How To Write A Book Title

Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to tell authors and aspiring authors write, publish and market their own best selling book. Now, I’m really excited about today’s episode because we’re going to talk about one of the most important aspects of your book, in the success of your book and that is your book title. Your book title can really make or break the success of your book. You can either go on to become a bestseller and sell thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of copies or even millions or it could absolutely bomb. They say, there’s that saying “Never judge a book by its cover.” But unfortunately, we do. We look at a book cover and we say does this interest us? And if it does, may we turn to the back cover and then that’s whole out of conversation which if I believe is spoken about on a previous episode so again go back through the more video section on getpublishedtv.com and you’ll be able to search for videos where talks about the back cover of the book. But the title is so important and I learned this from Mark Victor Hansen. I studied a lot of his materials and he kept drumming it in and drumming it in and drumming it in the importance of a book title. So what we’re going to do now is we’re actually going to talk about a little bit of a formula that I’ve developed for helping other authors to come up with the cover of their book. Sorry, come up with the covers of different story, we’re going to talk about the title. The cover design is something we’ll look at later on. But just the title of the book. So we’re going to go through a bit of a formula. And the reason why I want to give you this formula is that sometimes when you just sit down with yourself or you sit down with your partner, or maybe a family or friends and say, “We need to come up with a title for my book.” People throw out all these sort of random ideas and you got someone over here, someone over there and that’s kind of good well but for me it kind of lacks a lot of the focus which you’ll see by going through it in a different way. Now, let me use another analogy here to kind of explain it. I got a son who’s 18 months old. His name is Finnegan. He’s ultra cute and keep watching Get Published TV because he makes an appearance every couple of weeks and you can see his growth and development. But he’s got toys and the toys are kind of spread out around the lounge room. Now, we’ve always get them pack away in certain sections and he pulls them out and if I come home, there are toys everywhere. And that’s fine but what we’re teaching him to do is to pull away his own toys. Now, if I say, he’s only 18 months old. He’s just starting to learn things. But if I say that “Fin, I want you to go clean up your toys.” Now, he will look at me with a blank look at his face. You probably will know what actually you want him to do but he kind of looks at me like he doesn’t know, kind of like his brain is kind of scattered because there are toys everywhere. But if I say to him, “Fin, can you over there and get that ball for daddy and bring it over and put it in that bucket?” And he’ll go over there and he’ll grab the ball and he’ll put it in the bucket. And I’ll say, “Can you also go over there and grab that little monkey and come and put that in the bucket as well?” And if we go through this process, after five minutes, he’s pretty much cleaned his room but instead of just throwing it out there and saying, “Clean your room,” we’ve done it one step at a time. And that’s exactly how this formula works. Rather than just to say, “Okay, we’re going to come up with a book title fall down the sky and land on my lap.” We’re going to isolate different styles of book titles and we are going to then talk about each of those. We’re just going to focus with ourselves or with our little group of people. We’re going to focus on one style at a time. We’re going to like extract everything we can from that one style and then we’re going to move on to the next. Then we do the same thing, just focusing on one extracting and then we’re going to the next and then eventually, we’re going to have a long list of a bunch of titles and different styles of styles and then we can go through a process of elimination to find the title that is best for you. Alright, so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to go through a little bit a list that I’ve developed. I’m pretty sure we’re not going to get through all of them in one video. We’ll probably have to break this up over two or three or four days. But it’s so important, so I’m going to spend the time and give you lots of examples because I really feel that it’s important. So let’s talk about them very, very quickly. You may want to get a pen and paper, write these down and then again we’re going to talk about them in more detail. So the first one is short titles. Short titles is number one. Alright. We can put in brackets after that with a subtitle because short titles normally always need a subtitle afterwards. Then the next one is long title. So number two is long titles. So write that down. Short titles number one; long titles number two. Number three, one of my personal favorites is called shock titles. So write down the word, shock titles. The next one, number four, is story or metaphor titles. Story or metaphor titles. I’ll talk more about that later on. Number five and number one that I really like is common sense with a twist. Common sense with twist, that’s number five. Number six is series titles. And number seven is your personal brand titles. So that’s seven different styles of titles that you can write. Now, of course, you are only going to ever pick one title but it’s really handy if you can go through all those different seven because you never know where that million dollar title is going to come out from. It could come from completely left field but unless you went through this process, you may not ever discover. So I think this is really important. I probably not going to talk too much more because when I start getting into it, I’ll definitely going to run out of time. So I’m going to wrap up this video right now and say you got to come back tomorrow in the next day and stay tune to watching these ones as well. Now, I want to say before we finish out with the time that I got left. this is really important if you’re a fiction writer or a non-fiction writer and it’s also really important when you self publish or when you go through a major publisher because a lot of people I meet go through major publishers. They just kind of say, “Well, honestly I went up to the publisher. They can just put the title on the book.” And you know sometimes, publishers make really good decisions. Some publishers have really smart, clever people working in their companies and make great decisions and other times, they make really poor and lousy decisions. And you’ll think, “Why do they put that title on the book?” And it’s too late. So you want to go there with them with the whole list, a long list and say, “Here are all the titles that we’ve come up with. These are my personal favorites.” And you got to give them four or five options and then you’re going to be happy if they pick one of those four or five. It may not be the exact one that you like but at least it’s one of your top five. Or you can go to them and say, “This is my favorite title. I’ve tested this. I’ve spoken a lot to people. I know I can’t tell you what to do. It’s ultimately your decision as a publisher but I would really like to think that you could trust me and you could run with it.” Now, if you go to them with that type of research and that type of conviction, and having put that much thought into it, then I’m pretty sure that they’re going to listen very carefully and maybe even go with your suggestion. So it’s really important. Listen carefully and we’re going to have a lot of fun brainstorming, talking about different book titles on the next episodes. Please leave us your comments below as always and we’ll see you again next time on Get Published TV.