Your Headline Needs to Tell a Story

And so do your book titles

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

You’ve read thousands of articles on the importance of getting your headlines just right. Book titles are just as important — a catchy title could be the difference between a bestseller and a flop.

Some of my best articles have the worst headlines and went nowhere, and a mediocre book I wrote in 2013 is a Platinum Bestseller, likely because the title is intriguing. If you’re looking to publish a book or write articles online, you need to master the art of writing great headlines.

What’s in a name

Everything has a name. If something doesn’t, we give it one. A single word can act as a mnemonic device for dozens of things. You need those mnemonic devices to remember details about a subject.

Here’s the cool thing: If you string words together in specific ways, you can access the memories of readers and funnel them into thinking a certain way, usually by leaving the thought unfinished, like when you lead toward an answer in such a way that a reader believes they came to the conclusion all on their own. Such tricks are essential to persuasive writing.

Names work the same way, except they are far more encompassing. If I asked you who Harry Potter is, you immediately get an entire encyclopedia worth of…