My Unique Book Naming Strategy

Quarantined Income Workshop #6

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth workshop in the Quarantined Income Workshop series.

Today’s workshop is somewhat unusual compared to the ones that came before, because instead of talking about a new platform on which you can build an online hustle; today we’ll be building on the previously published self-publishing with Amazon KDP workshop.

I’ve had a lot of feedback regarding the self-publishing workshop from people who have tried it themselves, and that’s not surprising. Almost everyone who makes a self-propelled living through writing has tried their hand at self-publishing at one time or another.

While some people strike gold and make a handsome living off their self-published books, the vast majority of people never make it work.

Making it work with your self-published writing requires the perfect execution of a lot of factors, and one of these important factors is your selection of book titles.

Selecting a Title

Titling a book is incredibly important because it’s the first example of our ability to write that the reader will ever experience.

People say that there’s nothing like a first impression, so the first impression of your book should be something that gets a lot of care and attention.

Even more critically, the title of your books doesn’t just impact the success of the book itself; it impacts the success of the entire series that your book is a part of.

I’m a big fan of writing series’ of books for Amazon as a strategy for success. Personally, I make very little money from each of my books individually. Instead, all of my books are individual parts of a larger whole, and it’s the series themselves that make the cash.

If I can hook a reader in for one entry, I can bring them back for the rest. (Especially if that reader has Kindle Unlimited and isn’t paying more to read more).

Providing good content is the most important factor in the success of a series, but the audience will never know how good the content is if a great title doesn’t reel them in first.

There are many strategies all over the internet for how you can write a great title. Some advice is more academic, while others are anecdotal.

My strategy for book titling is the result of years of trial of and error. My hope is that my strategy will give you another tool for your hustlers’ toolkit going forward and most of all, that it leads to sales and glorious income.

The Homage Strategy

People are naturally risk aversive, especially when it comes to spending their hard-earned cash. Because of that, I try to make my book titles seem as familiar as possible.

Your ultimate goal when titling a book is to stand out from the enormous competition on the platform, so creativity will win every time.

You can have the most academic title of all time, but no-one will ever find it if you don’t have an edge of some kind. Unless you’re famous, then there’s no need for an edge, or even for the book to be good.

One go-to for me is drawing inspiration from the names of already existing movie franchises in my book titles, while also conveying the message of the book series I’m writing.

As you’ll know if you read my previous self publishing workshop, my greatest success so far has come from writing an enormous amount of short romance books that all connect together as part of a large, futuristic, post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure in space.

Creating three series of connected books has led to royalties that slowly build for every entry in the series I write.

For one series, I wanted to convey a simple message while also letting the audience know that the series was both action-packed and lighthearted in tone.

For this, I decided to replicate the names of the Fast and Furious franchise.

This is a franchise with which people are familiar, so all I had to do was swap out the words Fast and Furious with my actual title, which was Dangerous Cousins.

**(To protect the anonymity of my pen name author, this title is different to the one I used in reality. This example title is swiped from the TV series Arrested Development).**

My book Dangerous Cousins is about two cousins living on a small planet who fall in love and are therefore chased by the authorities for their crime.

This chase leads to a multi-book series of adventures, twists, turns, love, betrayal, etc. Despite the high stakes and dangerous tone, the books are lighthearted in their dialogue and character interaction.

The target demographic is people who enjoy, shall we say, “alternative romance.” Which, if you go by the statistics released by PornHub each year, is a surprisingly massive amount of people.

So the first book is just called Dangerous Cousins. But since I’m going with a Fast and Furious theme, my second book is called “2 Dangerous 2 Cousins.”

The title still works because the danger is indeed heightened in this book, and there are two cousins. The third book is called “Dangerous Cousins 3: Tokyo Drift.” In this book, they go to futuristic version Tokyo where the laws are friendlier to people who practice their alternative lifestyle… or is it?

The rest of the series titles are as follows;

Dangerous & Cousins Dangerous 5 Dangerous & Cousins 6 Cousins 7 The Fate of the Cousins C9

The longer a series goes, the bigger readership it’s able to build. The goal of titling books this way is to help the series achieve its most important goal on Amazon, standing out.

I Know it Sounds Crazy

There’s just so much content on the platform, and your book titled “What Me and My Cousin Did 3” or “Cousin Love 5” is going to be completely buried by all the other content that’s similarly titled.

Reminding people of something they already love will give them a small connection to the series before even reading it. They might chuckle when they see one of the books, then investigate and figure out that you’ve followed the whole film franchise with your titles.

Once your title has made them curious enough to click on your book, it’s the job of the book description to seal the deal.

When I recommend that you reference movies and pop culture in your titles, I don’t mean doing that porn cliche of literally re-writing the film as a sexual parody. My ‘Dangerous Cousins’ series doesn’t follow the narrative storyline of the Fast franchise at all. They’re only similar to the Fast series in that they’re action-packed, high stakes, and super focused on the importance of family. Mmmmmm gross.

**(Remember, my real books aren’t about cousins. This was only an example to prove my point).**

Remember, your homage doesn’t have to be to a movie or movie franchise, this is just what I did.

This strategy works off the idea that people buy what they know. So simply reminding people of what they already know and love may get your foot in the door. It may also lead to a title that’s more creative than the others in your genre, which is something all books need to succeed.

I believe that a book’s ability to stand out is the difference between it selling and going by completely unnoticed. Although as I said earlier, this rule doesn’t apply to celebrities.

Thanks so much for taking part in today’s workshop, I really hoped it helped.

If you’d like to read more about finding success on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, please check out my previous workshop on the subject.

Alternatively, I have several other workshops, all addressing online platforms that can be monetised.

If you’d like to continue the workshopping journey, come back to Money Clip on Tuesday, May 19th, for the next workshop in the series.