Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Titles are everything

Link taken from pbackwriter.blogspot.com: The Title Scorer

Put in your title, answer a couple of questions on the make up and it'll tell you the likelihood of your book hitting the bestseller lists. I put mine in and Hal Spacejock scored about 45% chance while Hal Spacejock Second Course scored 79%

I'm guessing they've analysed a load of bestsellers and distilled the titles to discover what elements most have in common. For example, titles with a proper name plus one or more nouns (e.g. Harry Potter and [something]) do better than wacky, oddball, too-clever titles which nobody can pronounce. A double or treble meaning is good, as long as the title isn't contorted unduly to make it work.

Personally I think the content is more important in making a bestseller - you need word of mouth for that, which means people reading and enjoying the book, not just talking about the title. On the other hand, every little bit helps in this game so why not put your intended title to the test?

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

2 comments:

M@ said...

Can I assume, then, that using a foreign turn of phrase puts me under the 9% threshold?

Dang. I was afraid of that. Looks like I'll have to go with the more pedestrian title.

Bernita said...

Do the DaVincu Code.
It comes out to about 39%.
Hoot!