Ever wonder if book titles matter?

The other day I was updating a spreadsheet I keep on promotional activities I’ve conducted over the past two years. Every few months or so I’ll come across a new avenue for promoting books so I collect statistics to help assess whether I wish to allocate my limited time to a particular promotion activities. After all, why do it if it doesn’t provide a significant ROI. Well, as I was reviewing the data, I observed a peculiar pattern that was unexpected and that I wasn’t even searching for, namely: of the first three novels I had been promoting, one was getting 1/3 of the views of the others at excerpt listing and video trailer sites almost consistently across the board. In other words, Book X and book Y were each getting three times the views of book Z. I looked and looked to see what was different. At first it eluded me. It wasn’t the cover art because all the viewers saw initially were the titles. It wasn't the tags because I used the same for all of them. Then it hit me. It was the damn titles themselves. I though, man that’s weird. The novel that was scoring lower on views had actually received five star reviews like the others and was even nominated at two sites for best romantic suspense of 2008. So what the heck could it be? Then it hit me. When viewers first read the titles without reading the blurb or excerpts, they were interpreting one word in a way I never envisioned, but now I understand why and I will use that lesson when I derive names for my other novels. As it turns out, that title was also the only one where I did not solicit inputs from readers on which alternative candidates they liked best. So what did I learn: Titles DO make a difference (surprise surprise), and you’re not as smart as you think so go sample them readers (g).

My point was not "Here's a fact you've never considered" it was really just a confirmation of what we perceive intuitively. More along the likes of empirical data of what we already expect.

And in response to Doctor Shifty, you're right, I have no exact basis to confirm why they viewed two books three times as much as the other, except to observe the differences between the books. Given they did not see cover art or blurbs before they clicked the excerpt file, and every thing else was the same (Tags, etc) it was logical to me to suppose the difference was in the title (that was all they saw before they click the link), especially considering the same pattern was observed on over a dozen sites. Could it be something else, sure, I guess so, but I don't know what it would be.

Is it a cure for cancer, course not (g) and it was offered more as an interesting side note, not a mind blowing revelation. One other important point was that the lower ranking book was the only one I did not solicit opinions from potential readers before I selected my final title, rather I did it all on my own. That was my "Ah ha" moment when I said I wasn't as smart as I thought, and the lesson learned was to continue sampling reader inputs before I home in on my title.

Sorry I didn't make things more clear.