Don’t Get Hung Up on the Title of Your Book

Contributed by Tony Horne, Elite True Crime Ghostwriter, Mangus Media Group

Every time I start working with a new client, a new adventure begins. ‘Ordinary people’ have extraordinary stories. Inevitably, as their ghostwriter, I find a new lifelong friend, too.

I never lose sight of what a big deal it is to make that initial contact with me.

Often, I will hear the same lines from my future clients.

‘I have been waiting years to tell my story’ is a favorite.

And that is the way it should be, especially in a memoir. You need time to weigh up your life! It is always fascinating what people say to you in that first phone call between the ghost and the client. Almost without exception, I hear ‘I don’t have a title yet’.

It is interesting that people place so much energy on this. The title is probably going to amount to less than ten words. Then you’ve got the other 80,000 or so, still to pen which is where people are going to make the big calls on your story! Does this title-ridden angst come from how we grew up? Reading works at school, such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye, certainly present you with eye-catching, memorable front covers early on. We can all look at our bookshelves and pick out the classic titles and the ones that are just OK.

I am not a fan of celebrity memoirs titled "My Story," but I can make a compelling case for them. There are so many books by that name that you will come up when a reader is looking for someone else’s story, so that the search engines can do you a favor. A crowded market is not always a bad thing in the digital era.

Then there is the cover, and the paradox of cliché.

‘Never judge a book by the cover,’ we are taught.

Yet, a picture paints a thousand words.

Anyone who has worked in an actual physical bookstore will tell you that before big publishers paid for window displays (which they do), a good cover could get you a prominent position. Equally, how many times at an airport have you made a book purchase, based solely on the title, the cover, and the blurb on the back? When my clients feel that they are missing something by not even having a title, even though there are still 300 pages to write, I really do tell them to relax.

‘The best titles find you,’ I remind them.

Sometimes, they just come from the momentum of your hands on the keyboard as you are coming to a chapter end. Tango 190 – the police call sign of the most widely-read book in my portfolio is a good example. I just found myself writing it and knew.

‘Getting over the X’ for the first winner of the UK X Factor is another cracker, which my client had in mind for a decade before he told me his story! (That is the other side of the coin – some people have a title but no story, though on this occasion, he certainly did.)

The game has changed.

More important than a book cover now is the JPEG on Amazon and the "Look Inside" feature, which allows you to give away a few pages. Some authors are protective and resistant to doing this, but it is a must. If they’ve landed on your page, let them in. And so, to that issue of what you call the book. A great title is always a great title. It is essential because people talk about your book, and if you’ve written Wind in the Willows or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then you have made that conversational, word-of-mouth marketing easy by the title alone.

But there is always a but.

In the digital world, you need something else. I urge every client to have a subtitle to their book. This is the phrase that someone, who doesn't even know your book exists, types into Google.

The reality is that this is more important now than that clever play on words that you were looking for in a title and fretted about when you made that first call to the ghost, and it is a hell of a lot easier to come up with. It doesn’t need to be smart or overthought – just ask yourself, if you were googling yourself, then what would you type in, and you are probably almost there.

So…conclusion: don’t stress, and it will find you. When it does, put it into ‘Books’ on Amazon and see what else exists by that name, and remember: great title, plus feed the search engines. 

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