A winning book title . . . at last!

If you’ve every had the daunting pleasure of titling a book, one that you wrote, you will appreciate how challenging a task it is.

There is so much to consider. What title conveys the content and feel of the book? Will it draw people in and get them to take the book of the shelf? Does it fit the marketing requirements of being discoverable with all the many tools out there, Amazon and Google and AI bots and your local robo-librarian (these are all basically the same to me; I’m thankful for the savvy marketing team at the University of Chicago Press!).

And a good title has to have the right rhythm—the writing on the cover better be at least as good as what’s on the inside.

By rhythm I mean the play of words and their pacing. It can be the most poetic part of a book. And it’s complicated, because there are so many possible forms. There is the title itself; the title plus subtitle (yes, the dreaded colon); and the title plus tagline, which my writer friend Leah Eskin turned me on to. This adds words, which search the engines love, but it can also get too wordy and start to sound desperate: my book is about everything, please buy it!

It’s lot to consider, and figuring it all out also demands diplomacy. What I like might not be what the editor or the marketers think best. Who should get to decide?

I’ve been working on the title of my latest book since I first conceived of it three-plus years ago, but things came to a head a few weeks ago as the deadline (final!) for my manuscript (final!!) approached.

This was my strategy: scribble. Then share the best scribbles with trusted friends and colleagues. Get them to tell it to you straight, and try to listen.

So here it is, with the caveat that, as the Romans used to say, omnia mutantur . . . .

On the Street of the Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk through the Layered Lives of Rome. Click on this very title to learn more about the book!