Authors, if you are ever close to titling a book* this way:
‘The Magnificent Spammer: the Spam Chronicles, Book Whatever’
You might want to rethink that colon and everything after it.
While that title format was fashionable for a while, and self-pub gurus were claiming it could help with SEO and finding books in a series, it’s not that fashionable now. In fact, according to more than a few literary agents and commercial publishing editors, it’s now almost a hallmark of bad self-publishing and vanity publishing. Seasoned readers are bypassing it without looking closer, and it’s becoming a query killer to agents.
By all means, have your series info somewhere on the front cover. Just not with your title.
*Fiction, misery memoirs, and fictionalized exposes seem to bear the brunt of this negative impact. I’ve seen the format going strong in non-fiction.
***
The recent tweet from agent Lana Popovic that made me revisit this problem.
16 years ago the colon-in-title Thing stopped being a Victorian conceit, and became a modern non-fiction marketing tool.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop with non-fiction.
Here are some places that might help those of us who are title-challenged (raises hand in guilty solidarity.)