Good Book Titles - The "Recipe" for a Better Book Title

A good title is your book's first marketing tool.

A catchy, "selling" book title sometimes erupts spontaneously from the mind of the author, the editor or from someone in the publisher's marketing or sales department. More often, however, writing a book title--like everything else about thoughtfully publishing a book--involves work.

For the book publishing- and food-loving biopic Julie and Julia, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron wrote a wonderful scene about writing a book title. In it, Judith Jones, Julia Child's lifelong editor, uses a morass of index cards to come up with the best title for Child's first cookbook.

That general method for book title development is pretty much tried and true and, save for the invention of word processing, still pretty much the way editors and authors think up their book titles.

A Good Book Title: The General "Recipe" to Writing a Better Book Title

Determine what ideas you want your book title to get across.

Keeping in mind the book's promise to readers, make a list of ideas of what you'd like the title to convey, and the emotional response you'd like target readers to have, and words that might suggest those ideas.

For example, if you've written a simple story to help young children start reading, your list might include:

Encourage reading
Make the book sound appealing to reluctant readers
Let the readers identify with the characters
Reading isn't a chore
Reading can be fun
Make them want to read!
Fun
Primer
Play
Read