Your essential ‘how-to’ guide to choosing book titles

Academic book titles often appear to be chosen by their authors without any thought to their interpretation by internet readers scanning through long lists of potentially relevant entries. Both completely formal or vacuous titles are prevalent in STEM disciplines and the ‘hard’ social sciences. And in the ‘soft’ social sciences and humanities, authors often seem to choose deliberately obscure, idiosyncratic or even actively mis-directing titles in order to make a particular intellectual impression. Here we present a simple ‘how-to’ guide to choosing a book title.