090: My Process for Coming Up With a Book Title

 

I used to struggle with choosing titles for anything I wrote. It's not something I'm skilled at, and it always caused me so much stress!

But then, a few months ago, I figured out a process that helped me choose a better title for my book, and this episode breaks down that process for you. Hope it's helpful!

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MY PROCESS FOR COMING UP WITH A BOOK TITLE

Hi, friends, I feel like there are some writers who totally just don't mind coming up with a title like it is one of the easiest parts of the process. They've got title ideas for days before they even start outlining their book. They're just like, oh, yeah, it could be this and this and this. And then there are writers like me more like me, where it is like pulling teeth to get myself to think of titles. It's just hard, it's very difficult for me, I tend to just default to choosing something really obvious and easy, because I am not creative. When it comes to titles it is not one of my strengths as a writers.

 

So I thought we could talk about it in this episode, because I recently, like tried to fix that. And I tried to come up with a process for picking a new title for my book. And it was really illuminating. And I think I'm trying to just rewrite this part of my brain that says you're not good at telling at picking titles for your books, trying to be like, no, wait, I'm okay at it. So if you are not sure how to pick a title, if you don't have one, or you just want like, some insight into someone else's process, this, hopefully this episode will help. I didn't even want to do an episode that was like four tips for choosing a book title. Because it's just, it's hard. And it's not one of my strengths.

 

And I just all I can do is tell you what worked for me and what I did and how I have sort of like, approached this process. Yeah, I've had some clients who have shared that the difficulty in picking titles as well. So I know that I'm not alone in this. Okay, so my first book was called Hidden Lake, because the family that I was writing about in that book, had a cabin on a lake that was called Hidden Lake, and there's some significant things that happen at that cabin at that lake. So, so easy for me to just call it Hidden. Like, I felt like I was like an okay, title, like, sure. Okay, hidden like the my second book was originally titled Scoop, because it dealt with a podcast and the podcasts title was Scoop. Again, make sense, I'm pulling it right from the story. So that's an approach that you can do as well.

 

Like, if there's something that plays a significant role in the plot, and is just kind of a title of something like a proper noun, that can be an option for a title. When my agent and I were doing revisions on Scoop, you know, we were both like, okay, like scoop is fine. But it does have sort of a journalistic bent to it, like getting a Scoop on something. And the podcast was not a journalism podcast, it wasn't a news podcast, and it just, you know, it, it was fine. But we were like, she was like, why don't you see if you can come up with something better? And if not, it's fine. We'll just send it on submission and Scoop. And that's, it'll be fine.

 

So I was like, Oh, my gosh, okay. So I put it off for a while I put it off until all my revisions are done. And then I was like, Okay, I've got to think about this. So, here is the process for what I did. Okay. The first thing that I think was was important for me to do is to give myself some dedicated time to work on this and brainstorm this. I just been feeling like, Oh, it's so hard to come up with a title like I don't know. Because I couldn't think of one immediately. Like, in the two seconds, I was giving myself to think of a title. I was like, I don't know, Scoops, fine, I'll just go with that. But then I realized, okay, no, just like if I'm having an issue with the plot in my book, or, you know, can't figure out how to resolve something. Sometimes the best thing I can do is to give myself some uninterrupted time to just focus exclusively on that and do some brainstorming. So I had to do the same thing with my book's title is to carve out that space. So I went to a co working space, so I got myself Starbucks, it was early on a Saturday morning, because I've been busy that week with client work, I think, and I just decided this is, this is what I'm going to do.

 

So I got my little treat, got my Starbucks, went to my co working space and opened up a word, document. And I just started writing down nouns. And, and actually, I don't even think they were all nouns, but just words of everything that is that plays a role in the book. So as an example, some of the words from this list were really basic like I, yeah, I'll just I'll give you a few podcast scoop, friendship, kappa group, revenge, rush, Georgia, all of these words, that were singular words, and just had to do with what my book was about. Now, what was important in this, and if you do the same thing, I want you to not judge what you're writing, like, I would never call the book, podcast group, right? Like, I would never pick a couple of words that just don't make sense and use that as the title for the book. That's not the point.

 

The point is just to do a brain dump, and to get some words on the page for potential titles, either the word by itself or in combination with other words, kind of like a plug and play sort of a thing. So if you do this, it's important to just give yourself the space to write things down and not judge, don't criticize them, just get them out. I got a list of maybe like 25 words, I think that were on this on this Word doc. And then once I had the words, then I came up with a couple of phrases that I liked. And a couple of phrases. Well, two phrases that appear in the book more than a couple of times, not super often, but I think they're in there like three or four times.

 

So these, I'm not going to give you the phrases, because there's one of them, there's a couple, well, a couple of them that I like, and I might find a way for future books. But think of a phrase like, I'm just going to make one up right now. This time around, that would be an example of a phrase. And I had maybe four or five phrases that I put on this list. And then once I had all of that I just started doing that combining that I talked about earlier, where I just I saw I tried to think if there were any ways that I could combine these words into potential titles, and I came up with a few options that were okay. One of the words that I put down on the list was girls and women. And I was thinking, okay, maybe like something with women or girls.

 

But there have been so many books published in the last five or 10 years with the word girls, I feel like that was just girl singular. That was such a big trend in publishing for a while. And in fiction generally. But if you like there were a lot of thrillers that have the word girl or girls in the title. And I just wanted to stay away from that, because I think it's kind of been overdone. And also, a lot of these books are dealing with women, but they're calling them girls, which always felt kind of condescending and infantilizing to me, the point why why I put girls on the list is because that's actually a point of dialogue that that someone says like, Hey, these are women. Why are we calling them girls? But yeah, so it was pretty clear that that wasn't the right that it wasn't gonna be anything related to girls.

 

So after some time of letting this percolate, I closed the document, I did a little bit of editing or writing, I can't remember exactly what I did after this. And set it aside, I didn't make a decision. I didn't force myself, I wanted to just let those things percolate and then come back to it later. So that's my other tip. Once you have your list, once you have some ideas, let things do a bit. If you don't have an initial title that jumps off and you're like, oh, this is it. This is this is perfect. If you have that if that happens for you, that's awesome. But if not let it stew for a little bit. Come back to that list again in a couple of days or a week and see if there's something different about it when you look at it again.

 

One of the phrases that was on my list was actually not the front runner for the title but it was something that later when I was talking with my agent about she mentioned this phrase that a character one of the sorority sisters says. Which is love you, miss you because it's like a Kappa thing when they when they say goodbye to someone they'll say like love you miss you. And it becomes this little catchphrase that the Kappa Kappa sisters have. And my first instinct was, you know, I'm not sure about this, and I kind of had to sit with it for a minute or two. And then it's like, suddenly, it just became such a perfect title for a number of reasons that I'm not going to get into in this episode because they kind of deal with the content of the book.

 

And I want to keep that as secret. And I want to talk about that too much and reveal too much. But it just works on a number of different levels. And I think I'm really excited about it. So that is the current working title of the book is Love You, Miss You, and we put a comma, you know, there are a few different ways to, to have punctuation with this, but we did love you comma, miss you. So we sent out the book with the title Love You, Miss You. And we're going to see now when you get when you go down the traditional publishing road, a lot of times the title that you start with, when you submit to someone is not the title that ends up being published. I mean, sometimes it is, but oftentimes the title will will be changed.

 

You know, just because the the publisher, whoever's buying your book, like they have knowledge around this, and they have an awareness of maybe what might potentially sell better in certain genres. And so, yeah, and I'm one of those people that like, yes, the title is important, but it's not the most important thing for me. So if I do get a book deal, and they decide that they want to change the title, I'm completely open to that I'm not so attached to this current title, that I would fight tooth and nail to have it be either Scoop or Love You, Miss You. So we'll just have to see, we'll just have to see what happens. So yeah, so. So try that process, just do that brain dump, don't judge come up with some words and kind of piece things together.

 

And see if you can, you know, put the puzzle pieces together in a way that that helps you come up with a title. Get some phrases together, pull out things that are common in the main use rep, things that come up again, whether they're themes or sayings or places, and then just let it sit for a while, come back to that list, see if you can add anything else to it, see if there's something that really starts to stand out. And yeah, I think it's, I've seen some some people talk about, like being aware of titles and trends in publishing. And I think that's certainly something you can keep in mind. Again, like I shared with my own example, my experience of having the word girl or girls in the title. If I were in that period of like, five years ago, when those titles were really hot and exciting, and everyone had girl on their title, like I might consider it. But I think we're past that point. We're kind of over that.

 

And so I don't want to I just, I think that trend is sort of over. So yeah, there are pros and cons, I think of choosing your title according to what's popular. And I don't, I'm not even, you know, much of a publishing expert to where I can really share a ton about that. But I just I can see that there would be pros and cons to doing that. So yeah, good luck with choosing your book title. And remember that if you are not finished with your book yet, or you're still in the revision process, like your title can be a working title. It can just be a filler until you actually get to the point where you do need to decide what the title is, when you are publishing or querying or whatever's next for your book. It's okay, if you have a draft title for a while. I think that was something I had to kind of give myself permission to do early on is like I just called it Scoop early on because I'm like, well, this is just going to make it easier. This can be a working title. And then it was one less thing I had to worry about when I was writing and editing. Alright, thank you for listening. Hope this was helpful. Catch you next week.

Katie Wolf