When words carry a lot of weight!
Coming up with a title for your stories, novels, essays, non-fiction, articles, and other written works can be as slippery as an eel (cliché but true). And often the first title for something that jumps into your head is not the best. The best thing you can do is consider that initial idea as your “working title” and be open to changing it later.
What Your Title Should Do
Just like a cover design for a book, your title needs to do several things:
- Grab the reader’s attention and interest
- Convey in words (as few as one and as many as is practical) what the work is about
- Relate to the work’s genre or category
- For academic/scholarly works, serve as a mini-synopsis of the contents (or so it seems to this lay person)
An article by author @Martine Proctor showed how a title can be a bit misleading, and thus either a subtitle or a different title is needed. In her case, a subtitle was added. The title by itself seemed more fitting for non-fiction, possibly a self-help book.
I changed one story’s title three times, settling on “Sally’s Destiny,” and another story was changed from “The Man in the White Room” to “Not All VR Goggles Are Created Equal” (my hubby came up with that). In both cases, the original (working) titles suited me but wouldn’t be so great for readers. For the second story, the new title gives the reader a better expectation of what is to come whereas the working title did not, per feedback I got from a reader.
Crafting a Title
Make it memorable. But that doesn’t mean short. Some examples of memorable long titles:
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
- Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (movie script) co-written by Stanley Kubrick
And some memorable short titles:
- Jaws by Peter Benchley
- It by Stephen King
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Heidi by Johanna Spyri
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
For a book of short stories, where you are the sole author as opposed to an anthology, you can have a title that gives a general idea of those stories, or you can use one of them as the title such as I did here:
Wind Down the Chimney and Other Eerie Tales
For articles, even this one, make the title show the reader that he/she will gain some new information that will hopefully be of benefit or at the very least entertain. Some examples from articles I have had published over the years:
- Why Is Tea So Expensive? (published in three parts)
- The Possibilities of Young Pu-erh Tea
- Why Coffee Shops and Tea Don’t Mix
- Can You Eat Tea Leaves?
- Weight Loss and Tea – A Practical Approach
- 7 Dishware Patterns for the Perfect Autumn Tea Table
- 5 Realities of Staging Your House for Sale
- How Winter Colors in Your Home Help Lift Your Spirits
- A Great Book with a Difference from Carrick Publishing
(Yeah, I wrote a lot about tea – about ten years.)
Final Note
Consider your titles carefully, and get feedback from others to assure you are conveying the right impression of your work. After all, you work hard to write it. Make it shine! That means proofreading, fixing grammar and punctuation errors, but also giving readers the right upfront impression of your work. You gotta get past those eyeballs and into the reader’s brain.
Hope you found this helpful and have been inspired to start and/or continue writing!
See my article: Publisher Agent Fiction Genres Defined, with downloadable PDF.
Please check out my works in progress (WIPs). And thanks for reading.
NOTE: None of my text or images are AI-generated. You can rest assured that I pulled it all out of that stuff in my skull called a “brain.”
My first book of short stories is now available from Wordwooze Publishing:
A.C. Cargill, Author 