Choosing a title that can be found and remembered
Your title is doing two things at once. It is a promise — the first signal a reader gets about tone, genre and what kind of experience this is. And it is a string of text typed into a search box, by someone who half-remembers it from a podcast three weeks ago.
Most authors optimize for neither. They pick a phrase that means something to them because of what happens in chapter 19, and it is neither evocative to a stranger nor findable by one.
These are separable problems, and fiction and nonfiction solve them in opposite ways.
Fiction: tone first, description last
Fiction titles almost never describe the book. They set a register. Gone Girl tells you nothing about the plot and everything about the mood. The working test is not "does this summarize my story" but "does this sound like the kind of book it is."
It has to be sayable. A title is passed between readers out loud far more often than it is read off a cover. If it has a word people will stumble over, a name they cannot pronounce, or a construction they have to think about, it will not travel. Say it into a conversation and listen to how it lands.
It has to be memorable a week later. Not clever. Memorable. Unusual word pairings survive; generic abstractions do not. There are a great many books called The Promise, and a reader who liked yours will find none of them.
It should be short enough to set large. This is the part authors underestimate, and it is a design constraint, not a taste one. Two or three words can be set enormous. Nine words cannot — they have to run to three lines at a size that vanishes in a search result. See The thumbnail test for what that costs you.
Nonfiction: the subtitle does the work
In nonfiction the title can be evocative, oblique, even a single strange word — as long as the subtitle says plainly what the book is and who it is for.
That is because the subtitle is indexed. It is where the words a reader would actually type live, and it is the second thing a browsing eye reads after the title. It is the most valuable text field on your cover and on your store page.
The commonest mistake is writing the subtitle as a second poetic phrase. Ashfall: A Meditation on Loss and Light has spent its best asset on atmosphere it already had. Ashfall: How to Rebuild a Business After a Fire has spent it on the reader.
A subtitle that works usually names at least two of these three: the outcome, the method, and the audience.
In the Cover Maker. Title, subtitle, series and author are live vector text, not baked into the artwork, so you can rewrite a title at any point and watch the cover re-set instead of rebuilding it. The cover check then shows the result at the ~160 px size a store actually displays. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Five checks before you commit
Search it in a store. Type your exact title into Amazon and any other store you will sell in. If a well-known book in your genre already owns that phrase, a reader searching your title will find that book and stop. Titles are not copyrightable and you are allowed to reuse one — but you will be competing against it for your own name, permanently. A collision with a bestseller in an unrelated category is survivable. A collision inside your genre is not.
Say it out loud, to a person. Not in your head. Watch whether they ask you to repeat it.
Set it on two lines. Write it out as it will break on the cover. Long words and lopsided splits are a real constraint: a title that breaks into a five-word line and a one-word line will look wrong at any size, and the fix is usually a different title rather than different typesetting.
Check the abbreviation. Readers shorten everything. Decide what yours becomes in a text message and make sure it is not already something else, or something unfortunate. If the short form is a single generic word, your book is unsearchable in conversation.
Read it in a series. If book two exists or is likely, put the titles in a list and see whether they look like siblings. Series titles want a shared shape — a repeating structure, a shared noun, a consistent rhythm — and retrofitting that onto book one after book three is out is a mess. Series covers: the same shelf, three books along covers the visual half of the same problem.
Length is a design decision
Every additional word makes the type smaller. On a 6 × 9 front you have roughly the top third to work with if you want the art to breathe, and a title has to be legible inside it at postage-stamp scale.
A three-word title can be set at a size that dominates the cover. A twelve-word title cannot be set large at all — it becomes a block of medium-sized text, which reads as a document rather than a book. If you love a long title, plan for a short display portion: set two or three words huge and let the rest run small underneath. That is how long nonfiction titles survive on a shelf.
Decide the title before you commission or generate artwork, not after. The number of words you are committing to changes how much empty space the art needs, and retrofitting space into a finished image rarely works — see Composition and negative space.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Feedback, revisions, and knowing when a cover is done · More: The thumbnail test · Categories and keywords, without the folklore