What Makes a Good Title/Cover?

[ysabetwordsmith]

Recent comments have gotten me thinking: What makes a good title for a poem, story, or book? What makes a good book cover?

What makes a good title for a poem, story, or book?

A good title should be distinctive. It should not be easily confused with other titles; ideally, it should be unique. This makes it easier for people to find when they search for it. Titles which are overly colorful or metaphoric may be distinctive at the cost of relevance and clarity.

A good title should be relevant. It should indicate the work's topic/theme as precisely as possible. It should not be misleading; there's no use hooking a reader with a cool concept that isn't in the work.

A good title should be clear. It should contain words that are pronouncable and comprehensible. It should have a discernible meaning. Titles which are relevant are likely to be more clear than titles which are irrelevant.

A good title should be memorable. It should stick in a reader's mind. Titles which are clear, distinctive, and concise tend to be more memorable than titles which are confusing, general, and/or lengthy.

What makes a good book cover?

A good cover should be eye-catching. It must snag the attention of casual browsers and cause them to focus on this one book out of hundreds. Bright colors, high contrast, vivid imagery, and a sense of motion or action in the illustration are all conducive to this.

A good cover should be legible. Plain or lightly ornamented fonts and layouts are easier to read than elaborate ones. It doesn't matter how pretty that stuff is if nobody can read it. Legible from a distance is even better.

A good cover should be inviting. It must make the reader want to find out more about what's inside the book. To accomplish this, it must give some kind of foretaste or teaser of the content. (See above for discussions of relevance and clarity as these also apply here.)

What's the point of all this?

A book cover's job is to make a reader pick up a book. Whatever does that is effective. Whatever fails to do that is ineffective.

The job of the cover text (front and back) is to make a reader open a book. Once the book is in hand, the reader must be enticed to venture further.

Once the book is open, it is up to the author's content to hook the reader and complete the sale. Everything else is just aimed at getting to that point. It doesn't matter how good the content is if the setup is so poor that nobody ever gets that far; and it doesn't matter how good the setup is if the content flops.

What are your thoughts on titles and cover art?