In this comprehensive guide to picking the perfect book title, I will walk you through how to think about book titles, then tell you how to pick yours, and how to test it. WHY DO BOOK TITLES MATTER? Your book title is the most important marketing decision you’ll make. Period. The title is the first thing the reader sees or hears about your book— even before the cover in most cases—and getting it right is the single most important book marketing decision you’ll make (even though most people don’t think about it as marketing). The title forms the basis of the reader’s judgment about your book. Let’s be clear: A good title won’t make your book do well. But a bad title will almost certainly prevent it from doing well. The iconic example of the importance of a book title is the title change that led to an obscure book becoming a #1 best seller. In 1982 Naura Hayden released a book called “Astro-Logical Love.” It bombed. She then took the exact same book, changed a small amount of the content, and reissued it with a different title, “How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time…and Have Her Beg for More!” 184 · ThE SCriBE METhOD