Hey writers, my name is Brittany Wing. I'm an author of an upcoming YA Theory Fantasy series, and today we're talking about how to title your book. Personally, I've been struggling with what to call my own work in progress, which has been Project Theory Fantasy, which is just a placeholder. But I've learned a ton in my research about how to go about creating a bunch of different ideas for the title of my book. I'm still in the process of picking one, but I wanted to share my findings with you because I think if you follow these tips, you will come up with a plethora of ideas that you can pick from. So the first thing I did, and I definitely suggest that you do, is create in brainstorm a list of key words that represent your book and what it's about. This should include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that all sort of revolve around your genre, the tone, the mood, and the themes of your book. This can be characters, places, events, key items, and terms that are unique to your story, and of course, symbols. The next step is to get inspired. Go ahead on Goodreads and Amazon and Google and search book titles in your genre because you want to make sure that your book title, whatever you come up with, sort of fits within your genre and will be relatable and appealing to your target audience. At the same time, you want to do this because you want to make sure whatever book title you end up with isn't too similar to any book especially in your genre because you want it to stand out. We'll talk more about this in just a second, but your next step is to come up with at least 10 book title ideas using these title combinations and title tips. Let's start with title combinations. What do I mean by that? Well, I want you to take the list that you made in step one and start taking some of the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and mix them around along with some filler words, like the, these, a, and of, in, on, beside, near, and and see what you come up with. To help you out, I've sort of created a list of madlib titles that have placeholders for all those terms you came up with, and you can just insert the terms you came up with in your list and see if any of these title combinations work for you. For each example, I've also included some popular book titles that already exist that use these combinations. So let's see how they work and which one will work for you. The first is you could take an adjective, an noun, or a plural noun, like red queen, crooked kingdom, twisted fate. You could also add an article at the beginning like the young elites, the croprants, these rebel waves. Then there are a bunch of combinations just with nouns, so we have noun noun like warstorm or the raven boys, or you could even create a new word combining two nouns like theory, born, or seafire. Another is you could have a possessive noun with a noun following like Evelyn's number, or you could put some filler words in between two nouns, so noun of noun, like thrown of glass, six of crows, and enchantment of roses, the chronicles of Narnia. Or you could do noun of the noun like fellowship of the ring. Another is noun and noun, so of my son men, or pride and prejudice, noun in the noun like embers in the ashes or sky in the deep, and of course there's always the slightly longer noun of noun and noun like children of blood and bone, or a court of thorns and roses. Then there's a few combinations I found that have a noun and a verb, or an adverb in a verb, so you could do noun and an active verb like red rising, or an active verb and a noun like the rising darkness. You could do a noun and then a verb that sort of acts like a noun like the ship sinkers, or you could do an adverb and a verb like brightly burning. There's also a few titles I found that began with I am and then a noun, so I am mercy or I am legend, and another one I found was starting with a word when and then having some kind of event in your book. So an example of that is when stars burn out. Now if you're someone who doesn't like to be too formulaic, I do have a bunch of other tips for you, so here we go. You could have your novel named after a key character in your book like Cinder or Harry Potter. You could have the book named after a description or the title of your character, so like the Savior's Champion, the Time Traveler's wife, keeper, the girl from everywhere, or the maize runner. You could also take unique words or key objects in your book and make that the title, so some examples are Graceling, Mockingjay, Three Dark Crowns, or you could pick a place or location that is important to your book or a description of it like City of Bones, a thousand leagues under the sea, or Treasure Island. Also don't forget major events in your book like the Hunger Games or even a time of day or a time span like Twilight. You could also simply pick a theme or a word or phrase that captures the tone of your book, so examples of that would be divergent or she's not here, or you could even go through your book and find key phrases or pieces of dialogue. So like children of Blood and Bone is actually a phrase in that book, or you could even pick a phrase from a totally different book that has connection to your book. So I know a friend of mine, Vee Renee, named her book Civil Blood because it is a phrase in one of Shakespeare's books, or you could even do a twist on someone else's book title like To Kill a Kingdom is sort of a variation of To Kill a Mockingbird. And here's a bonus tip. If you're struggling, especially with coming up with a phrase from your book or key things that really stick out from your book that have to do with your theme, if you have critique partners and beta readers that are reading through your book before it's published, a great question to ask them at the beginning is, hey, if you come across a word or a character or a phrase or a piece of dialogue that really sticks out to you that you feel really encapsulates my book, please highlight it and send it to me because I'm still trying to figure out what to title this book. All right, now you're ready for step four, which is elimination. You want to take that list of at least 10 book titles and you want to eliminate the ones that are the weakest so that the strongest title sort of rise to the service. And to do that, here are some questions to ask yourself to help you with the elimination process. First, ask yourself, is there a book with this exact title or one that is super similar? So again, go to Google, Amazon, Goodreads, and you want to make sure that there are no books, especially in your genre or bestsellers that have a title too similar to yours. When your book is published and people are searching for it online, you want it to rise to the top of the search engines. So you want to make sure you're not coming up against a bunch of competition when you pick your book title. Some other questions to ask are, does it capture the mood or the tone of my book? Is it memorable? Is it easy to say and spell? And is it pleasing to the ear? For example, you could play around with alliteration or other literary devices to help you out. Then after you've gone through your own elimination process, you want to narrow down even more with step five, which is getting feedback from your target audience. If you want to be really bold, you could take a few of your favorites and put a poll out on social media. But if you want to keep it to a bit smaller of a group, you could use newsletter subscribers or your beta readers or critique partners as the first line of defense before putting it out for the world to see. The last step and thing you want to ask yourself before you pick your title is, is this a part of a series? Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail here. I might do a whole another video on coming up with titles for a series. But basically, if you're writing a series and you're trying to decide on the title for book one, you may want to plot out the titles for all the books in the series. So you can make sure that they all cohesively go together. And when people see those books, your readers will recognize that they are a part of that series. So you might want to use similar title combinations like we talked about before, but just switching up words or at least making sure that the titles build on each other or relate to each other in some way. If you guys found this helpful, I'm actually giving you a free worksheet with all of my title combinations and different tips. So if you'd like to get that, you can sign up for my newsletter and the link is down below for that. And if you enjoyed this video and you would like to see more readily content, come into your subscription box. Definitely make sure to like this video and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Also, if you didn't know already, my friend and fellow author Bethany Autosada and I are outlining a novel live with you guys for the next 10 weeks using the Save the Cat Rights and Novel method. We are doing this again live on our YouTube channels every Monday until like the beginning of May. And as we are outlining our own book with your feedback using this method, you also get to outline your novel at the same time and get inspired and meet a bunch of fun writers at the same time. This is great, especially for any of you that are planning to do Camp Nano that's coming up very soon. And we also announced some really exciting news at our last live stream that we are having the author of this book, Jessica Brody, join us for a Q&A on May 1st here on my channel. So if you aren't already involved in that, I have all the information down below so you can get involved. Anyway guys, good luck titling your novel. If you end up using these tips to title your novel and you end up loving it, definitely put that title in the description below. I would love to know that. And when I finally pick the title for my working progress, you guys will definitely be the first to know. Hope you guys are having a great day and until next week's video, happy writing.