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Keywords: writer, writing, writing a book, book publishing, marketing
your book, book ideas, effective writing, writing help
So you have your book ideas and have started writing
a book. Good for you! A great title can certainly help
with marketing your book, and
it can also spur you on to more effective writing and perhaps even
help you with book publishing.
When writing a book, there are tricks to great
title selection, such
as plays on words or twists of common expressions that make people
laugh and remember your book. Sam Horn, a best-selling writer, has
written a book on assertiveness, which she has titled: Take
the Bully by the Horns. This is cute, fun and makes the point.
Lee Glickstein, a writer who teaches public speaking by focusing
on speaking from the heart and being truly present, titled his book Be Heard Now, a play on the title of the Ram Das book: Be Here
Now.
When helping writers who are struggling to find
a title, I ask them to just tell me their book ideas. I have done
this in front of audiences at conferences. I ask someone to come
up from the crowd: someone whose effective writing
is stalled because he or she is having trouble finding a title.
Once the person is on stage, I place a flip chart or screen where
it can be seen by the audience and me but not by the volunteer.
I then ask the person to tell me what the book is about. As the
volunteer describes book ideas, I write the keywords so all can
see. Within a minute or so, the person repeats a phrase, and then
repeats it again. Each time the volunteer repeats a phrase I circle
the words. After about five minutes, there are numerous circles
around the same group of words. It works every time. One phrase
has stood out as the main book idea. That is the
book title.
Susan was writing a book and having trouble finding her title.
When asked to describe her book idea, which was
about single moms raising children alone, she kept repeating the
words: I want to remind them to “Save Some for Me.”
After she had repeated this book idea numerous times, I pointed
out that she already knew her perfect title. It was: Save Some
for Me. The subtitle: Inspiration for Single Mothers and
the People who Love Them came later.
Craig, a writer in San Francisco, got not only his title, but also
the entire outline for his book from this simple system. I was giving
him some writing help
while we were overlooking the bay in my San Francisco office. He
is a career management specialist, who was writing a book
about people who become dispassionate and miserable in their careers
at midlife. He kept repeating the words, “Perfect Work Day”
and “Perfect Vocational Day.” He liked the word “vocational”
because he believed that a career should be a vocation, a calling,
not just a job. I got so tired of hearing him repeat the word “perfect”
that I finally said to him, so title the book P is for Perfect.
He sat there stunned, realizing that the title was indeed: P
is for Perfect: Your Perfect Vocational Day.
Try it with your book ideas. Speak about your
book writing into a tape recorder or get out a
notebook and just write as if you were telling a good friend what
your writing was about. Do this for ten or fifteen minutes. Then
reread your writing and circle your repeated words.
Your title, if not your entire book outline, will jump off the page
at you. Believe me, you have been repeating your perfect title to
everyone already; you just don’t know it yet. Your
title selection is right in front of you.
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