What to Title Your Business Book (4 of 7)
The 3rd Commandment of Business Book Titles
#3: Be Convenient
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
- Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters: Letter XVI
Successful titles are easy to recall. If someone is recommending a book, they can probably remember the title easily, since they invested some time and thought into it. The convenience factor in naming your book is really for people who hear of your book in passing—listening to the radio or the news, reading about it in a magazine or newsletter, or while talking to a friend. If the book's subject or recommendation piques their interest, and they later want to find it at the bookstore or online, you want to make it as easy as possible to help them remember it.
Using the least number of words is one easy way; Influence comes to mind. The fewer words people have to remember, the more likely it is they'll be able to do so. Good to Great and Built to Last are succinct and punchy enough to easily recall, even if you haven't read them. Another successful triple-syllable title lands here, too: It's Your Ship.
Mnemonics4 (4 Whose cruel idea was it to stick an M at the beginning of that word?) work well, as with the rhyming of Quest for the Best.
Despite its age, it's still one of my all-time favorites as a title and a business book. Why We Buy is a beautiful example of a title that is clear, compelling, and convenient, both short and rhyming—just like The Art of the Start. Besides being succinct, Good to Great is a classic example of an alliterative title, as are The Fred Factor, Selling Sunshine, and The Go-Giver.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There is a mouthful, but it works because it easily rolls off the tongue. The rhythmic ba-BUM-ba-BUM-ba-BUM-ba-BUM combined with the simple imagery of getting from point A to point B make the title effective.
A little wordsmithing made all of these examples easy to say and easy to remember.
You can also play off well-known phrases or easy-to-recall questions.
What Would Google Do? is a twist on the oft used "what would ______ do?" dating back to as early as 1897. What Is Your ONE Sentence? works because we think about the infamous elevator speech we're all supposed to have handy for that one time we ride from one floor to another with the billionaire investor who gives us his undivided attention.
Convenience goes beyond being easy to remember. Your title needs to be easy to find, too. Weird punctuation, using words often misspelled, or using made-up words can trip up your would-be reader (or a clerk at the bookstore trying to order for your reader). One of my authors toyed with the idea of combining the words "success" and "execution" as a kind of trademark to build his platform around. But it did not take us very long to look at SuXeXecution (and variations thereof) to completely abandon the idea. He got an A for originality, but if no one could spell the title, the market would grade it with an F.
