Authors Electric

Yes, I know this post has a long title... that's rather the point. Did it draw you in? More importantly, did it come up when you searched for one of the keywords? Someone who knows what they are doing (unlike me) could make sure you find it, and the same theory applies to book titles. Sometimes - in the interests of market research, naturally - I browse the Top 100 Bestsellers on my Kindle. There's one list for paid and another one for free (which requires an extra click to find it). For this post, we'll concentrate on the paid list, because any fool can give away a book... right? Wrong, as it turns out, with so many freebies around these days, but the same tricks will help you there, too. The last time I looked before writing this post (about a week ago), almost every single book on the first five pages of Amazon's Top 100 paid list had not only an eye-grabbing cover and main title, but also an additional subtitle or sentence, some of these too long to fit in the ...

It's still sharper than my sight without my specs Over the past year I've been trying - with a satisfying amount of success - to make my garden more attractive to wildlife. By which I mean birds, frogs, newts, that sort of wild life and not certain friends. (Apologies for the photo's poor quality - new camera that I've not got the hang of yet.)       Chatting recently to my agent about the possibility of selling a non-fiction book, I happened to mention this. My agent was interested. A non-fiction book for children on the how and why of 'creating a wild-life garden.' She could get behind a book like that.      Ah, but what to call it? It's one of the banes of a writer's existence that books and articles have to have titles.        I started the book with the working title 'Why You Should Make a Wildlife Garden.' But this very blog's own Karen Bush strongly objected to this on the grounds that it sounded ...

Now, there's no room for potty humor on a dignified site such as this. But the real subject I'm tackling does not stray at all from my headline--or, at least, not far enough for me to have stepped into 'doody'. Life is short, art is long...so here comes some serious shop talk about our common quandary. In any art or line of work, we're all bedeviled daily by the superabundance of signs. Specifically, the signs of money-grubbing bastards selling the same thing that we are. The fact that our product is better--we think--means nothing if nobody sees it. So the first essential step is this: to compel the paying public, by whatever magic, to give our 'stuff' a try. The key word there is: Real Magic. Not a game of smoke and mirrors involving discount prices and/or swaggering titles for bandy-legged work. If the work lacks Real Magic, the best signs will fail; it's only a matter of time. But the best work may sink if betrayed by our signs. Whatev...

     I think we are probably all in agreement that it's important to get cover images right.      But we all know that words are important too.      So it's just as essential to get the title of your book right. It can be the hook which makes the difference between someone passing over your book and pausing, picking it up (or of course, clicking on it in the case of ebooks) and taking a peek inside - and then, hopefully, buying it. It has to grab the attention of the reader you are trying to attract: be memorable: piquing the curiosity perhaps ... Does what it says on the cover      With factual books, having the right words in the title can also, of course, help readers looking for a specific subject to find just what they are looking for. You might think that choosing a good title for a factual book is easier than for a fictional one, but it's far ...