How
to Choose a Cookbook Title
That Will
Literally Sell
Your Cookbook for You!
Here's yet another powerful insider's secret: Titles
sell cookbooks.
You're going to need to put a lot of thought into coming up
with a title for your cookbook. The title is SO important because
titles sell cookbooks.
In fact, your title may be the single most important factor in the
success of your book. The title is the first thing a potential reader
is going to see when they come across your book. You can have the
greatest content ever written within the pages of your book, but if
your title isn't working, readers will never get to see it, so a lot
of good it will do you.
Think of your title as the doorway into your book. The title has to
be powerful and enticing - it has to work - in order to get readers
through the door and into the book. (Read: in order to get them to
buy the book!).
The title is essentially like a one-line advertisement for the book.
It's got to be enticing. It's got to make the reader want to try it,
or at least read it.
Fair or not, the fact of the matter is that a book with a great title
and not-so-great content will likely far outsell a book with awesome
content but a not-so-great title. It's true that you can't judge a
book by its title, but you can sell a book by its title. So work that title!
In a sense, your title is a powerful form of advertising for you, so
use it to your full advantage.
Your title should be catchy, concise, and communicative. It needs to
clearly convey the idea behind your book, what your book is about.
The concept behind the book should be clear from the title.
It needs to intrigue, entice, and interest the reader on its own
merit. That means that it should get the buyer interested all on its
own - even before they have a chance to glance through it, or even
take a good look at the cover.
Your title needs to be meaningful. Clear. Specific.
And this is very important - your title should communicate the
benefits of the book. Remember we talked about that promise a
cookbook offers for the reader? A powerful title conveys that
promise. Try to incorporate a benefit word into your title
Plan your title so that it grabs attention, draws interest, and
creates desire when it catches people's eye from the shelves of
bookstores, or in a list of Amazon search results. Use words that
create an emotional reaction in the reader or that clearly reveal the
book's benefit, advantage, promise or hook.
If you've tried to launch a book and it just didn't take off, here's
an insider's secret: go back and revisit the title! Sometimes you can
take a book from zero sales to best seller simply by changing the
title, then re-marketing it under the new name.
A Subtitle can be used to expand on the main title for the book, and
give the reader greater insight into what the book is about.
You don't need to have the title and subtitle decided upon before you
start writing. Sometimes a book can evolve as you write, so it may
not be until the end that the title becomes clear. Different writers
work in different ways, and sometimes the same writer works in
different ways at different times! You may find that you start with a
title which then inspire the concept and content of the book, or it
may work in the reverse.
Spend some time at Amazon.com studying cookbook titles and subtitles
to get inspired as to what makes a good, catchy sounding title.
It's also very helpful to visit your local library and ask the
reference librarian to help you locate the current "Books in
Print" directory. Virtually every major library has a copy
of Books in Print.
Books in Print, published yearly, is a directory of all currently
available books (which have been assigned ISBN numbers), organized by
subject, author, and title.
Find the section on Cooking and Cookery. You will have before you a
listing of all cookbooks currently available - title, author,
publisher and date of publication.
Title Searching
Its not possible to copyright a title of a book, but if at all
possible you want to try to avoid giving your book a title that is
already in use for another book. You don't want your book
becoming confused with the other, or vice versa. Can you just imagine
it? You put all that work into writing a truly terrific book. It's
getting lots of great reviews, fabulous word of mouth, and people go
into their local bookstore and ask for the book&ldots; and they end
up buying a different book by the same title, a book that has nothing
to do with you!
If you are in the US, you can search the title of your book online
through the Library of Congress:
http://www.lcweb.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html
Click "Search Our Catalogs"
If you are in Canada, you can search the title of your book online
through The National Library of Canada:
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/index-e.html
Click "Amicus", then "Amicus Web", then "Search"
Another less formal but also less reliable tool you can use is
Amazon.com. Of course, this will only show you whether Amazon has
ever carried the book - not whether such a title has ever been
published. But Amazon is a huge bookseller. So if your chosen title
does not appear in a search at Amazon.com, you might have a winner on
your hands. That's not to imply that there isn't a book by that title
being sold somewhere, but its less likely to have the type of
widespread distribution to create confusion if its not carried by
Amazon. Most popular books, or those that sell reasonably well, are
listed with Amazon.
Of course, with so many books in print, it is quite possible that
your title has been used already - perhaps even numerous times. When
that is the case, try to refine the title if you can. Figure out what
is different, better, newer about your book and try to incorporate
this twist into the title to differentiate your book and set it
apart. You can use the sub-title to accomplish this.
If you feel that keeping the title of the book as it is critical to
the success of your book, it may be all right to go ahead with it
even if the title has already been used, but you will have to
consider this carefully. How easy is it to find the other books? How
widely are they available? It will be of extreme importance that you
find a way of making it clear that your book is different.
Moreover, you don't want to appear like a copycat or knock-off
artist. Readers are turned off by that. They want to see originality.
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