Titling a Book

Newsweek, using Booksinprint.com as a source, recently reported that the top 5 words to be found in a book's title over the last 100 years (1906 to 2006) are:

1. Man—122,221 [men 57,485]
2. Diet—9,960
3. House—100,648
4. Woman—36,123 [women—98,140]
5. Sex/Sexual—[Sex—23,235, Sexual—12,772]

House is a somewhat surprising inclusion to me. Newsweek gives "The House of [you name it]" as an explanation of why this word is so popular. When I did an Amazon.com search, "house" came in second to "man." (The numbers in the list above are from my Amazon search.)

"Diet" came up with a surprisingly low return on Amazon, only 9,960, compared to "man" at 122,221. Diet books are, of course, huge sellers. At Quill Driver Books, we've published two, one of which, after making it a New York Times bestseller we eventually sold to Warner Books for a princely sum.

Since the Amazon "woman" figure seemed somewhat low, I searched on "women" and the two of them come in at 134,263 combined. The "men" "man" searches returned 179,706. Sex/sexual combined came in at 36,007.

Apparently in reference to an accompanying article (I only have a clipping someone sent me.), Newsweek reports "Jesus" has never been in the title of a bestseller. When I Amazoned "Jesus," I got 35, 392 hits about the same as "sex/sexual." And the pope's new book Jesus of Nazareth at #38 in Amazon's bestseller ranking today might be considered a bestseller. The number one bestseller each year and in the course of history is a book about Jesus, but, of course, his name isn't in the title.

Why does all this interest us as writers? There is an argument to be made that including the most popular words in your book's title might help it sell. If that is the case, someone bring to me a proposal for The Man and Woman's Guide to the House of Sex and Diet.

By the way, the word "guide" returned 477,180 hits.