Tips and Pitfalls regarding Titles and Summaries

At this point in my career as a fanfiction author, I think it's fair to say that I kick a bit of ass as far as coming up with titles and summaries to my stories. Since I've gotten no less than seven PMs from people over the past year or so asking me for advice about the subject, I decided that rather than type up this crap in a PM and then sending it out for one person to use, I could instead outline the general wisdom of such matters in a general document and let people just read it.

Regarding Titles...

Make it unique.

This should be fairly simple. People should not confuse your story with another story based on the title. When they hear the title to your story, they shouldn't have to ask themselves "Is that the Kitsune where Naruto crosses over with Ranma or the Kitsune where Naruto marries the Kyuubi?" For example... Go google the titles for any of my longer stories. With the exceptions of Echoes of the Past and An Unforeseen Consequence, my stories will show up in the first google page you get back even if you don't slap 'em in quotes, just because they're unique.

If you want to make your title unique...

• Make sure that there's between three and five words in the title. There are over one million stories on Fanfiction.net, each of which has a title. Although there are roughly 500,000 words in the English language, the average speaker probably only knows 15,000-25,000. More words means that you've got a much better chance of not using something someone else has already used.

• Use a thesaurus and swap a word or two for something less common. A lot of poorer authors have a terrible vocabulary and won't use them anyway

• Relate the title to your plot somehow. If it's about a character growing up, call the story Marching Through The Years. If it's about a backstabbing friend, call it Severed From Behind. Condense the story into five words or less and you've got your title.
  

Do not...

• Use or bastardize elements from the original title of the series. I want to hire a hitman to violently kill an author every time I see someone use either Ranma or ½ in a Ranma ½ story. No, being "cute" and using Nibunnoichi doesn't excuse you from this either. In fact, cut out anything from the original title if possible. This goes double for crossovers... Stapling the two story titles together (for example, Full Metal Alchemist ½ or Sailor Naruto) just shows a complete lack of interest, these days. Back when fanfiction was in it's infancy on the net, it was okay to do this sort of thing because there wasn't really many stories. Now... there's no excuse.

• Use a one English word for the title. Ever. Again, I point to the 25,000 word vocabulary of the average person, ask you to contrast it to the fact that some fandoms are reaching double that by themselves... Let alone the ones which are already a large multiple of that number. The odds are certainly against you, here.

• Use a single word from a foreign language for your title. This goes especially for the foreign language which the series originated from. People who don't speak a language will have picked up maybe a couple hundred or so words from another language, so these common words related to a series will tend to be repeated quite a bit: Odds are that people are going to have stumbled across the same word's meaning. For example, remember that Kitsune thing I mentioned above? There are nine Naruto stories with that exact title on fanfiction.net and 507 with the word somewhere in the title. Kyuubi is just as bad, for reference.

• Use a lot of foreign words. Gratuitous Japanese, I'm glaring at you. Look, the thing is, you're writing for an English audience. The title should not be a random bunch of letters in English which they happen to associate with your story, the title should be words they associate with your story. If you don't know the language, you're likely to do the same thing you laugh about on Engrish.com and if you do understand the language... You've still got a title nobody but you and a few other people can understand.

• Write a full sentence as the title. There's such a thing as too many words. If reducing your title to the first letter of each word still leaves it longer than your account password, you've got a problem.
  

Regarding Summaries...

You'll have 255 characters to summarize your story in a way which invites the casual browser to check out your story. This is not a lot of space. In fact, it's two or three sentences, which is really not enough to properly summarize your entire story... So you shouldn't even try. The "summary" is mislabelled anyway, since that's not what you want to put in the space alloted under the title. What you want to do is draw in potential readers, and you'll only do that by tweaking their interest.

It's pretty easy. Just outline the situation that the characters begin the story facing for the first sentence, then describe what's going to happen to them in the second sentence. The first sentence gives the reader a picture of when the story takes place and which character or characters the story focuses on, while the second sentence is the story's "hook", the part which tells the reader "now that you know where the story begins, here's the interesting situation the story is going to move towards."

Don't be afraid to include events from the end of the first chapter in your summary. It's better to "spoil" the stunning revelation that occurs at the beginning of chapter 2 and have a concise summary of what's going on in the story than it is to save the potential reader from a spoiler and have the summary be hopelessly vague.

More important than what you can do right in a summary are the many things you can put in which you should not. These include...

• Grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistakes. You've got 255 characters: That is, at most, eighty words to read through and edit. When you're trying to attract attention, making sure that you don't have any technical problems in the eye-catching sentences is key. After all, if you can't be bothered to edit eighty words for mistakes, how likely are you to be editing the thousands of words in the story? And if you can make a mistake or two in just eighty words, how many problems are we going to find in your actual story itself?

• Eventual Plot Points. Allude to the plot points. Maybe the main character is "attempting" to become the leader of his people or cure his curse, but don't outright tell us that he will. Don't tell us exactly who the hero will end up with, if that's the point of the story. One of the main reasons people read an interesting story is to find out what happens next. If you just tell them what's eventually going to happen, they'll lose interest.

• Confirming Pairings. Not even in the story itself. Look, label your story with the pairing system if you've got one and it's the focus of the story. It'll quickly become obvious anyway. But don't divulge every subplot. People will be asking questions about the story because they want to know. Don't just GIVE them the answers, make them wait until you've written the answers into the story. They'll hate you for making them wait, and love every minute of the anticipation when they get their questions answered.

• First Fanfiction warnings. We already can tell, if we take a look at your profile and see you've only got one story listed. This is an admission of your lack of confidence in the story, and if you, the person with the most invested in the story, aren't confident about its quality, what do you think we, the readers, are going to think when we see it? Don't admit it's your first story, ever... Even if it is.

• AU or OOC tags. If you've done your summary properly, we should know this already. And the OOC and AU tags invite people to skip the story, when half the time they're not even necessary. Don't sweat details like this too much.

• Questions. Specifically, any question which begins with "What If". Asking a "What If" question immediately prompts the reader to fill in the blank themselves, and they might be annoyed with your work because it doesn't conform to the vision you just put in their head. Any idea they come up with will probably sound better to them than yours, so it's best not to have that problem in the first place. Likewise avoid asking questions beginning with "Can" or "Will" for the same reason.
  

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