How to pick a title that people can remember and search for

Your working title often gets stuck in your head until it feels perfect. Before you print it on a cover, it deserves a few tests.

Say it out loud

Say the title to a friend in a sentence. "Have you read ..." Does it come out easily? Titles that are hard to pronounce or easy to mishear are harder to recommend by word of mouth.

Spell it

Ask someone to type the title after hearing it, without seeing it written. If three people spell it three ways, readers will struggle to find it online.

Search for it

Type the title into a search engine and a few online bookshops. If ten other books share it, a reader looking for yours will be buried. This is more important for a first book, which has no reputation yet to push it up.

You do not need a title nobody has ever used, since many good titles are shared. But you want yours to be findable when combined with the author name.

Look at it small

Put the title in a tiny box, the size of a thumbnail. Is it still readable? A very long title becomes a smudge.

Ask what it promises

A title is a small promise. A title like a name tells the reader to expect a character. A title like a question promises an answer. A title that sounds like a warning promises tension. Check that the promise matches what the book delivers.

Subtitles

A subtitle can do the practical work so the title can be poetic. It says what kind of book it is, or who it is for. This is particularly useful for non-fiction and for books by new authors, since nobody knows what to expect.

For fiction, many authors skip the subtitle, and that is fine.

Chapter titles

Chapter titles are small opportunities. A list of chapter names in the contents page is often what a browser reads in a shop. Try making them specific and curious, rather than "Chapter One" and so on.

Titles in more than one language

If your book exists in Hindi and English, decide whether the title will be translated or kept the same. A direct translation sometimes loses its sound or double meaning. A transliterated title (the Hindi written in Roman letters) can help English-speaking readers find it, but check how it looks in the original script too.

When you are stuck

Write twenty possible titles in ten minutes, without judging them. Cross out the worst ten. Read the remaining ten to someone you trust, and watch their face rather than listening to their words.