It probably won’t surprise you that this can be one of the thorniest questions for publishers and authors to discuss. Authors often get very set on a particular title that appeals to them, whereas publishers typically have a very prescriptive view of what a title should and should not say. Alternatively, some authors don’t have a strong sense of what their book should be called and while this can be less diplomatically challenging, it can also lead to remarkably long exchanges batting ideas backwards and forwards between author and commissioning editor.
Some of this conflict is actually quite productive, at least up to a point. Certainly I’ve know many projects where the final consensus title is better either than the original proposed title or the initial counter-suggestion that we made. Equally, I do thing it’s helpful to take a step back and consider what the competing concerns are when it comes to selecting a title, and how we might best go about prioritising them.
Eye-catching and Memorable
Let’s begin here because so often it’s where authors tend to start. It stands to reason that you want your book to have a distinctive and pithy title. It should help catch people’s attention, and be easy for them to remember when they hear it mentioned and want to look it up later.
This is quite common practice when it comes to publishing journal articles. Indeed, among some academic communities it’s something of a game to come up with the wittiest title for a journal article, the more oblique the better. You can afford to play this game because your article appears in a given journal and so has some context built in. Besides, it’s a relatively short piece of work, which any prospective reader will have access to either through open access or an institutional subscription.
Publishers, you may already have discovered, are often less enthusiastic about pithy, witty, eye catching titles when it comes to books. While we do appreciate the appeal in principle, in practice such titles often fail to meet our other priorities. It’s worth keeping in mind that – – in contrast to journal articles – – books are usually both discovered and bought individually.
Clarity and Context
It’s really important that people coming across your book as a search result, or from browsing a catalogue, website, conference stand, or book store shelf, can identify what it is about as quickly as possible. Whereas with a journal article, the journal itself will provide some context (although even then, some titles can be baffling for a prospective reader doing a keyword search on a database), books typically have to make sense ex nihilo. This means your title needs to convey as much relevant information about the book’s subject matter, approach, context, and specific topic as is reasonably possible.
This can lead to what colleagues and I at Routledge used to half-jokingly refer to as “the Ronseal principle”. Ronseal was, and probably still is, a brand of wood sealant famously advertised in the UK with the slogan “does exactly what it says on the tin”. The principle that a book should do exactly what it says on the cover, was the standard yardstick by which we would judge the title.
While this is by no means a bad basis on which to name books, it can run the risk of being a bit too prosaic. Consequently authors are often unenthusiastic about these kinds of naming conventions. It’s certainly true that very literal and explanatory titles can be unappealing to readers. For many books it can be a good place to begin though. It’s not a bad idea to consider what the most direct possible title for your book would be, even if you then choose to go with something a little more interesting.
Keyword-rich
A vast proportion of specialised books are sold online, many of which are also discovered online in the first place. While making sure a human reader understands what a book is about is obviously important, you also need algorithms to be able to discover and surface it. That requires ensuring your title has the most important keywords that prospective readers might be searching for included in it.
It is possible for publishers to embed keywords in the metadata for a book, such that they should be caught by search algorithms without having to be visible to readers. For that matter search algorithms will search the descriptive blurb text too. However, many search algorithms will place a greater weight on keywords that appear in the title and subtitle. There’s also the question of the human interpreting the results — if it isn’t immediately obvious why a search function has returned your book as a result, then the prospective reader parsing those results may ignore it assuming it was picked up erroneously.
In short, you might not need to include every possible relevant keyword in your title, but you should definitely consider which words you want to ensure are given precedence by searches, and will be picked up on by somebody who sees the title in their search results.
Mention your big ideas
Next we’ll consider an element that can sometimes pull in the opposite direction, depending on what exactly it is you’re writing. If your book takes a particularly novel perspective, or presents a new argument, or attempts a new conceptual framing, you really do want to make some reference to this in the title or subtitle if possible. The problem with this is that if you coin a new term then, by definition, it won’t be a discoverable keyword. Nobody searches for new terms you’ve invented unless they’ve already heard about your book, or at least about your work more generally.
Sometimes this will simply not be a problem, your framing will be fairly self-explanatory, or at least use established keywords in a way sufficiently familiar that someone might already be searching for them. Other times you’ll be inventing new words, probably by combining existing terms into a single word. It’s still worth foregrounding these in your title or subtitle if they’re important, especially if it will be fairly apparent to a human reader what it is you mean by them. The trick is to balance the new terms with other words that will ensure discoverability and relevance. For example, you might be coining a new term to describe governance in China, in which case as long as “governance” and “China” are there in your title, you’d be fine.
Don’t bury the lede
I’ve borrowed this expression from journalism, and it’s debatable whether I’m applying it correctly here, but it feels right. Specifically, I’m saying you should not use your title to obscure the actual content of your book, as though you’re ashamed of it. If your book is based on a longitudinal study of Singapore, or an in-depth case study in Botswana, or election data from the state of South Carolina, then you should say so, preferably in the main title (see below). We can have a separate conversation (and I’ll almost certainly write a post on this next year) about whether anyone is interested in such a book, but there is no point trying to bait-and-switch your readers. If your book may in fact be too specialised or niche to reach a significant readership, that is not something a title can or should fix.
Sooner or later, somebody looking at buying your book is going to realise that the grand claims of your title are in fact based on the rather narrower foundation of your actual research. This will be liable to irritate the kind of reader who is not interested in, say, local politics in Finland specifically. More importantly, it may be overlooked by those prospective readers who actually are looking for, say, a book on stand-up comedy in Oman.
Where this can get even more complicated, is where a book discusses a number of case studies from different countries that do not necessarily have obvious characteristics in common. Perhaps most of the book is about Japan, but then a comparative couple of chapters have been added to provide some international context. Or the book treats three case studies more or less equally, but their selection was — if we’re completely honest about this — largely down to where you could obtain the requisite research funding, or participants. This can be more delicate, but the main test of your title should be whether it properly represents the content of your book, rather than whether it makes an ostensibly convincing argument for coherence that will not hold up on closer inspection. Again, if you can’t find a way through this problem, that just might be a red flag with regard to the viability of your book.
On titles and subtitles
I should begin by being really explicit about what I’m talking about here. The title (or “main title” sometimes, for emphasis) is the part of the title that comes before the colon. The subtitle is the rest of it. So, to take a non-book example, in Terminator 2: Judgement Day “Terminator 2” is the title, and “Judgement Day” is the subtitle. I explicate this here, because just occasionally I do find authors become slightly confused by the way we publishers use this terminology. It doesn’t help that we do also refer to the whole thing as the title.
An important thing to understand about titles — in the narrow sense described above — is that they need to work in isolation, without their accompanying subtitles. This is because sometimes in catalogues subtitles will not be printed, because algorithms tend to give priority to titles, and because human readers also tend to give titles greater emphasis than subtitles.
I’ve often found authors will instinctively do this the other way around, wanting a big thematic title, which is explained in the subtitle. Something like (to invent an example) The Politics of Mistrust and Polarisation: Lessons from South Korea. Whereas we would usually prefer Polarisation in South Korea: The Politics of Mistrust. You can see that this keeps one of the key terms in the title, while ensuring South Korea is right up there. The subtitle then provides further information about the book’s themes, but if you saw the title alone you’d still have a pretty good idea what the book was about.
One way to summarise this is to say that titles should typically be relatively prosaic (like Terminator 2, which clearly and efficiently indicates that this is the second movie in the eponymous Arnie franchise), while subtitles give you room to be a little more poetic (eg “Judgement Day”, which conveys themes and tone, but adds no real information).
So what have we concluded?
It does all come back to balance, and there should be room for all of the elements that I’ve discussed. The ideal title would convey the core information necessary to understanding what the book is about, including the disciplinary approach, framework, and the geographic focus of any empirical work. It can then have a subtitle either to provide more general context, or to convey more of a mood or theme. It would also be memorable, eye-catching, and keyword rich. If you need to compromise on some of these elements — and you often will — have a very open discussion with your commissioning editor about what prospective readers need to know about the book from the outset, and how you envision them discovering it.
I hope you’ll have come to the end of this feeling a little more sympathy for your publisher’s attitude towards titles. If you think you might have just the title for us then please do get in touch at proposals@tbarnpress.com.
