What Makes a Great Non-Fiction Book Title and Subtitle?

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 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. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publishers, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers and done right will 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 want to 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 a 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 going to cover those in a minute. But then your subtitle needs to make it really obvious who your book is for, what they're going to 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 and 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, simple, 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 Professional's 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 those right out of college, up until maybe their first or second career change. And Metamorphosis actually is a great play on Harness yous Butterflies. Harness yous Butterflies in itself is strong, 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 this 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. But Harness yous Butterflies in Itself wasn't going to sell. So we had to pack that subtitle with keywords and phrases that would make it understandable to the audience and understandable that this is a career guide with a very specific outlet. 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 bookpreneur 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 wanted as his title, but he didn't have his subtitle yet. And Protecting the Pig, what we do love about it is it's got some great imagery. I mean, you can obviously see from the COVID that we were able to play on that pig idea. Piggy bank. Protecting your piggy bank. How stock market trends reveal the way to grow and preserve your wealth. Anybody have a question about what that book is about and who's going to be interested in it? It's going to be investors, it's going to be people who play the stock market. And it's very specifically how do you grow it and how do you prot. I mean 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, 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 at Book Launchers. And of course we're all about no boringbooks, 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 the Golden State Killer's Other Life. Okay. Wow, that was a. 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. He grew up with him. 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 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. Had had this 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. 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 just, you know, it's. I just don't like those ideas. And I'm like, but what does 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 a. 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 noboringbooks swag. We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you catch every one by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. You are 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 going to try that whole section again because 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 want to see. I've got some coffee on to share with you and I'll see you there.