all bestsellers have good titles and a good title doesn’t guarantee a bestseller. But the right one can take your book to the next level. It’s worth spending some time on.
Let’s look at the three most important things your title should do in order to function as a powerful marketing tool:
Describe. Yes, yes, I know. Describing your book is impossible to do in a paragraph, let alone a sentence, let alone a phrase. So there’s no way everything about your book goes into your title. But some level of description is, at core, what we’re all trying to do with a book title. What is your reader going to be reading about? Sometimes one word is enough (Circe, Yellowface) and sometimes more words are needed (Lessons in Chemistry, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) but a clue to the content is something every good book title needs.
Associate. Because you get so few words in a title, making them count sometimes means relying on the ones people have existing associations with. This is why approximately 83 gazillion books of the past decade have the word “Paris” in them; a whole lot of people already have thoughts about Paris, and most of those thoughts are positive. If you can incorporate a word that resonates with your potential reader, especially if it’s also descriptive of your book’s content, go for it.
Intrigue. Some book titles work by puzzling the reader. Who is the “you” and who is the “I” and what are the questions in Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You? What in the world happened to Jennette McCurdy for her to publicly declare I’m Glad My Mom Died? Is there literally a support group for horror’s “Final Girls” in Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group? Not every book can knock it out of the park like these examples, but a little incongruity or mystery can be just enough to entice a potential reader to look for more information.
Q: How does your book’s title stand up against this test? Does the title do everything you want it to do?
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com
Absolutely, Greer,
powerful titles give marketing a priceless boost. But so much of book marketing these days shows the title placed ON its cover art. Art that doesn’t support, or better yet strengthen, the title undercuts the whole project.
Readers make judgments in mere seconds. That the nature of the world now. So I spend time and money to make the best union of these two elements that I can imagine.
Superb point, Greer — thank you for putting this out here. Let’s face it, usually the first thing *anyone* knows about a book is the title, and it’s the thing that sticks with them as they consider learning more or their friends keep talking about it.
(Or on a shelf or row of images, they first see the cover, but after that first instant’s glance of the image they see the title *with* that. I keep wanting to do a book about dangerous court intrigue just so the cover can be a sword and the title is *Rules of Diplomacy.*)
A good title really would describe what the story’s about — and lean in to its descriptive power. Some authors may take pride in how much they underplay them, but most of us want our titles to promise the reader one clear thing, and a lot of it. A truly sinister-sounding conspiracy, a heartbreaking romance, a few words of a comedic situation that’s too gloriously absurd to ignore.
And the truly great titles could “Intrigue,” like you said. They’d be something compelling but *contradictory,* unlikely, surprising, so that just seeing that one first thing grabs the reader with “What kind of book brings *those* things together and why am I not reading it?”
All that in the title itself.
I wrote a how-to on just this topic at Writer UnBoxed back in 2016 if it helps anyone:
WORKING TITLES
Puzzle titles can work too. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Silence of the Lambs. The Hunger Games. When in the text you find out what those titles mean, there’s a big Ah-ha for the reader. To work, though, it’s good to include a symbolic word and to truly puzzle us.
Biblical references have heft. East of Eden. Wolf Hall is similar. Characters at the center are good as well if the character sounds interesting. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The Marsh King’s Daughter.
The Day of the Jackal. Little Fires Everywhere. Bright Lights, Big City. Little Women. The Orient Express. From Here to Eternity. The Sun Also Rises. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Think grandeur, sweep, romance, mystery, thrills, chills, laughs…the emotional experience that readers are going to get. Intriguing post title, Greer, with a good reveal and solid advice!
Yes!
So all three of those puzzle titles are subcategories of titular lines.
Yup, I mentioned the classic text reference in the post.
A lot of the others are also core metaphors, symbols, or MacGuffins i think?
Lancelot’s link took me to a post titled I’ll Have What She’s Having. I think the Working Titles link is this one:
https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2016/12/19/working-titles/
that’s super odd. i don’t think there’s a way for me to edit my comment but maybe someone can in the backend
Good post about this so-important marketing tool–often the first thing a potential reader sees!
I struggled to find the right title for my memoir of being on welfare. I finally came up with “Innocent” for its double meaning of naive (which I was) and not guilty (because there are plenty of people who say those who receive public assistance are lazy, greedy, sinners or all three). Of course, I then had to add a subtitle so readers wouldn’t assume it was about a crime or a trial.
Thanks for this post and all the examples. I’m so glad I got feedback and comments from my reader/writer friends and editors and changed the name of my memoir from “Enroute” to “When Your Heart Says Go.” The working title had all kinds of meaning to me, but the Heart has meaning to all.
The Self-Publishing Conference just had an “Art of the Title” contest that requested a projected novel title and 200-word synopsis. Mine was “Mark Twain Killed My Dog.” I won’t put in the synopsis, but know that no dogs were killed in the mental fabricating of the ersatz tale.
Another feature of a good title: when readers have finished with a book, the title will always remind them of its contents.
Jaws
The Goldfinch
Rebecca
The Hobbit
Airport
Condominium
Exodus
Mrs. Dalloway
…
I DON’T like the titles that are easy English sentence fragments exactly because I can never remember what something like ‘I Saw You Last Night’ was about: there are way too many of them, all similar, all not descriptive or memorable. They are NOT specific, don’t have any biblical or other resonance, and I can’t even figure out genre from reading the title.
Mine is PRIDE’S CHILDREN, contemporary mainstream fiction, among other things a modern retelling of The Book of Job, and it is a variation of
Job 41:34. “He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.” (KJV).
Straight ‘Children of Pride’ had way too many competitors to be useful – there is even a famous homeschooling family with the surname Pride – but my version only had one competitor – a lovely book about a family with two fathers and their kids I’m happy to share it with, as we can’t possibly be mistaken for each other.
The subtitles are PURGATORY, NETHERWORLD, and LIMBO (under construction) – all being possible variations of life after the story ends.
Greer, your one-word titles are intriguing, and the covers are gorgeous. In a bookstore, I’d grab one of those for a second look in a hot minute.
I’ve seen a number of potentially good titles undercut by unappealing cover art. (Not the case with yours, obviously.) Both play a role in marketing, IMO.