Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Choosing a Book Title

From a book marketing perspective, choosing a good book title is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a self-published author.

There really isn’t a science to choosing a good book title, though there are certainly people who will lead you to believe that.

However, that doesn’t mean you should just choose a title at random that sounds good to you.

Look for Recent Successful Titles in Your Subject Area or Genre

One of the best ways to start thinking about a title for your book is to go to the bestsellers page on Amazon for your main book category.

Look at the titles that the top-selling books have. If they were published by a big publishing company, the company - not the author - may have chosen the title, and they may have spent a fair amount of money deciding upon it.

Do An Online Poll

You can also do an online poll on social media. Just present people with, say four different titles, and ask them which they like best.

Test Ads for Different Titles

If you have a bit of a marketing budget and you’re into this kind of thing, you may want to do an A/B test with paid ads pointing to your book’s landing page.

As long as you can track whether your ads “convert” people (i.e. they click the link in the ad to go to your book’s landing page), it doesn’t really matter if the title they see on the landing page is exactly the same as the title in the ad.

So, you could make one ad with the title “Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Nineteen”, and another ad with the title “The Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Nineteen”, and see if one performs better than the other.