Titles carry more weight than they get credit for. A title decides whether somebody remembers a work well enough to recommend it, whether they can find it again a year later, and whether a search that should have reached it does. Those are three different requirements and a single evocative phrase usually satisfies only the first.

The tension is real rather than something to be solved by trying harder. Memorable titles tend to be short, odd and specific; searchable ones tend to be descriptive and use ordinary words. Understanding that they pull apart is the first step to handling both.

What makes a title memorable

Short, concrete, slightly unexpected, and connected to something specific in the work. Abstract adjectives fail because they are interchangeable, and long phrases fail because they get shortened by readers into something else, at which point you have lost control of the name entirely.

A memorable title also has to be pronounceable, since recommendation happens out loud more often than people assume. Anything that requires explaining how to say it loses a share of word-of-mouth, which is the cheapest distribution available to anybody.

What makes a title searchable

Ordinary words in ordinary order, describing what the thing actually is. This is close to the opposite of memorable, which is why a purely searchable title reads as generic and gets forgotten. It also risks colliding with other works using the same obvious description, which is its own discovery problem.

Uniqueness matters as much as vocabulary. A title that returns thousands of unrelated results is not searchable in any useful sense, even if every word in it is common, because being findable requires being distinguishable.

The subtitle solves it

The old publishing answer works: a short memorable title, a colon, and a plain descriptive subtitle. The first half does the remembering and the recommending, the second half does the matching and tells a stranger what the thing is. It costs nothing and it has been in use for centuries because it works.

In practice the subtitle can live in the description field rather than the title itself on platforms where long titles are awkward. The point is that both jobs get done somewhere in the text a reader or a search system encounters, which is the argument made in the piece on how readers actually search.

Series naming beats individual titles

For anybody producing a body of work, the series name matters more than any single title, because it is the thing readers remember and search for. Numbered or clearly patterned entries within a series then inherit its findability without needing to be individually clever.

This also solves the recommendation problem. Readers rarely remember the title of one chapter; they remember the series and go looking. A catalogue of individually brilliant unrelated titles is much harder for an audience to hold on to than a plain series name with consistent entries.

Consistency across a catalogue

Pick a naming pattern and keep it. Consistent patterns make a body of work legible as a body of work, help readers predict what a given entry is, and make an archive navigable years later, which is the practical concern raised in the piece on archiving your own work.

Inconsistency has a real cost that is easy to miss: it makes a catalogue look like a collection of unrelated experiments rather than an output, and it makes every individual work start from zero rather than benefiting from the last one.

Check the name is actually available before committing to it. A quick search for the exact phrase will tell you whether an established work, a band, a product or a very different kind of website already owns it, and discovering that after a series has run for two years is an expensive way to learn the lesson. The same check applies to whatever handle or account name will carry the work.

Choosing a title that does both jobs

The method: write the memorable half first, then write a plain sentence describing the work, then use that sentence as a subtitle or description. Check the memorable half is unique enough to search for and easy to say. Then apply the same pattern to everything else you publish.

Our own editorial approach to naming and describing work is set out in the principles page.