On the subject of Book Titles

I write books and stories. I’ve been doing it for a while, now. My first full novel, Lost and Not Found, was in its first draft in 2002 and first published in 2003. I wrote Dragons’ Truth in 2003, publishing it in 2004, and then in 2004 I wrote and published something else. Something which I gave a really, really long title to, as follows:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book One:
An Introduction to Dodgeball
-or-
Conception and Induction
-or-
How To Begin An Apocalypse

At the time I’d not yet begun thinking about marketing. Not the way Marketing people think about marketing. Perhaps a pinch of the way Salesmen think about sales, but really I was mostly thinking about writing the stories I wanted to write and giving them titles I thought were appropriate. The idea, when I titled it originally, was that the book took place in the universe of the “Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction” of which many various stories and series may eventually be written, and that the series I’d just begun was called the “Recollections of an Alternate Past.” The first book, “Book One” had three titles, each of which was an appropriate title and none of which, I felt, properly encompassed the full scope of the book. That part, I can understand, might be confusing at first. Most books have only one title or, at most, two titles. Three is just, whew, confusing?

After that, in 2005, I wrote and published the next book in that series. I gave it a title commensurate with the first book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Two:
The Twofold Invasion
-or-
Penetration and Destruction
-or-
How To Make Love With Twins

Again, with the two series titles and the three book titles. In 2005-2006 I wrote (& in 2006 published) the third book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Three:
Escape From Exile
-or-
Confusion and Contraction
-or-
How To Get Out Of Hell

Yep. 5 titles. Again.

In 2007 I decided to take my publishing company into the major leagues by buying ISBNs, registering with the Library of Congress, properly registering as a business with the state, and signing up for printing & distribution with Lightning Source (LSI). Based on my research at the time, the choice between Lulu.com and LSI was a false dichotomy, since all of Lulu’s printing was done by LSI. Cafepress wasn’t (and still isn’t) taking publishing seriously, and Amazon’s CreateSpace/whatever cost a bit more than LSI & limited distribution to Amazon, which seems more like bush league than major league.

In 2008 I began working full-time as a creative, and began to look into marketing a bit. As I’ve recently written about re-realizing, I had accidentally let myself slip into a mindset of thinking sales & marketing were important. In two years of frustrating myself, I did get a smidgen of understanding about marketing. By 2009 I was aware that it was considered a bad idea for a book’s title to be longer than 3 or 4 words. If you look at the New York Times Bestsellers this week, in Hardcover Nonfiction four of the top five books have a one-word title. (Did you notice none of them is a word over 5 letters long?) In Hardcover Fiction, four of the top five have two-word or three-word titles, and that trend covers most all mass-market books by all major publishers. It’s good marketing, you see, to have a short, memorable title.

In 2010, I’ve begun to come to terms with the fact that the entire publishing world (both in books and in music/audiobooks) has been built around the assumption that all publishers follow that sort of thinking. The relevant metadata fields for books, eBooks, audiobooks, et cetera are small. On some eReaders, books’ titles simply get cut off if they’re more than about 25-30 characters. On some eBook stores, book descriptions can’t exceed a few hundred characters. I can still name paper books whatever I want, but in the transition to digital, I lose a certain degree of creative freedom with regard to titling books. I “can” put my full titles in the title fields of my eBooks, but I can’t guarantee potential readers will actually be able to see the full titles there. (In fact, in 2009 I discovered that I literally can’t use my full titles on my audiobooks because of how RSS/WinXP handle the titles of podcasts episodes. I compromised on an abbreviated title because not doing so prevented people from hearing my books. (ie: not about money, but about readership))

This year I’ve also been going back and forth with Mark Coker / Smashwords on the subject of titles. Smashwords didn’t like how I initially named my short stories from short story collections. I thought about it for a month or so, then decided to change the way I arranged the titles of my short stories (going from collection first to individual story title first), trying to make it more clear, in light of my discoveries about how eReaders display the titles. I also decided to use a similar tactic to rename the eBook versions of my Untrue Tales… series according to the compromise I’d made on the audiobooks, waiting until Book Four was released, 11/5/2010. The full title of Book Four is:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Four:
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities
-or-
Corporation and Collusion
-or-
How To Subvert Corporatocracy

But in the “title” field I put the abbreviated version, “Untrue Tales… Book Four” when I uploaded it to Smashwords, the Kindle store, and when I gave Bowker the information for the eBook. At the same time, I updated the titles of the first three books to the abbreviated versions on all sites, putting the full titles in the books’ description fields instead. I feel that, under the circumstances of the limitations placed on book titles for eBooks, this is a good compromise, allowing me to communicate basic info (this book is in a series whose name begins with “Untrue Tales,” and is book number “Four”) in the limited space of the title field, along with the full title to people who click through, look at the book cover, or actually download the book and look at the title page.

Mark Coker disagrees. In fact, as someone with a background in Marketing, his opinion is that I ought to just rename my books. I complained a bit about this current disagreement on Twitter and someone chimed in to the same effect; if it helps sales, change the titles. To me, this is like a teacher asking a parent to rename their 6-year-old because it might confuse the other kids at school.

Yet, even after working on this blog post for 3-4 hours, after spending another while writing another response to Mark Coker via email (highlight: “As far as I’m concerned the only problem is when retailers decide not to display the correct/full titles. Since they seem to accurately display covers and descriptions, but not titles, I moved my titles to where they could be seen: the book covers and the book descriptions. I then put an abbreviated (as your reviewer noted: incorrect) title in the title field, in order to fit the limitations of the system.“), I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Usually I write posts like these to work through sticky ideas, and after a thousand words or so, I know what I mean to do. I’m still a bit conflicted. Only about the metadata, though. The other two books in the series are all going to get the 3-titles-each treatment, and the series still has two titles. Here’s what I’ve got for the recently-finished Book Five:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Five:
The Bloodless Battles
-or-
Conscription and Revelation
-or-
How To Break Into Prison

I’ll start work on writing Book Six pretty soon. Hopefully I’ll have it’s ridiculously long title by the end of the month (or early December, at the latest).