What's In A Title?

Which one would you rather click on : "Electric sheep invade Google" or "Installations in Google and Willow Garage". I rest my case.

For any of you abnormal netizens who didn't rush off to check out the invading hordes of electric sheep, a title will not sell your writing. It will only help sell your writing. It is, however, the main reason why a prospective buyer will pick up your book off a shelf or a search engine user click on your link. So, before you start writing that epic, pick a great title. Give it as much time as needed. The title tells the reader a great deal about the content. Think about the idea behind the book, or article, or blog post. Ok. So you've agonized over the title for your masterpiece. Now head over to google, search for the top 100 best-sellers which fall under the same category as yours, and write down their titles. Read the whole list from top to bottom. Now go agonize some more.

I agonized over the title for this post. "A Perfect Title"? Nah - Gives away too much about the contents of the post. If the title tells you everything that's in the post, why would you want to read the whole thing? So I nixed that one. And it was really tempting to use the electric sheep, but they really had nothing to do with titles, so I let them go by, albeit reluctantly. So I went over to google. Wrote down a big list of books for writers, which stress titles. Then I agonized some more. Finally, I came up with "What's In A Title?" Rushed over to Google to find a 118 million people already using said title. Aaargh.

Anyway, once you think have the perfect title, head over to the Lulu Titlescorer and have your title analyzed to see if it's going to hit the NYT best-sellers list. There's a 70% chance that what they say will be true. And the results of the analysis will indeed confirm your worst fears - Your book is going to be read only by your family, that too only if you promise them all sorts of goodies in return.