I might be jogging, which I'll do once more after I have banged this out, when a title for a book will pop into mind.
It might be a play-on-words, or a fragment that is funny, something the magma at my molten mentis spews forth.
And usually, I can recognize a winner, though some of these gems are more appropriate for an article than a book-length exposition.
Naturally, as a student of rhetoric, persuasion, and marketing, I'm interested in figuring out if there are similarities between the absolutely must-be-written titles.
One thing I have discovered is if it starts with the words, "You Can" it is very promising, indeed.
For example, one of my biggest bestsellers starts with the words, "You Can." That title beats out every other winner among my books.
Scanning the numbers of clicks that I have received from my 1,700 online articles, which appear in 25,000 publications, it is clear that "You Can" titles are among the most-read.
Reread this article's title and you'll see I purposely injected redundancy, repeating the "You Can" promise, twice.
Check out the titles in your field to determine if there are patterns worth emulating. Let me give you one practical tip.
Editors are eager to change the best titles for the worst reasons. So, once you have settled on yours, to protect and preserve it, make sure to write your text so it mirrors the title, frequently throughout.
That way, it will be somewhat impervious to modification and it will remind readers that you are truly delivering on the promise that originally hooked them.
