- You already know the title is vital
to the success of your book.
The title is vital.
And in a recent deep dive training,
we dove into three titles and their subtitles
and why we love each of them.
So if you missed that or you, even if you caught it,
and you're still wondering what makes a great book title
and whether you have a good title idea or not,
then this video is absolutely for you.
(upbeat music)
- Hey there I'm Julie the book Broad from Book Launchers.
We're your professional self publishing team
helping you write, publish, and promote a non-fiction book
that will help you have a huge impact
on your readers and done right.
We'll help you grow your brand,
build your business and make you money.
The best part, you, yes, you keep all rights and royalties.
All right, every month we do deep dive training sessions
to help you on your author journey.
It's our gift to you.
So if you wanna be invited to those,
make sure you head over to booklaunchers.com
and get on our launch letter right now.
Today, I'm highlighting part of the session we did
on writing a book with marketing in mind.
I did this together with our book marketing manager
Sarah Bean.
Your book title needs to sell your book.
If your cover gets their attention,
the title then really needs to tell that person
this book is for them
and why they need to read it right now.
Your title should have certain criteria,
and I'm gonna cover those in a minute,
but then your subtitle needs to make it really obvious,
who your book is for,
what they're gonna get when they read your book,
and it should also have some Amazon and Google keywords
in that subtitle.
The most powerful place you can put keywords for your book
is your title and subtitle.
Getting clever or too clever with your title
is not a good idea because your creativity or brilliance
may not connect in the way that you hope.
So before we go through the three examples we covered
in the deep dive,
let's quickly recap the important things
to look for in a great title.
And this is a list of ideal and most likely to succeed.
Of course, there's always exceptions,
but the best titles are typically short,
memorable, easy to say, speaks clearly to your reader,
works with search engines and is not trademarked.
Works with search engines means that it's keyword rich,
but also that when someone types in the title,
they find you and your book, not something else
that is dominating that word or that phrase.
For that reason, I prefer the title to not be in use
with another book and that the URL is available,
so you can own the website domain for your book title.
But if another book is using the title
and they're a very weak competitor,
they're not showing up in the search engines very strongly
and it's not trademarked, you can go there.
The point is that you want to be found,
so you need to be able to dominate easily.
Easiest way to test whether a title is memorable
and easy to say is to tell someone, your title,
and then a few hours later ask them what it was
to see if they remember.
If they don't, you may have been too clever
or it wasn't strong enough
or if they say it wrong,
which is what happened to me with my book,
"The New Brand You"
you should go back to the drawing board.
When I did that book, I also did not have the benefit
of my brilliant team at Book Launchers.
And these three books did.
So let's take a look at the examples of the title,
subtitles that worked well and why.
Here's Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager
in our deep dive training event explaining the first book
by Benjamin Preston and what's great about his title
and subtitle.
- Yes, Harness Your Butterflies,
the young professionals metamorphosis
to an exciting career.
Okay.
So what this book really wanted to,
you can tell right from the subtitle who this is for.
It is for young professionals.
We're talking to those right out of college,
up until maybe their first or second career change.
And metamorphosis actually is a great play
on Harness Your Butterflies.
Harness Your Butterflies in itself is strong.
It's it's memorable,
but it could describe quite a few things.
So we had to lean very heavily on the subtitle
to be able to sell this to the right audience.
You can tell from this, that it's a career guide
and it actually shows a little bit of
the imagery I think is what's really great,
in his title, he wanted to write a book
and he wanted to direct people about how to get that career
that gives you butterflies in your stomach,
that you fall in love with the same way that you would,
the same way that you would fall in love with a person.
You know, you get those butterflies
and you just know you're on the right track.
And, but harness your butterflies in itself
wasn't going to sell.
So we had to pack that some title with keywords and phrases
that would make it understandable to the audience
and understandable that this is a career guide
with a very specific outcome.
You are going to change what you're currently doing
into the exciting career you wanted.
- Isn't Sarah awesome?
What you don't know is that I haven't prepared her
in advance for what books I'm showcasing.
She's saying all that on the fly.
And side note, I did a really cool author spotlight
with Ben on building your business from your book,
because he is a self-proclaimed book printer.
And that book was his starting point.
I'll link to that at the end of the video for you.
So let's go to the next example for you,
which is by Jeff Link.
- So the author came to us with "Protecting The Pig."
He already knew that that was what he wanted as his title
but he didn't have a subtitle yet.
And Protecting The Pig.
What we do love about it is got some great imagery.
I mean, you can obviously see from the cover
that we were able to play on that pig idea, piggy bank,
protecting your piggy bank.
How stock market trends revealed the way to grow
and preserve your wealth.
Anybody have a question about what that book is about
and who is gonna be interested in it.
It's gonna be investors.
It's gonna be people who play the stock market,
and it's very specifically, how do you grow it
and how do you protect it?
I mean, there there's really no question there.
And the great thing about this
is we were able to pack in those keywords,
stock market, trends, wealth, grow.
All of those are ones that really play well
when it comes from an SEO standpoint
and from an Amazon keyword standpoint.
And to give you a totally different example,
nothing to do with business whatsoever,
because we're all about nonfiction book launchers,
and of course we're all about hashtag no boring books.
But we don't just do business books.
So our last book is actually from the true crime genre,
check this out.
This is "Killers Keep Secrets,"
the golden state killer's other life.
Okay, wow!
That I mean, it's a lot to unpack.
So obviously this is a true crime book,
but here's the thing,
James Huddle who's the author
is the brother-in-law to the golden state killer.
They grew up with him.
You know, the guy married his sister,
they were best friends,
they were roommates at one point.
And then in 2018 he discovered this man
he had known for 40 years
had committed all these horrific crimes.
So when he was writing this book,
he really wanted the book to not just be about their life
but about the fact that this guy
had the secret life for years
that no one in the family knew about.
And so right there in the title "Killers Keep Secrets"
I mean, it seems like it's obvious
but it automatically draws you in to go,
"Okay, what are those secrets?
What kind of things do they cover?
And then we're looking at the golden state killer's
other life.
There were a few things that we had to look at here.
How do we factor in the golden state killer
into the title without it just being
like this book is about the golden state killer.
We had to figure out how to put it in there
and make it really show what aspect
of the golden state killer
that we were covering that other books
about the golden state killer weren't covering.
And this is on his day-to-day life.
So it was a
very specific book.
And as you can imagine, it was hard for the author to really
settle on something because he was so close to the material.
So that is actually one piece of it
that I would like you to consider
when you're coming up with titles.
Remember how close you are to the material,
compared to the average reader or your ideal reader.
I just had a conversation with an author
a couple of days ago, who has a very specific title
for his book but he is really fighting the subtitles.
And he's like, that's just, you know,
I just don't like those ideas.
And I'm like, but what is your ideal reader like?
What is your ideal reader going to respond to?
It's not about you, it's about your reader.
Not only did Sarah drop some amazing knowledge
of what makes those titles great,
but she also shared some really big gold nuggets
at the end there, didn't she?
Yep.
You guys really only see me in action on YouTube,
but I have amazing...
I have a amazing
I also have great editors.
You guys only really see me in action here
but I have an amazing team of brilliant minds
behind the scenes who are doing the real work
of making our books great,
and Sarah is one of our stars.
There's a lot of factors that make a great title,
being short, memorable, easy to say, and available
are pretty important,
but that subtitle really needs to play together
with that title to make it clear who the book is for,
why they should read the book,
and what they will gain when they read it.
And it should play well with the search engines,
both Amazon and Google.
Did you get a great tip from Sarah today?
Of course you did.
So please smash that thumbs up button.
It feels so good,
and head on down to the comments
to share your favorite book title
or tip for titling books.
And of course, if you have questions
you can also post them there too.
And when you comment the day a video is released,
you'll be entered to win some sweet
hashtag no boring books swag.
We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday.
Make sure you catch everyone by subscribing to the channel
and turning those notifications on.
You are lovely to hang out with.
Would you like to hang out a little bit more?
Okay, great.
This great video here is with Benjamin Preston
on building your business from a book,
or if you want more on creating great book titles,
this one is a much a much watched.
Okay, we're gonna try that whole section again
'cause that did not come out right.
You are really lovely to hang out with.
Would you like to hang out a little bit more?
Okay, great.
This video is with Benjamin Preston
on building your business from your book,
or if you want more on creating great book titles,
this one is a must-watch.
Click on the one that you wanna see.
I've got some coffee on to share with you
and I'll see you there.
(upbeat music)