Naming Your Novel

Nam­ing a nov­el should not be more dif­fi­cult than nam­ing your baby. How­ev­er, find­ing the per­fect nov­el name has caused me many sleep­less nights and more anx­i­ety than nam­ing my children.

Should I name the nov­el after my main char­ac­ter? Or maybe one of the loca­tions in the nov­el. I have fol­lowed the advice I have found in author groups, YouTube videos, and Pin­ter­est, but noth­ing seems quite right.

1. Use Keywords.

   In sev­er­al of the YouTube videos I watched to help me accom­plish this feat, the writ­ers talked about nam­ing your book after doing a thor­ough key­word search. If you can con­struct a title based on words that peo­ple are search­ing for, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly they will find your book. Since my goal for this project is to write the book I’d love to read, I want­ed to love the title as much as I love my book. Google Adwords and Google Trends can help you find out whether the words in your name are trend­ing or are fre­quent­ly searched. *You have to cre­ate a cam­paign to use Adwords though. Update: I have also start­ed using Key­words Every­where. It’s a free Google add-on.

2. Name your book after one of the locations in your book.

   The ben­e­fit of this would be that you could get read­ers from a spe­cif­ic area that would like to read some­thing that takes place in their com­mu­ni­ty. That would work for me if my sto­ry did­n’t take place in sev­er­al loca­tions through­out Flori­da. I think it would be con­fus­ing  if the book had a spe­cif­ic loca­tion and I would hate for peo­ple to think my nov­el was a guide­book.  So, while a good idea, I need­ed anoth­er way to grab my read­ers’ atten­tion at the cover.

3. Do what others are doing.

   Exam­ine the books in your genre. Which books are sell­ing? Short words, sin­gle words (usu­al­ly nouns) some­times pref­aced with the word “The,” are very pop­u­lar. If the  name is sim­i­lar to books they love, read­ers will get a sense that they already know what your book is about. That goes the same with the cov­er. Make sure it looks sim­i­lar to oth­er books in your genre. You may only have a sec­ond to grab read­ers before they move past your book. Check out my final title below!

Here is my orig­i­nal Title.

Here is my final­ized Title.

I chose to imi­tate the title style of books from top-sell­ing Young Adult authors, which start with “The”  fol­lowed by sev­er­al one-syl­la­ble words.

Once I had set­tled on the title, I test­ed it in Face­book groups to “not stel­lar” reviews. Hon­est­ly, at the time, I was quite pleased with myself because the title was appro­pri­ate in the con­text of the sto­ry. The prob­lem was it did­n’t make sense to those that who had­n’t read my book yet, in oth­er words, the peo­ple I want­ed to read (and buy) it.

So, I took a few days off and went back to the draw­ing board for every­thing. It’s fun­ny how it took sep­a­ra­tion for me to see where I’d gone wrong.

Final­ly, my title and tag line (which I added for clar­i­ty) help read­ers know instant­ly whether my book is a good fit for them. It meets their expec­ta­tions, instead of con­fus­ing them and leav­ing them feel­ing that the inside did­n’t match the outside.

So, is it the per­fect title? Who can say? I did my research. I made the title match the style of oth­er authors in my genre. While the title does­n’t indi­cate where the sto­ry takes place, the cov­er image does. Over­all, I am very pleased.

How about you? Did you know the title you would use before start­ing your nov­el? What research did you do on the hunt for the per­fect title? Now that your book is pub­lished, are you still hap­py with your choice?

Join the con­ver­sa­tion. I’d love to hear from you!

As always, fair winds and fol­low­ing seas!

-Elyza