What to Title Your Business Book (6 of 7)
In Titling Your Business Book, Last But Not Least…
#5: Be Continuous
"Begin as you mean to go on."
- Charles H. Spurgeon, All of Grace
It is nigh impossible to hit all four of those milestones and still shoulder on to the Holy Grail of killer business book titles: one that lends itself to a series. But if you can and do, then each subsequent book will enjoy the compound interest5 (5 Yes, that was a horrible pun.) of its predecessors (and vice versa).
Dan Kennedy's No B.S. title falls squarely in the "lends itself to a series category" (by smart design, not happy accident; Dan is brilliant): No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, No B.S. Price Strategy Guide, and No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits, among many others.
Although I wouldn't put a check mark in its "clever" category, The One Minute Manager is a great example of a title that can be easily reconfigured for subsequent titles. Unsurprisingly, Ken Blanchard did just that, with The One Minute Entrepreneur, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, How a "Last-Minute Manager" Conquered Procrastination6 (6 This last example is actually the subtitle to his book The On-Time, On-Target Manager. I might have suggested simply going with The Last-Minute Manager, then write the subtitle as How to Conquer Procrastination and Become an On-Time, On-Target Manager to play off the strength of the initial title.) , and other derivatives.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad spawned a whole Rich Dad series on real estate, sales professionals, legal entities, and more. Michael Gerber has successfully used The E-Myth in a number of other small business-related volumes. Yet again, The 4-Hour Workweek shows up as a great example of being contiguous. Ever the entrepreneur, Tim Ferris parlayed the success of his book into The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Chef.
Here, too, we have another appearance of Your Marketing Sucks. It's easy to imagine a whole series of Your _____ Sucks. It just lends itself to that kind of wordplay. Wisely, Mark Stevens took advantage of it, subsequently writing Your Company Sucks. and Your Management Sucks. There are plenty of other titles that haven't been used for additional books, but you could imagine them. I could easily see Dave Ramsey leveraging EntreLeadership in EntreManagement and EntreFinance, for example.
If you can hit the first four Cs and still find a way to leave your title open for spinoffs, you are in a truly extraordinary league of authors.
