Paul Whybrow
Full Member
In a couple of previous posts I mentioned how I'd experimented with the titles and cover designs of my ebooks on Smashwords and Amazon. It was a rough form of market research, while I gave all of my books away as a marketing tactic to help launch my novel.
I changed some short story and novella covers several times, making note of the download figures each time. I found that predominantly red, yellow and orange covers were more popular that greens, blues and darker colours. It helped to have a readily discernible image that stood out when the book cover was shrunk to tile size - such as a baby, a bright dragonfly or a burning candle. The biggest boost to the number of readers came when I made a couple of titles into questions.
Making like a linguist, I've been looking at the titles of the threads on the Colony, to see which have the most views. Again it's noticeable that threads with a ? or a ! do well. Emurelda's 'Full Manuscript Requested!', Lex's 'Is there any legitimacy in the publishing industry anymore?', jaguest21's 'The hardest thing about writing?', Carol Rose's 'Facebook, anyone?' and Marc Joan's 'New Word!' all attracted a lot of interest.
I also found with my ebook experiment, that gloomy titles did better than upbeat titles (this really surprised me), and it's broadly similar on The Colony forum. Thus, Jason Byrne's 'We need a rejection bell', my own 'The Perils of Pen Names', Marc Joan's 'It's not whether, but how one is rejected' and AgentPete's 'Hour of Writes: A Grumpy Agent Responds' were all looked at a lot.
This is not to say that we don't respond to happy news, but my rough research shows that titles in the form of a question or exclamation, and those with a hint of sadness lure us in to find out more. Great news always attracts attention, such as when one of us makes a Submission Gong announcement - but that's of interest to we Colonists, and would be hard to transfer into a book title.
Sex sells, of course - thus Katie-Ellen Hazeldine's 'Literature is About Sex' and my own vaguely suggestive 'Does Size Matter?' were ogled a fair few times.
What does this suggest for the title of our next books? Well, if I were contemplating calling my new psychological thriller 'The Body On The Beach', I might attract more readers with 'The Sad & Lonely Death Of A Beachcomber' or by turning it into a simple question that still intrigues would-be buyers, such as 'How Did He Die?' A sexual element could be injected with 'Death Of A Naturist.'
Designing a book cover for the latter could be a nightmare!
I changed some short story and novella covers several times, making note of the download figures each time. I found that predominantly red, yellow and orange covers were more popular that greens, blues and darker colours. It helped to have a readily discernible image that stood out when the book cover was shrunk to tile size - such as a baby, a bright dragonfly or a burning candle. The biggest boost to the number of readers came when I made a couple of titles into questions.
Making like a linguist, I've been looking at the titles of the threads on the Colony, to see which have the most views. Again it's noticeable that threads with a ? or a ! do well. Emurelda's 'Full Manuscript Requested!', Lex's 'Is there any legitimacy in the publishing industry anymore?', jaguest21's 'The hardest thing about writing?', Carol Rose's 'Facebook, anyone?' and Marc Joan's 'New Word!' all attracted a lot of interest.
I also found with my ebook experiment, that gloomy titles did better than upbeat titles (this really surprised me), and it's broadly similar on The Colony forum. Thus, Jason Byrne's 'We need a rejection bell', my own 'The Perils of Pen Names', Marc Joan's 'It's not whether, but how one is rejected' and AgentPete's 'Hour of Writes: A Grumpy Agent Responds' were all looked at a lot.
This is not to say that we don't respond to happy news, but my rough research shows that titles in the form of a question or exclamation, and those with a hint of sadness lure us in to find out more. Great news always attracts attention, such as when one of us makes a Submission Gong announcement - but that's of interest to we Colonists, and would be hard to transfer into a book title.
Sex sells, of course - thus Katie-Ellen Hazeldine's 'Literature is About Sex' and my own vaguely suggestive 'Does Size Matter?' were ogled a fair few times.
What does this suggest for the title of our next books? Well, if I were contemplating calling my new psychological thriller 'The Body On The Beach', I might attract more readers with 'The Sad & Lonely Death Of A Beachcomber' or by turning it into a simple question that still intrigues would-be buyers, such as 'How Did He Die?' A sexual element could be injected with 'Death Of A Naturist.'
Designing a book cover for the latter could be a nightmare!
But it was fun! 
I haven't yet titled the remaining 7 books in The Weathermen series.
