Subtitle this!
How an author with a great manuscript decided to create a subtitle that would change the world forever
You know those books?
The nonfiction ones that have the short or even single-word title followed by a subtitle that raises the stakes so high you have to buy the book?
Yeah, you know them.
There’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.
Or (same link) Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
Or how about The Bad Guys Won! A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform, and Maybe the Best
According to the Washington Post, subtitles are getting longer and longer. And it’s been going on for a while. This New York Times article (which mentions the Mets book) is from 2005.
The ostensible reason, according to the Post, is this:
Blame a one-word culprit: search. Todd Stocke, senior vice president and editorial director at Sourcebooks, said that subtitle length and content have a lot to do with finding readers through online searches. “It used to be that you could solve merchandising communication on the cover by adding a tagline, blurb or bulleted list,” he said. But now, publishers “pack the keywords and search terms into the subtitle field because in theory that’ll help the book surface more easily.”
So what to do when you’re writing a nonfiction book—let’s call it THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY—and you figure you’d also like to have a good, hooky subtitle?
You do what every good author does: a Twitter poll.
Readers got three options:
1. The Power of Multicultural Creativity
2. How Diverse Creativity Constructed the Greatest Content-Generating Machine Ever Known
3. How A Ragtag Band of Traveling Gods and Local Myths (and vice versa) Changed Us All Forever
My marketing director (AKA my wife) voted for #1, as did a solid minority of Twitterati. I don’t think you can go wrong with a “The Power of” subtitle.
#2 tanked. I like it, but I can see why it’s not so exciting. Machines and stories don’t really go well together.
#3 was the winner. Is it a coincidence that it was the longest?
Excellent follow @RavenMae (huskies, the Iditarod race, other fun and serious stuff) said “1 is more concise but I legit love 3.”
I legit love 3 as well, because it is the most over the top, and the “traveling gods and local myths” turn of phrase might be the best I’ve come up with so far to explain the multicultural nature of Greek myths.
The “vice versa” part was because of Twitter’s character restriction. If I’m honest, I would have put (Not to Mention Traveling Myths and Local Gods) instead of the Latin phrase, making the subtitle even longer.
I decided on the “Changed Us All Forever” part because everything in books nowadays always seems to change things forever.
In retrospect, I might modify that to “Changed Storytelling Forever.” Because, “Us All,” even though it’s absolutely true in the case of Greek Mythology, is still a bit overused.
And I like creativity and originality.
This is, of course, just the beginning. Once the book is sold to some lucky publisher, they will no doubt have legions of subtitle experts who will pick out the best one.
For now, though, I legit love 3.