Book subtitles are getting longer because of SEO

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-subtitles-are-getting-ridiculously-long-what-is-going-on/2019/06/04/3150bcc8-86c3-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

by neonate • 7 years ago

144 79 7 years ago

washingtonpost.com

gdcohen• 7 years ago

So true. And interesting that the title of the actual article is also very long, "Book subtitles are getting ridiculously long. What is going on?".

tracker12• 7 years ago

New book idea...

SEO: Search Engine Optimization to expand markets both online and offline in the face of competition and substance

tracker12• 7 years ago

Song Title: Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand

TheSoftwareGuy• 7 years ago

I've noticed this for a lot of web pages too. It seems a lot of search engines put a disproportionate amount of weight on keywords that are found in titles/headings as opposed to text bodies

AznHisoka• 7 years ago

Youtube video titles as well. Especially kids video where they stuff a bunch of kid-related words in it like 'Play Doh Elsa Johnny Johnny Yes Papa Masha Bear ABC'

aeharding3• 7 years ago

SEO is making all titles/descriptions be less creative and use more targeted keywords.

For example, Skydiving dropzones. Some in Wisconsin:

  1. Skyknights -> Skydive Milwaukee
  2. AtmosphAIR -> Wisconsin Skydiving Center
  3. Green Bay Skydivers -> Skydive Freefall Adventure

jetrink• 7 years ago

Back when people used phone books instead of search engines, businesses would choose names that would be listed first alphabetically[1]. Even now, there are three unrelated AAA Plumbing businesses within 10 miles of me.

1. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-11-08-920411...

Jarred• 7 years ago

My dad's small business construction company was called "AA1 Construction" because he wanted it to be the first in the phone book.

SerLava4• 7 years ago

That last one seems to be going the other way.

aeharding3• 7 years ago

It could be, but keep in mind Skydive Freefall Adventure is trying to capture a lot of northeastern Wisconsin, not just Green Bay.

illvm• 7 years ago

Is number 3 backwards?

aeharding3• 7 years ago

No, Skydive Freefall Adventure is a brand new reincarnation of Green Bay Skydivers.

chrisseaton3• 7 years ago

Seems like a good thing, doesn't it? More straightforward, plain speaking language.

fastball3• 7 years ago

You want the world to be more straightforward and less creative?

Huh.

MisterBastahrd• 7 years ago

Maybe, but it also is forcing a lot of editors to use article titles that actually make sense. There are plenty of editors, especially in the magazine business, who use silly, non-descriptive title to their articles because if you're holding the physical magazine, then they've likely already captured your money. Many magazines have featured a table of contents with the ridiculous title in bold, followed by a subtitle that actually tells you what the article is about underneath.

781• 7 years ago

SEO is one reason, but the reduced attention span of today's people surely is another. People just won't bother figuring out what a "mystery title" book is about.

SerLava4• 7 years ago

I don't like the idea of attention span in the context of media consumption. It presupposes that the producer has some kind of right to everyone else's attention just because they made something. If you're not going to help filter yourself out from people who won't be interested in you, it will be and should be an automatic no.

inetknght• 7 years ago

I don't like the idea of attention span in the context of media consumption.

You not liking it doesn't make it any less of a fact...

marvy3• 7 years ago

so you're saying you approve of the longer titles?

icebraining• 7 years ago

Seems like a return to book titles of the past, which often were a short summary of the whole book: https://evareadsbooks.wordpress.com/tag/really-long-old-book...

WorldMaker• 7 years ago

I do find it amusing for its retro sensibility from the times when it was easier to typeset additional words on a thing than images or illustrations.

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

I love them:

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships

Or another all time classic:

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Iſland on the Coaſt of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been caſt on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men periſhed but himſelf. With An Account how he was at laſt as ſtrangely deliver'd by Pirates.

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

I'm forry about the long-f there, but the title doefn't look right without it.

coding123• 7 years ago

Soon author pen names will look like this: Stevenking Shining

ryandrake• 7 years ago

Same with mobile app titles. Back when I wrote iOS apps, our marketer/growth hacker advocated changing the app name to a ridiculously long string of keywords. I thought it was the stupidest idea ever but we did it and it had an immediate and sustained positive effect on our app’s AppStore ranking. Turns out I was the stupid one.

falcolas• 7 years ago

They have a ways to go, if they want to compete with some of the Japanese Light Novel titles.

I Came to Another World as a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None to Journey while Relying on Quickness

There was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party so I tried Confessing

or the rather tame

Didn't I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?

It's kind of interesting to see what is done to make titles stand out in an age where anyone can write a novel on the web (or publish a book on Amazon).

hnaccy• 7 years ago

I like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn_as_a_Vending_Machine,_I...

pixelbath• 7 years ago

These isekai novel titles have long since gone past the point of ridicule, and that stands even if you limit the selection to translated versions. I do wonder if this is a byproduct of SEO, or simply differentiation between products.

TheAceOfHearts• 7 years ago

I was about to say the same thing. Some light novel titles are literally a long description. These are two of the longer titles:

* (I've Already Saved This World and Taken Its Wealth and Power and I Live Happily in a Castle with a Female Knight and Demon Queen, So To All Other Heroes) Stay Out of This Fantasy World.

* Sew It Up! Take It Off? Change!! My Girlfriend Failed Her High School Debut and Became a Hikikomori, So I Decided to Coordinate Her Youth (Fashion)

You also see the same trend with some manga titles:

* I'm a Middle-Aged Man Who Got My Adventurer License Revoked, But I'm Enjoying a Carefree Lifestyle Because I Have an Adorable Daughter Now

* A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman

Indie publishing has also made high quality cover art much more important. I don't know about other people, but I regularly judge books based on their cover. There was a book in my recommendations list which I skipped for years just because I thought one of the guys on the cover looked like an asshole. Ended up enjoying it and regretting that I waited so long to pick it up. This isn't always the case, but more often than not, low quality cover art means poor writing as well.

ajmurmann• 7 years ago

That explains how we got this video game title: "Summer-Colored High School Adolescent Record – A Summer At School On An Island Where I Contemplate How The First Day After I Transferred, I Ran Into A Childhood Friend And Was Forced To Join The Journalism Club Where While My Days As A Paparazzi Kid With Great Scoops Made Me Rather Popular Among The Girls, But Strangely My Camera Is Full Of Panty Shots, And Where My Candid Romance Is Going. –"

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

I regularly judge books based on their cover

I do, too. I've noticed something interesting. Fantasy book covers use a different style of art than scifi covers. You can reliably pick out from a distance which are fantasy and which are scifi.

itronitron3• 7 years ago

How do they title their Haiku?

asutekku• 7 years ago

Slightly unrelated but “A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman” is a really wholesome manga. I urge everyone to read who has even slight interest into fantasy settings.

fastball3• 7 years ago

Vaguely reminds me of the work of Chuck Tingle[0].

0: https://www.chucktingle.com/ebook.html

klyrs• 7 years ago

Sudden urge to make an AMSR recording, just reading that list.

Kuiper• 7 years ago

Japanese 21st century light novel titles have a long way to go if they want to catch up with 18th century book titles, like 12 Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana (now shortened to 12 Years a Slave), and The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates (commonly abbreviated to Robinson Crusoe)

While search engines didn't exist back then, books of that era had these kinds of titles for similar reasons: they were a way of turning the book's cover into a piece of marketing. Books with long titles could explain their appeal to shoppers without requiring them to pick up the book and open it.

Interestingly, one of the things that may have led to titles getting shorter in the 19th century may be the advent of serialized fiction: as printing technology became more widely available, many famous stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the early works of Charles Dickens were published chapter-by-chapter in weekly publications (quite similar to how manga are published in weekly magazines like Shounen Jump), and if you had an extra-long title that took up half a page every week, it would add to the printing cost in a non-trivial way.

nacs• 7 years ago

Article without ad/paywall: https://outline.com/XS9Yqt

whatrocks• 7 years ago

My favorite college professor was onto this way back in 1988 with the subtitle to his great book `Another Sort of Learning`

`Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire an Education While Still in College Or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found`

https://www.amazon.com/Another-Sort-Learning-James-Schall/dp...

ilamont• 7 years ago

Another trend: Titles are getting shorter. Publishers use larger title text, clearer images, and more colorful/contrasted covers so they stand out at thumbnail scale.

JoeSmithson• 7 years ago

This is seems to be true of apps names as well. For example, to pick a few random examples;

- Spotify's actual name on Google Play is "Spotify: Discover music, podcasts, and playlists" (so catchy!)

- SoundHound's actual name is "SoundHound - Music Discovery & Hands-Free Player"

Rather than fixing whatever search behaviour incentivised this, Google seem to have just joined in;

- Google Maps is actually called "Maps - Navigate & Explore"

- Google Keep is actually called "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"

When I got a new phone recently I actually found it really confusing and had to check I wasn't installing phishing apps by mistake.

Thankfully Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently named with their actual names!

leppr• 7 years ago

The app store UIs could just differentiate between the canonical name and a short tag line. Right now tweaking the title is the only way to add a description to the search result list.

kalleboo• 7 years ago

The iOS App Store tries to do this since a version or two ago.

Apps still stick a bunch of junk in their names though. Partially because there are app name squatters, and one way to get around an app name being taken is to add stuff to it. Partially due to SEO myths.

Stickycover• 7 years ago

As mentioned, the app stores' UI could definitely help in getting rid of the dirty phishing app feeling. I do believe though that the enlongated names in this scenario is probably to help newbies to find a new app that they didn't know of. Slightly different from the enlogated book substitles scenario as the books are competing on Google's entire database of books, linkes, articles, etc. versus the apps are mostly only competing with other apps on their app stores.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

Tangentially related... the most memorable answer/blurb I've heard to the question "what do you sell?" came from a Coca-Cola executive in an interview with Charlie Rose (I forget which one, so citation needed). The exec said "we sell ready-to-drink, non-alcoholic beverages". I've never heard a marketing pitch that told me more about what a company does than that blurb, and I use that as my benchmark for whether a blurb I am crafting describes what I am trying to pitch.

OriginalPenguin2• 7 years ago

I think it can be simplified even more: "we sell non-alcoholic beverages".

Especially because they own Minute Maid, and Minute Maid concentrated orange juice is still a thing.

In fact Minute Maid's very name alludes to it not being ready-to-drink.

qwerty456127• 7 years ago

Why the heck would Google itself need this kind of SEO junk?

Why not just let people search by app (and book) description text (does it really not work this way already?)?

notatoad• 7 years ago

Google needs that kind of SEO junk as much as anybody else who publishes in the play store, because somehow depsite google's general excellence at search the search function in the play store is still garbage.

OriginalPenguin2• 7 years ago

Google has to be careful giving too much favoritism to their own products, because it invites regulation for abusing their monopoly.

So it's often better to just play the same SEO games for their own products that everyone else has to play.

geofft• 7 years ago

On iOS, the app is named "Google Maps - Transit & Food." Food!

Fortunately the App Store name can be different from the app name once installed, which remains "Google Maps."

Funes-• 7 years ago

Thankfully Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently named with their actual names!

I have some ideas for them:

"Twitter - Whining & Doxxing"

"Facebook - Data mining & Old People"

"YouTube - Clickbait & Drama"

gcb0• 7 years ago

"...and lack of reviews".

If they had reviews (reason we had affiliate code) organic search would work just fine.

Instead we give google the affiliate cut, in exchange of the privilege of tweaking our content to their search.

d-d• 7 years ago

If you're fascinated by the unintended consequences of technology it might be worth picking up a copy of "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan. This hacking of book subtitles is a great example of what I like to call the "McLuhan Effect", but honestly I just can't remember the proper term for it.

tartinipaolo• 7 years ago

This "trend" seems just so sad to me, but the truth is, the title sells. Unfortunately that means changing the original name to something totally different in translation just as the publisher wants to sell the book. I don't think this is right but as long as it is the will of the writer it will make just him look ridiculous because of the ways he used to sell.

jjp• 7 years ago

Is it SEO or search result presentation optimization? I've noticed a load of book/film titles on Amazon search results and had assumed that it was less about SEO than a bit more of a descriptive title so that I was more likely to click through and find out more about the book/film.

stunt• 7 years ago

Everything is getting longer because of SEO. Books, Articles, News, blog posts, and Youtube videos.

Even conference talks are getting longer because length is often more important than the quality for most of the users.

mrhappyunhappy• 7 years ago

I wonder how much collective human time search engines and google in particular has siphoned from us. Instead of getting straight to the point, now you have to read a bunch of “long form” content. Think about all that wasted time and multiply by billions.

gipp• 7 years ago

You've gotta squint really hard to convince yourself that the internet has decreased the brevity of communication.

hirundo• 7 years ago

I can confirm it's also true for web articles:

  mysql> desc articles; 
  +--------------+---------------+ 
  | Field        | Type          | 
  +--------------+---------------+ 
  | id           | int(11)       | 
  | kicker       | varchar(255)  | 
  | body         | longtext      | 
  | headline     | varchar(255)  | 
  | sub_headline | text          | 
  | teaser       | text          |

We used to have varchar(255) for sub_headline as with headline. A few years ago I caught a ticket to turn it into a text type (65 KiB). SEO was the motive. If we ever get a request to make it longtext (4 GiB) I may cry.

benatkin• 7 years ago

It isn't 191 characters?!?! https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9855#issuecomment-2887... https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/30305

Kidding. I have used 191 as a length because of that though. :)

0xcde4c3db• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the following creature from the Magic: The Gathering "Unhinged" joke expansion [1]:

Our Market Research Shows That Players Like Really Long Card Names So We Made this Card to Have the Absolute Longest Card Name Ever Elemental

[1] https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

borne0• 7 years ago

As an aside, Jon Ronson's podcast 'The Butterfly Effect' presents the same issue with porn videos; before streaming sites and SEO producers were free to name their videos as they wished but now they need to name them so they appeal to multiple sub-genres and fetishes and that's why we get 'Step Daughter Cheerleader Orgy Volume 4' rather than some play on Edward Scissor Hands.

Book subtitles are getting longer because of SEO

Related Stories