The subtleties of subtitles, or: how not to blow your wad with new readers
No pressure, but if you're not a household name, subtitles are kinda-sorta super important.
“Do we really have to obsess this much over the subtitle?”
“Who even reads subtitles?”
“Can we just make it ‘essays’?”
“Can we just make it ‘a memoir’?”
“Can we just make it nothing?”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard authors grump about this during the editorial development process.
And I am right there with them! Because subtitles suck.
No, really: they suck. They are for the most part mindbogglingly annoying to write. Every time I set out to help an author with one, I wonder anew whether we might get away with just…not.
Subtitles are the Colin Robinson of the epitext: drab, literal-minded, soul-sucking. Were they active on Twitter, they would spend all day replying to other people’s jokes with explanations of the joke. Of course fun people—sparkly people—hate subtitles. Of course we’d rather not yuck our yum by engaging with them at all.
Alas, however, we have to. Or at least most of us ought to.
Is *your* subtitle going to make a huge difference in your book’s commercial prospects?
I can’t tell you.
I’ve written before that in commercial book publishing, success functions like a gut microbiome. Outputs spring forth from an unquantifiably complex system of contributive factors. Each individual system contains elements that are common across populations, yet each is as distinct as a fingerprint.
In systems this complex and chaotic, no single factor can ever be make-or-break—let alone any single factor a human being can control. The best any of us can do is eat lots of fiber and take the odd probiotic, metaphorically speaking.
Here’s what I *do* know: at least for nonfiction—we’ll get into fiction toward the end of the letter—subtitles are one of the most effective, least expensive probiotics you can take. Pretty much every author benefits at least a little from a good one. And although I have no scientific data on this, I suspect a majority benefit significantly: selling many more copies; getting vs. not getting a book deal with a major publisher; getting vs. not getting pickup from key retailers.
Above all else, subtitles are free marketing. FREE.
FREE!
Boring though they may be, good subtitles do a number of tremendously helpful things for a book:
They show editors, readers, and B2B types what’s actually inside the cover.
Like a comely ankle flashed beneath a petticoat and ample bosom, they reassure would-be buyers: yes, I can deliver what you desire; I am worth it from head to toe.
They introduce your voice and vision to people who’ve never heard of you.
They boost your book’s SEO (by making it more likely to show up in internet searches for your topic) and discoverability (by generally signaling “I’m of interest” to anyone in your target audience, on or offline)
Most important: they help YOU. (More on that shortly.)
For all of those reasons:
Please think a lot about your subtitle.
As an agent, I beg of you: please don’t throw the free probiotic away. Please. Write yourself a good subtitle.
I hope this newsletter will help you do that, or at least get started.