Every month I attend the Utah chapter of the National Speakers Association and each month we spend about 3 hours learning how to build a solid speaking business. I’m not a public speaker by trade, but as a preferred guest I get to attend these meetings and mingle with some of my perfect profile customers. Last month we learned how to come up with titles that sell.

You may find this advice a little strange but that’s okay because most of us attendees did too. The speaker, Sarah Victory (http://www.thevictorycompany.com/index.htm) told us to buy all the tabloid magazines in our neighborhood grocery store. Tabloids like The National Enquirer, she said, are full of examples of great headlines, like this one:

“Britney’s Baby Driving Drama” and “Nick’s Kinky Confession.” Another example Sarah gave was any title with numbers in it, like “1001 Ways to Lose Weight.” Headlines are meant to catch our attention and motivate us to read an article, which means we’ll have to buy the magazine. Book titles have a similar function. They are to catch our attention and prompt us to buy the book we are looking at. The tabloid magazines can teach us what buzz words people connect with and which words create the impulse to buy.

What I like most about Sarah’s advice, is that it gives us a process we can follow when trying to come up with the right title for our books. Many authors I’ve worked with are completely hooked on their title and most of these authors came up with the title on their own. I was working with this one author a few months back and I told her point blank that most potential buyers would not understand the title she had chosen. She didn’t like me being so blunt. But I told her that my opinion is only the opinion of one person and I recommended she talk to at least 30 people about her proposed title. A week later she called me up to tell me how mad she had been when I told her to think about changing her title. But she said that once she cooled down, she did go out and ask as many people as she could and the feedback told her she needed to change her title, which she did, and she now has a much better title.

Coming up with a good title is not easy, but keeping an open mind, looking for the words that sell, and asking a focus group are some good common sense tactics to use when coming up with your title. If success in the retail business is Location, Location, Location then success in selling books is Title, Title, Title.