/lit/ - Literature

>>22805451
what the FUCK is that thing?
i HATE it

>>22806162
average uncircumcised dick. they’re pretty disgusting i agree

>>22806162
>what the FUCK is that thing?
Smug.

>>22806162
Tapir

>>22806162
Pige

>>22805451
>>22806516
Newfags don't even KNOW pige

In the SEO optimized world I think mononyms are a double edged sword. If anything is named the same as it you may be stuck in a poor search crisis. They can be hard as shit to write as well, and so your work can generally be for nothing if you can't find an appropriate mononym. Extremely calibrated two word titles generally work well, but have to be tested against existing titles (similar or the exact same) to ensure discoverability. They are a little easier to write but have good uniqueness, given the number of combinations of 2 words that exist. "The X" or the many titles like "Noun of Noun" are my least favorite because there are so many of them. But they are the easiest to make up because you have a lot of word flexibility.

I think the important thing when picking a title is one that when paired with your author name is ALWAYS discoverable through search engines, and when not paired with your name but maybe with "book" or "novel" stands out from other similar or same titles.

>>22805451

>What makes a good title?

I've wondered about this too. Everyone knows a good title when he hears one but the rules governing them aren't obvious. A few random thoughts:


A title needs a certain amount of 'strangeness'. (But not too much.) In a book, the title is typically wrtten in a bigger font than the body of the work, and the title itself has to have that same quality of being not quite common-or-garden prose. That's why proper nouns (character names, etc) are good, and better if the name is a bit unusual:

Lorna Doone
Moby Dick
Don Quixote

They're not total weirdness. (We know what part of speech a name is; we know how to fit it into a sentence. It's not just a random collection of letters.) But they are a bit weird.

That's why made-up words can work, although the key then is not to be too weird:

The Hobbit [a made-up word, but also sounds very comfy and down-to-earth]
The Silmarillion [not so down-to-earth, but it sounds awesome]

Notice that the "The" gives a certain framework of normality. If you just said

Silmarillion

it would be too weird because we wouldn't know if it was a noun or what.


If a title is a mundane phrase, the danger is the other way — that it will be too mundane. So it has to have some resonance; we have to know there's more to it than meets the eye, e.g.:

A Clean Well-Lighted Place
The Thirty-Nine Steps
etc

There are some templates which automatically get you into this sweet spot of normal + strange.

e.g. THE SOMETHING OF (THE) SOMETHING:

The Silence of the Lambs
The Day of the Jackal
The Snows Of Kilimanjaro
etc

Quotations can work similarly because we get the resonance from the original use of the phrase:

Darkness Visible
The Wings of the Dove
etc


The normal rules governing rhetoric also apply to titles. So a bit of alliteration, assonance, etc can work a treat:

The War of the Worlds
The Maltese Falcon [repeated "al"]
etc


In general it's harder to be serious / tragic with a really long title. Most films with really long titles are madcap comedies ("The Incredibly Strange Beings Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies", etc). Science Fiction is one genre that (somewhat) gets away with long titles for serious(ish) novels. I think that's because it doesn't take itself so seriously (or pretends not to). PKD has quite a few longish titles:

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
etc


Also, good titles for novels and good titles for short stories are very different. It's easier to get away with a long / chatty / wacky title for a short story:

Everything That Rises Must Converge
The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber

are great short story titles but wouldn't work as well for novels.

>>22805451
>>22806725
I would add that the a word title is more memorable if it is a name of some thing important for the novel and not a direct way of conveying the theme.

>>22806516
based

>>22806386
cringe

>>22806684
>>22806725

These are really great inputs

>when the characters in the book say the book's title
fucking Dostoevsky. when Raskolnikov, lamenting near the end says "Truly, this has been my crime and punishment." really took me out of the book. what a hack!

>>22806370
compelling analysis

>>22806162
You sound like a cat person.

The best titling convention is stealing a title from a traditional folk song

>>22805451
>>22806725
does anyone else remember the 2010s period when every mass-market novel was titled some shit like
>The Assmuncher's Cousin
>The Balloonist's Brother
>The Sniper's Wife
and every literary fiction novel was titled some shit like
>The Tiny Things We Know To Be Small
it was fucking intolerable.

anyway IMO a good title should not only convey something of the book's essence, but it should also highlight its central themes; bonus points if the title's able to point towards multiple themes at once. a title is like a red circle -- it tells the reader that this, here, this thing, is what they should pay attention to in the work.

however I've always really enjoyed the dead simple titles like
>30 Poems
>7 Stories
that just tell you the genre and the amount of stories/poems/essays in the book. I'd like those to make a resurgence.