12 May Q&A of the month: How important is your book’s sub-title?
It’s important!
These days the metadata of any book must really work for you. Metadata means the title, subtitle, blurb, short author bio on the back of the book, key words — anything that will be used as a way for people to find you or the topic of the book on Google or Amazon.
People often think that Amazon is a book store. It’s not. It’s a mega search engine and the way your book gets found is through key words and SEO (search engine optimisation) among other things.
So, think about your prospective reader. What might they search for? I crowd-sourced the title of the memoir I’ve been working on with my Mum on my author Facebook page. In the end we went for the popular favourite, A Baboon in the Bedroom, then we added a very long sub-title: Across Africa in a Land Rover called Stan.
In this case ‘Africa’ and ‘Land Rover’ are key words that people interested in travel / Africa / driving might search for and Stan is simply a quirky character of the story.