Are you tired of seeing article titles like Seven Secrets to Stunning Success or Ten Tips for Tackling the Terrible Twos? As much as we roll our eyes when the Huffington Post or Digg trots out another of these list titles, they pull in readers. So, in the same spirit, let's look at what makes a good book title (for technical non-fiction).
Fits the genre
First of all, titles are nearly completely dependent on genre. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People is a great title for a non-fiction book or an article. It would be a miserable title for a mystery. The Man with the Shredded Ear—a title Raymond Chandler came up with but never got to use—would be great for a mystery, but lousy for most non-fiction, though Mary Roach or Oliver Sacks might come up with a use for it.
The title The Secret Life of Word is catchy, and with its subtitle, A Professional Writer's Guide to Microsoft Automation, it does a reasonable job of telling you what the book is about. However, when you search for that title on Amazon, you get a bunch of books that range from books on the English language to Sue Monk's The Secret Life of Bees. A title that fit the genre more closely might have been a better choice.
Tells you what the book is about
Maybe obvious, but your title really does need to reflect what the book is actually about. I tend to prefer short, punchy titles like Managing Writers (pretty obvious what that one's about) or Learning Author-it. There's no question what either of these two books is about.
Has a keyword-laden subtitle
But just in case the title isn't clear enough, you've got a subtitle to play with, too. Search engines look for content, and your title and subtitle are part of the content. By putting the right keywords into your subtitle, you help potential readers find your book. For example, even though The Secret Life of Word may not be an optimal title, the subtitle is very good. If you search for “Word Automation” on Amazon, our book appears first in the search results.
Doesn't collide with other titles
Every time we consider a title, I do Google and Amazon searches on that title (and parts of it). Sometimes that search can be surprising. For example, when I searched for the title Conversation and Community, I expected to find enough collisions that we'd need to drop the title altogether. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find just one other title, which was published fifteen years ago.
Doesn't promise what it can't deliver
If you title your book 8 Steps to Amazing Webinars, you better deliver 8 steps. And you better make sure it's easy to find those steps. Fortunately, Sharon Burton's 8 Steps to Amazing Webinars delivers on both counts.
Avoids clichés
This brings us back to the ubiquitous some number, a noun, a verb, some more nouns and maybe an adjective or two titles. For an article, they're fine, if tiresome. There's no question they attract attention, but ask yourself, “How often do you do more than just read the headings and then go to the next article?” You may gather clicks and views, but do your readers retain anything? I'm not sure. Plus, a cliché-laden title can get lost in all the other cliché-laden titles, which is a bad thing for search.
But if you insist on an X steps blah-blah title, pick six or eight steps. A quick check on Google shows them as the least-used numbers in that style of title.
All that said, as with everything else to do with publishing books, you can never be completely sure about any title. So there's an important element of personal preference that goes into picking a title. That's why we have Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, a title chosen by the author, Sarah Maddox. Far from an obvious choice, it still fits the book, hasn't hurt sales, and certainly isn't a cliché.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, and marketers and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh's DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O'Reilly Media.