Book Title Ideas

Your title determines about 70 percent of your book's success. Good titles attract readers. A bad or ill-fitting title is like a dunce-cap on your work. And the author's choice of title is not necessarily the best one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to call his novel Trimalchio at West Egg. His editor changed it to The Great Gatsby. Napoleon Hill called his "how-to" book Use Your Noodle to Win More Boodle. It became a bestseller under the title Think and Grow Rich.

A good title should be:

short (Think: Twilight, Sanctuary, Black Boy, Rebecca, Little Women.) A big marbly mouthful can sometimes work if it's fun to say, such as Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, or What Narcissism Means to Me; or it can work if it very specifically reflects the book's content, such as The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

and a title should also be:

• fun to say
• intriguing
• appealing (the sunny version of "intriguing")
• fitting
• accurate
• informative
• memorable
• pleasing to the author
• interesting to a great many people of all walks of life (which is a marketing concern)
• unique

The right title attracts publishers and readers; the wrong one repels them. Your efforts to find the perfect title for a book will be repaid in sales and reader interest. BookEval will tell you whether your title seems viable and on request will suggest alternatives.