Writing Awesome Book Titles

I have always been fascinated in reading books and interesting magazine articles.  But what really catches a reader to go and continue reading base on the article or book title description.  Just a little bit of work will give you a great description that piques a reader’s interest.  It’s always a good thing when you can pitch your story well. But so many authors settle for lame title descriptions, making their books or article a hard sell. You may have even looked at your description and thought it could be better, but you haven’t known how or where to start.

I want to just share in this blog what I think would best be an attractive and awesome title description.

Research… Lots of research

I’m a big fan of doing research the way successful titles are doing things. The process of writing a title description is no exception. You can learn a lot by spending time looking at the descriptions of other titles and what better way to start than at the biggest online book seller, Amazon.  Here you will find great titles and best seller books.

We may start finding a book’s category in the Top List section of the Kindle store and click the category link to see that Top List. Look at the list for the Top 100 Paid books in that category and choose some books to research. I’d recommend checking out at least the top ten titles on the first page, then maybe two or three that look interesting on the remaining four pages of results. That means you’ll be looking at around twenty to thirty books.

Take a moment to read through the descriptions of these books. Take note of what elements you see. Look at what displays as the description before the Read more link — often called “above the fold.” This may be the only text the reader sees, so it’s very important to make sure your key description points are included in this section.

You’ll want to do the exercise for yourself with your own categories. Different genres will often have different strategies that work to sell books. But to give you an example, here’s a list of some of the things I saw when I did this exercise with books in the Science Fiction Adventure category.

Bold teaser text with an eye-grabbing tagline. A vague statement like “humanity might not survive” doesn’t say much about the story details, but it sets the mood draws the reader’s eye to the description area.

Simple formatting, but a very compelling description in brief paragraphs.

A sentence near the top of the description that offers an interesting idea. Varying list will probably look a little bit different due to different genre conventions, but some of the elements should be similar. With the list, you can get started crafting a description that fills these parameters, which makes the job less daunting. Instead of approaching the task with the goal of, “I’m going to make a great book title description,” you can say, “I need a tagline, a compelling summary, and an interesting idea.” It’s much more manageable to take it one piece at a time.

Let’s take a moment to look at two keys that are important for any title description:  An intriguing summary and an attention-grabbing tagline.

Attention-Grabber

Many book descriptions use a bolded tagline that’s designed to stand out. It catches the reader’s eye and directs their attention to rest of the description. Get someone reading the tagline, and their eyes will often continue to the description on autopilot.

There are two ways to make an attention-grabber: Pull a quote from your book, or write a really great tagline.

Book Quote

Have you ever opened a novel and found a short paragraph from the book on the first page? That’s the idea here. Find an iconic, amazing section from your book, put it in bold or italics, and you’re done. Since every book is unique, I can’t tell you what to pick, but I can tell you that you may get some good suggestions by asking your readers what part of the book stood out to them visually or emotionally.

Tagline

A tagline is just one sentence. It’s typically something vague that sets a mood or tone for the description that follows. Again, I can’t tell you what would make a good tagline for your book, but if you’ve done your research into similar titles in your categories, you should already have a wealth of inspiration.

Make It Look Awesome

Now that you have an incredible description, you might want to think about making it even better by applying some basic formatting.   There you have it! You are now equipped to create an incredible title description for your book. It’s completely worth the couple of hours you might spend doing research and crafting your description. You’ll stand out from the crowd of inept descriptions and make your book look like a great buy for someone’s book shelf.