I loveeee making book titles. Having a banger book title is SO satisfying and ties the book together perfectly…if done right. If you have a plot or an idea for a story, but are struggling with finding the right title for it, here’s my tips and suggestions:
A story title is very different from a name of a song, band or album. The difference is that titles in music are not BASED on storytelling. You want to avoid your book title sounding like a song title.
Let’s take ”Moonlight Deluxe” as an example; it could work great in music, but it’s superficial and heavily lacking storytelling as a title for a book. What the reader would understand from it is just something about moonlight in a lavish way. It doesn’t TELL a story, and that’s your goal.
Although, you could work with it. You could GIVE ”Moonlight Deluxe” more meaning by CONNECTING it to your story. For example, it could play as a name of a cassette tape or a video game that is important for your story. You wouldn’t NEED to add such meaning in music. So think about the meaning of your story, and place that as the title. Boom, meaningful story.
But to give your title even more meaning, I really recommend using metaphors. Something I personally LOVE doing
I can show my own novel series that I’m currently writing called ”Wildfruit” It is PACKED with metaphors and could hopefully inspire!
The title ”Wildfruit” is the name of a poem a dead brother of his protagonist sister wrote about her. The story obviously tells about the sister and the absence of her brother. Boom, it’s a connection: (title=poem)—story.
But the title also plays as the biggest metaphor that sticks through the whole series. And it’s born in the poem: The little sisters name is Cherry, fruit is symbolic to her name, and ”wild” tells for HOW the whole story plays out: Cherry ”goes wild”
A metaphorical comparison is to a wildflower, instead of flower it’s fruit=Cherry. It personalises to the story, which also is important.
That’s a little bit about my novel. I could post the poem in some poetry forum or in my blog sometime, lmk if you’d want to see it soon
It’ll be published here anyway! Metaphors create big depth to your story a shallow ”Midnight Deluxe” needs. I could write on and on about everything about metaphors and how you can include in your writing, examples on how it’s been done before, metaphors ideas, etc, etc.
Check my blog & lmk if you’d like to see that in the future, and I might see you soon
Hope this helped!!