The Headline Act

No matter what length your work is, or genre, the title has to reach out, grab a potential reader and reel him in. Although there are a few suggested rules, even non-fiction newspaper articles need an eye-catching and interesting few words ~ just like the headline act of a Las Vegas show, a good title will draw the crowd in.


While you have some flexibility in choosing your headlines, each should be a form of summary of the content or story. If you are making a blog post, or even advertising your work online, keep in mind that your title or headline ideally should contain appropriate key words that search engines will pick up on; the closer to the beginning of the title your keywords appear will improve the efficiencey. Whether online or not a reader will be attracted by words and themes that interest him or her. For instance, a golf enthusiast will be more likely to read an article relating to golf (ie: Tee Off) instead of something related to makeup (ie: The Lipstick Wars).


It’s recommended that fiction book titles be just a few words, catchy, and raise “questions”. Avoid overused clichéd phrases and, a trick I myself learned after the fact, search an online book store for titles you are considering. My second novel with my publisher was originally titled Forgotten; it was a romantic suspense that opened with a case of amnesia. While the title was appropriate and easy to remember, it took searching through ten separate page loads on Amazon to find, surely enough time for someone to find something else to read. About a year later the book was re-published with the title His Lucky Charm and turned up on the first page load.


Keep your titles short and sweet. It’s okay if you want to be creative and play with words as I did with A Chaunce of Riches – Chaunce was the family name of one of the characters. Non-fiction books should be more straightforward and summarize BRIEFLY the content such as “Abnormal Psychology” or “Dummies Guide to Bowling”. Don’t misrepresent your content, folks looking for non-fiction are looking for specific content and not surprises. By the way, titles are not copyrighted.


Headlines sell newspapers and newspaper editors seem to like sensationalism. Newspaper headlines containing negative connotations statistically catch the reader’s eye faster. Again, the story of the article should be summarized in the headline which is classically printed in a bolder and larger typeface to stand out on the page. In tonight’s news, the headline “Sidewalk Danger” is catchier than “Gate Falls on Pedestrian” – both titles are accurate, but the first is more intriguing.


When you are deciding on a final title for your work make a list of keywords that someone might use to find it online. Summarize your story in a few words, don’t include spoilers. Use online book retailers to search potential titles to see if there are already a lot of books with the same title; even if another book, or lots of them, share the title, you can still use it but think about changing the order of the words or adding an extra and different word (an adverb, proposition, etc), change the tense or perspective.




Writing Exercise: #1) Ignore the titles or headlines of any short story or new article. Read the item and choose three keywords. Make up a title from those keywords. Do this a few times with different articles until you feel comfortable with your titles. #2) Choose a common and short phrase you, or someone close to you, uses often (ie: “Not For Nothing”). Write a few paragraphs using that phrase as your title. Does the title really reflect the content of your story?



Writing Prompt: List the first word you think of for EACH of five different items in your immediate vicinity; these words can be a color, a size, an object or an adjective. Now write a two to three sentence paragraph using EACH word in one cohesive story. Try it again.