Short or Long Titles?

[ThisAdamGuy]

I've always thought that a good title was something short but memorable, like Henry Rider: Clown Hunter. But it seems like the most popular stories (or at least webfictions) have really long light novel-style names like I am the Chosen Hero in a Game with No Respawns or Immortal Paladin: A Warrior Trapped in the Demon Lord's Nightmare. Are readers more inclined to check out books with those kinds of titles? When I eventually publish it would Road to Olyssiem get more attention if I named it something like Olyssiem: The Outcast Artificer Fights to Ascend to Godhood?

 

[RepresentingDesire]

I think it should be memorable, but the length doesn't really matter to me personally, Genocide Online Playtime Diary of a evil young girl is as memorable as Genocide Online. But I know only the latter by heart.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

I like short titles, but long ones are also ok as long as they are not stupidly long. Do readers perefer those stupidly long ones? I'm not sure.

 

[Tyranomaster]

Within the webnovel meta, your title is essentially the shortest possible synopsis for your story. People see the following on most webnovel websites: Cover Art -> Title -> (Sometimes a brief description). So you need to make people interested with the title. If you're in certain genres, you've gotta fit like 6 words in so that readers in that genre can distinguish it from other, similar stories.

I wrote this thread awhile ago, but the first three points in "The Bait" are about exactly these three things.

 

[BearlyAlive]

Do you want a catchy title or do you want the description of your novel to be seen as early as possible?

 

[Deleted member 84247]

My titles aren't long, and I get many readers. Mostly it's the genre and tags that make people read.

 

[Corty]

Short title ftw.

Long titles make me think of something that is sub-par and that it's something that tries too hard to bring in readers without much faith in the work from the get-go. I don't have faith in a work whose author can't make up a proper title for his work and needs to put the whole premise into it.

 

[TheKillingAlice]

I would say it's the short title for me, but I also have some longer titles in the mix by now. I believe it depends on the story.
In your case, the shorter one sounds a lot more slick. The longer one is very specific and may get people to click because the title tells them in detail what they are gonna get. You can never underestimate the power of laziness.

 

[Tyranomaster]

My titles aren't long, and I get many readers. Mostly it's the genre and tags that make people read.

Short title ftw.

Long titles make me think of something that is sub-par and that it's something that tries too hard to bring in readers without much faith in the work from the get-go. I don't have faith in a work whose author can't make up a proper title for his work and needs to put the whole premise into it.

We should strive for it to be as short as possible. Some genres though, you gotta fit a lot in there to make it attractive. I think I recommended 8 words at the upper end. Many genres don't need many words, but damn, when you look at stories that are three different genres deep... Imagine a xianxia with an odd cultivation method, fated villainess, and vampire story. Gonna be a long title to slog through for that one.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I like titles that kind of stand out, even if they don't tell you anything about the story.
Not sure about here, but I know on some other sites that a lot of the longer titles are translations (sometimes two or three characters in an Asian language winds up being a paragraph in English it seems), and many others seem to be attempts to emulate those translations.
As for a preference ... I like shortER titles. Not essentially SHORT ones, like one word or something but something "pithy," typically one to three words - and if I need more in it, I'll go for a subtitle

 

[Deleted member 84247]

Some long titles are interesting.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Some long titles are interesting.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

Ah but what you have there is a simple Title (Accessory to War) and a kind of cool but lengthy subtitle (The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military")...

 

[LoneQuack]

Brother, you forgot the prologue with that second title. If I don't know the name of the mc, the name of the setting, the name of the genre, and a general idea of the entire novel its a big no no. Back to the drawing board and next time make sure to put the entire story as the tittle don't half-ass it.

 

[DJ_Rhaposdy]

I've always thought that a good title was something short but memorable, like Henry Rider: Clown Hunter. But it seems like the most popular stories (or at least webfictions) have really long light novel-style names like I am the Chosen Hero in a Game with No Respawns or Immortal Paladin: A Warrior Trapped in the Demon Lord's Nightmare. Are readers more inclined to check out books with those kinds of titles? When I eventually publish it would Road to Olyssiem get more attention if I named it something like Olyssiem: The Outcast Artificer Fights to Ascend to Godhood?

I prefer short titles, but my comedy adventure story has a ludicrously long title as a joke. I'll probably change it later, but only to make it longer.

 

[packbat]

We're currently working on a story with one of those long summarize-the-concept titles, and we pretty quickly found ourselves using a truncated version of the title to refer to it. I think that's the big disadvantage of the longer titles: "Non-Player Character" (a novel we read a few times and enjoyed but it's been some months) is a lot easier to remember than "The Harem Protagonist Something Something Girl Something Doesn't Want To Turn Back" (a webfiction we are literally currently rereading).

*checks* "The Harem Protagonist Was Turned Into A Girl!! And Doesn’t Want To Change Back!!!??", okay.

...artistically, I think the kind of title you write is a genre thing. "Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy novel. The harem protagonist one is a web light novel. "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" is a comic travel story. "The Shipping News" is lit fic. "Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer" is a college thermodynamics textbook. "Home By Now" is a MUNA song. Different communities have different traditions when it comes to title-writing, and I think you're kinda just trying to find something that fits both your story and your genre.

As far as Scribble Hub goes, if we can't see the summary we're looking at the genre tags mostly, and if we can see the summary we're looking at the summary mostly.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I prefer short titles, but my comedy adventure story has a ludicrously long title as a joke. I'll probably change it later, but only to make it longer.

Eh, you can get away with wilder titles for comedy. Two of the older Star Trek novels, by the same author IIRC (I think John Ford but it's been a while since I saw my copies), were the super-serious Faces of Fire (one of the coolest takes on Klingons before the mid-point of TNG) and the way-too-silly-for-words (I mean it's a prose MUSICAL comedy set loosely in the Star Trek universe) How Much for Just the Planet?

 

[Deleted member 84247]

This reminded me of this.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

This reminded me of this.

Does that translate to "John Jacob Jingleheimer Shmidt"?

 

[LoneQuack]

This reminded me of this.

Is there a dub for this? Or does it fail to capture the sheer comedic value of the sub?

 

[fayethemouse]

according to a random twitter post i saw it's because web/light novel sites dont/didnt have summary fields so they put the plot summary in the title, and then it became a trope to do so

also in that twitter post they said more traditional titles sell better overall but essentially the "lets put the entire summary in the title" titles had a higher floor on sales.

unsourced tweet source