SEO & Book Titles

SEO → search engine optimization.

Some days I wish I didn’t know anything about this, but as a self-pub it is something you have to be aware of, at least on a surface level. Last year was the year of figuring out how to do that. I’ve been fixing a lot of titles. You might have noticed a change with The Saint George Chronicles.

These changes came about from talking with people about my books, and researching my titles and similar titles of books with similar tropes and genre.

What I discovered was that my SEO sucked! I’m a newbie author. I wasn’t going to get everything right the first time. It was somewhat embarrassing too, because I thought I was actually pretty good at titling things. (I’ve won a few awards for titles in the past.)

It’s a credit to how much changes, and how much more you need to know about publishing overall to realize you need to make sure of a couple of things about titles, especially for genre fiction.

1) Your title needs to be unique enough that it has a good SEO. In other words, it needs to be within the first five search results. The first three would be preferable, but the first five is pretty good.

2) It also needs to stand out from other books in the genre. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are a lot of books with the word “Dragon” somewhere in the title. While it’s good to have that word somewhere in the title if in fact you are writing a dragon book of some kind, you’ll want to really consider using common combinations for the title alone.

3) It still has to make a reader curious! What I found out with The Saint George Chronicles, was that readers in the US didn’t really know about the myth around St George. The title was mostly original, and had good SEO but it had poor reader capture, unless someone else talked about it.

Whenever I explained it, people got the idea of the book pretty well. Unfortunately, I can’t stand next to all the shelves that carry my books and explain it. The title and the cover need to do that heavy lifting. Also important is how the title looks on the spine of the book. Because those beautiful covers aren’t always going to be facing out for readers to see.

If there is any important thing I can impart to anyone coming along for the self-pub journey, it’s to make sure your title is as smashing and unique as possible. And if you’ve done everything possible to make a book you love, then it will find its readers.

Check out this vlog with Ubiquitous Tavern talking about titles.