Are You Looking For Guidance On How To Find Title Ideas For Your Book? You’ve Come To The Right Place Then!
Writing a book is a difficult and tedious process, and to top it off, there is the title of your work. You will rarely get a title for your book in just one go; there will be different title ideas and a lot of brainstorming.
A great book title makes the chances of the book being a best-seller higher. The title of your book also plays a role in how your book will perform in the market. The title of your book is the first potential thing that your target audience will see. So, it has to make the reader want to pick it up and read.
There are different areas from where you can get inspiration for your titles like social media, previous best-selling books, online book title generators, descriptive words, and more. Several great articles explain ways to get ideas, like this one!
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Some Of The Ways To Title Your Book Include:
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Book Title Generators
Many online Book title generators help you come up with title ideas through random words or a random mixture of words to go along with. Although, you must use these generators only as a source of inspiration.
Some sites may allow you to use the exact combination of words that the generator recommended or with a few changes of your own. It will be a good practice if you come up with your own title for your book.
There are several Book title generators online categorized into genres of books. Mostly, the book title generators are helpful for fiction books and not so much for non-fiction books. I will be listing some of them below:
- Fantasy Book title generator
- Sci-fi novel title generator
- Romantic novel title generator
- Mystery novel title generator
- Crime book title generator
- Non-Fiction
- Horror book title generator
- Comic Book title generator
- Children’s Book title generator
Feel free to use the titles you obtain from the book title generators if the site allows you to do so. You might end up getting a great book title.
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Make A List Of Adjectives Or Descriptive Words.
A simple formula for coming up with book titles is to have choices and help to form a title. A book title is simple, an adjective followed by a noun. This is just one of the simple methods to come up with title ideas.
For example:
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
- Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (2019)
- The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (2019)
A list of descriptive words to get you started with your own –
- Aggressive
- Ancient
- Next-door
- Roman
- Dead
- Crazy
- Dull
- Crooked
- Graceful
- Ice-cold
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Leave The Book Title Till The End.
Instead of stressing out about coming up with a book title, in the beginning, you can wait till you finish writing your book and then decide on your book title. After you finish writing the book, you can spend more time working on your book title and coming up with ideas.
Another advantage, along with more time, is that you have more references now to work with. As you finish your book, it becomes a little easier to find inspiration for the title.
Once you finish the book, you can ask yourself these questions to come up with title ideas:
- What is your book about?
- What is the genre of your book?
- Where is your book taking place?
- Why have you written this book?
- What happens to the characters?
While answering these questions, you can form your title based on the characters’ actions, your story unfolds.
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Brainstorm On Title Ideas For Your Book.
Brainstorming is one of the best methods to develop new and original ideas for projects and solutions for problems. Brainstorming for book title ideas will be a little long process depending on how fast your mind works.
Although, while brainstorming your way through to the book title, you should keep these points in mind:
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Unique Title-
Ensure that the title you come up with is unique and not repeated or used by someone else. Keep it unique and something that comes from you naturally. It should sound like something that one has never heard of but still suits the book.
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Your Title Should Be Able To Catch The Reader’s Attention Immediately-
As we discussed in the beginning, your book title is the first thing your potential reader will look at. If the title is not intriguing enough, the reader might move on to another book rather than give your book a chance. Use something catchy but not too catchy, making the readers curious to know what is inside the book. Use a title that makes the target audience want to pick it up and buy it.
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Can Be Easily Remembered-
Don’t use big words or too long titles. They’ll be erased from the target reader’s mind as quickly as they read it. Use simple words but make them sound good enough to draw the reader’s attention, and it is easier for them to remember the title of your book. If they remember your book title, they might also recommend it to their acquaintances.
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Can Be Pronounced Without Difficulty-
Your title shouldn’t be too complicated or big that the readers find it difficult to pronounce it. If your book title is easier to pronounce, its chances of staying in the readers’ minds are higher.
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Shouldn’t Overlap With Other Titles-
As mentioned before, the title of your book should not overlap with any other book which is already on the market. If that happens, it will just be a repetition, and your book won’t get recognition as the book that was already in the market before your book. So, check with other story titles to see if your title overlaps with theirs or no.
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Avoid Using Any Negative Connotations
While coming up with a book title, you should make sure that you don’t use any negative terms or any controversial words in nature.
Anything which has controversy going on should not be used as a title for the book. So, check up on the news and articles to not end up using the wrong terms.
- Look Up Titles Of Other Best-sellers
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
This method is only for you to get inspiration and understand the kind of titles required for best-sellers. You can research book titles of the best-sellers and take inspiration from them. And along with that, you can also make sure that the book title ideas that you come up with do no overlap with the already used titles.
Please do not copy the titles completely. It will either get copyrighted or useless when it comes to selling your books in the market. Two books of the same title do not do well in the market.
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Pick A Line From Your Book
You can also use one of the lines from your book as your book title, which explains your book or summarizes your book perfectly. Even a line from your book can become a perfect book title.
The line that you pick might sound poetic as the title or might sound more fascinating to the reader to know more about the book.
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Add-In A Subtitle For Coherence
Along with your title, adding in a subtitle might come in handy for clarifying things even more to the readers. A subtitle that explains your title in simple words gives the reader a little more insight into the book.
There is a trend in non-fiction books for there to be a subtitle. Their titles are lengthy and more elaborate. So, subtitles may be a good option when choosing the perfect book title for your non-fiction book.
Keep your subtitle to the point and use simple words. And most importantly, keep it as short as you can. For example:
- Dark Heart: Tales from Edinburgh’s Town Jail by Douglas Skelton (2008)
- The Five-Hour Workday: Live Differently, Unlock Productivity, And Find Happiness by Stephen Aarstol (2016)
- Nine Days a Queen: The Short Life and Reign of Lady Jane Grey by Ann Rinaldi (2006)
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Take Inspiration From Your Characters.
Photo by Dex Ezekiel on Unsplash
You can take inspiration from your character, how their story goes, where it starts, or just a description of the character as the title. Describing the character in the title is a method that is often used and works a lot of times.
Some of the best examples of picking character inspired book titles to include:
- Jane Eyre (1847)
- Anne of Green Gables (1908)
- Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- The Great Gatsby (1925)
Some of these titles include actions related to the character. Others describe the character and explain who the character is and where they are from.
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Few Tips On Titling Non-Fiction Or Fiction Books.
Titles can be of different forms and styles. Some using single words and some use more than one word. Some are poetic in nature, some which follow the basic rule, and some which don’t.
Some of the tips to keep in mind while coming up with a title is
1)Just Using One Word For The Title:
Only using single words as the title of the book, either descriptive words, name of the character, location, or when the book takes place.
Though, the use of just a single word is often said to be a risky move considering the market visibility of your book might not be up to the mark.
Examples include:
- Island by Aldous Huxley (1962)
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
- Fairest by Marissa Meyer (2015)
- Rome by Jay Crownover (2014)
- 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
2)Poetic Style
You can try poetic or lyrical titles if you wish. Using the right words and forming them in a poetic format. You can use various poetic or literary devices to make it more fun and aesthetic. Usually, they are used as fiction titles, but you can take title ideas from them for other books too.
Examples include:
- And Then There Were None (1939)
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)
- Gone with the wind (1936)
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010)
- Love In the Time of Cholera (1985)
3)Taking Famous Quotes Or Sayings
You can try using the common saying as titles. They can be proverbs, idioms, or popular statements. Examples include:
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
- Till Death Do Us Part (1997)
4)Wordplay
Using alliteration, repetition, and more techniques while playing around with words to develop more title ideas. Examples include:
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Paws in the Proceedings by Deric Longden (2007)
- Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner (2005)
- Of Mutts and Men by Spencer Quinn (2020)
5)Using Antonyms As Title Subjects
- Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room (2012)
- Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel by Heidi James (2007)
- Left Early, Arrived Late by Teddy Jones (2008)
- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Men I’ve Dated by Shane Bolks (2005)
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Testing Out Your Title Before Finalizing.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash
It’s a safer option to test out your title once before you choose a potential book title. You need to see if the title is appropriate, whether it attracts your target audience, whether it will have any impact on the readers and if the audience likes it. You can test out your title in different ways.
- You can start with family and friends. Ask your family and friends for feedback on your title. Whether they like it and what they think of it. They might even give you some more ideas for your title or give you corrections. You never know!
- Moving on, you can use social media to your advantage. Use Facebook and the groups on Facebook to broadcast your question and ask for people’s opinions. You’ll get a variety of responses on your title, which will help you understand the possible reaction of your potential audience.
- Along with Facebook, you also use Instagram and Twitter to help you with a larger response. Through tweets and Instagram stories, you can reach further out globally and get several responses to different opinions.
- After social media, you can make use of survey sites. Make up a survey and circulate it through google, online websites, WhatsApp, and social media. Through the survey, you can get accurate responses by asking the perfect questions.
You can do this for anything, random stories, short story, novel, poetry books, or non-fiction books. You can easily get a lot of title ideas and suggestions from people.
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Wattpad Recommendations
You can also find several books on Wattpad with a list of potential book titles which you are free to use. Two such books are:
With the tips and ways mentioned in this article, I hope you’ll be successful in getting good book titles. Take inspiration from your favorite books too. A good title is the most satisfying when it comes from you originally.
Last Updated on by Sathi
