You are stressed out. You are looking for a book that provides you tips on how to deal with the situation. You find two books.
“For The Stressed And Overworked And Unprofessional Project Manager” and
“The Relaxed PM”.
Which title would you pick?
Content is the same.
The first title might even be an actual description of your current state of mind.
The positive, future oriented second title definitely has my preference.
Book titles matter. No matter how the actual story is, if the title puts people off, you don’t sell a thing.
Master marketer Seth Godin wrote a book called “All Marketers Are Liars”. In a recent version of the book, he changed the title and cover:
“The original cover seemed to be about lying and seemed to imply that my readers (marketers) were bad people. For people who bothered to read the book, they could see that this wasn’t true, but by the time they opened the cover, it was too late. A story was already told. I had failed.”
I once worked for a client who wasn’t used to projects. He perceived “risk” as a bad thing. A disaster. Something so negative, you don’t want to think about it. And I just keep hitting him with “risk reports” over and over again.
Create an email in which you write that “… if you read this sentence, you get a free lunch.” Put this part in the body of the text. Now write a highly controversial subject title for this mail, and press send. See if anyone gets beyond the title.
Do people read your mails any way? Or your reports? Or documents?
Just curious if you made it to the end of this post?
I’m also reading Seth, not so because of marketing tips but because of his originality. And I agree with you Bas, and at the same time question myself about the borders of manipulation…
Yes, I read the article to the end. Do I deserve a free lunch?
@Primoz: he is a great storyteller, that is for sure. Manipulation is when the intent is dubious I guess, but it can be a fine line between influence and manipulation.
@Ali: hahaha. uhm.. no
Yes, I’ve made it to the end of the post, but pretty often I don’t.
We live in world of limited attention span. You have to trigger me to start reading the article or post with the title or I just pass it. You have to drag my attention with first couple of sentences or I walk away to the next item in my rss reader. Then, you have to keep my attention every few sentences or I stop reading in the middle.
It works the same with books as it works with blogs. I see similar patterns with emails and all other stuff we’re supposed to read.
So yes, the title does matter but only to the point where it gets the reader to reach another base which is first paragraph or foreword or whatever beginning you’ve chosen. Then, it isn’t important anymore.
This post has drawn my attention. I’ve read it to the end. I wanted to comment it. I kept in my mind the message you’ve shared which I’ve wanted to discuss. But by the time I started writing the comment I couldn’t tell what the title of the post was. By that time it didn’t matter. What mattered was you message.