Finding the Best Title for Your Book, Story, Essay
How do you choose a winning title for your book? Story? Essay? One that intrigues but isn’t a spoiler? Maybe gives a new depth to what readers might get?
I am not the best when it comes to titles for my books. Evidenced by how many times, in my publishing history, editors or agents have changed my proposed title. Sometimes just a little. Most often radically.
My agent has taught me some good tricks and rules about choosing a title. She says it matters—a lot. You may disagree. But for those of you who are struggling over titles for your writing project, read on.
Confusing or clear?
My second novel was finally ready to be shopped to publishers, when my agent emailed me with a big problem—the title. I had written the novel under the title of OUTLAWS. I loved that title because it represented all the bad-ass glory I love in women who are heroes at heart. I embedded the theme of outlaws into the story, placed it (very occasionally) in dialogue as a marker for the reader to go “Ah-ha! That’s why the title.”
But she didn’t like it. Editors would be confused, she said, thinking it was a Western. Which it most certainly is not. It’s about an indie musician on the run from a murder-frameup and her estranged sister who has to hide her, against her better nature. Both women are pilots. My mom was a pilot, and she had a little of that free spirit I imagined for these two characters. So OUTLAWS was a tongue=in-cheek, rather brilliant way, of alluding to that heroic nature.
Thelma and Louise. Butch Cassidy. Society’s outcasts who win our hearts. Right?
My agent wasn’t having it.
She gave me a hard task: come up with fifteen possible titles instead of OUTLAWS.
Researching other book titles
She suggested going online and looking at novels like mine (comp titles) and seeing what those writers chose.
I got on google and searched for stories about women heroes. Then about sisters, estranged and reuniting under crisis. Some results, not enough. So I toggled to the online bookstores, notably bookshop.org, and searched. Goodreads was another great resource.
It was an efficient way to also collect more comp titles, but it took a lot of time—I had to read synopses of each book that kinda fit.
If you’re into AI, this is where it can come in handy—to ask for ideas. But the most useful, and fun, method came with my mind map of themes.
Theme mind map
I began freewriting on the themes of the book, using a list of what actually happened, what that happening meant to the characters, and what I hoped the reader would take away from all of it.
My list began with these three ideas:
The book was about women who became heroes despite themselves.
I wanted to show how women save others.
I wanted to also show how we all often save ourselves because we save others first. In other words the value of community, natural or created.
That led me to thinking about the three generations of female main characters in the story—an artist in her twenties, an indie musician in her thirties, and a mother and Search & Rescue worker in her forties. As the story evolves, their lives become entwined, again, despite their better judgment. They become “found family” and begin to heal the longings they’ve each had for this kind of bond.
There was another theme: found family
So my next idea was to allow my non-linear brain to craft some metaphors, a play on words if I could. Like a song lyric that means more than the literal meaning of the words.
Metaphors
Something really intrigued me about saving one another. A different word for that might be rescue.
I took a big sheet of paper and started a mind map with the word rescue in the center of a circle, then I drew lines out from it with any idea, phrase, or word that came to me. Now that the book is published, and the title so well received, I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out the metaphor.
Search & Rescue is the older narrator’s occupation. Women in SAR are perhaps not as common, it’s still a male-dominated profession, as is aviation, which both narrators are involved with. But SAR fascinates me, and as I was drawing my mind map, I caught the metaphor of it: Our search for ourselves and how we rescue others in the process.
A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue became the title. My agent loved it.
A few more tips on titles
Terrific titles sell manuscripts, catch the eye of an agent who has already scanned hundreds of queries that day, light up for a bookseller, intrigue a reader.
Have you tried this technique? Some writers choose a title early on, to orient their writing and revising, like a roadmap. They write towards the metaphor or feeling the title evokes. Of course, as they write, as the story changes, the title evolves, but starting with a draft title often leads the way.
And another thing I learned from my agent: Once you have some ideas, see how far you can trim them down. Get rid of any extra words (especially ones that don't convey image--the, and, an, a, etc.). Go for short. Longer titles are hard on library cataloging systems. Short titles fit more compactly on a book's spine, in larger type too.
I broke that rule with my novel, but it sold well anyway.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Here are some fun steps to try if you’re in title search mode:
List key images or keywords in your manuscript. Read through your chapters and highlight words or images that repeat. On paper, begin doodling or playing with them.
Write a poem around one of these image or words. Does part of one line of your rough poem stand out? Could it become a book title with some additional tweaking?
Study your book's meaning or theme--not what it's about, but what it means to the you, the characters, the reader. Any images or words come from that?
Look at your characters' dilemmas--could their name or occupation be part of the title?
Have fun and share your findings or thoughts or questions!Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash