It’s all in a Name: 4 Hour Work Week November 1, 2007
I'm at the New New Web conference in Reston and just listened to Tim Ferriss of 4 Hour Work Week fame speak during our chicken lunch. His whole pitch is worth listening to but I was particularly interested in an anecdote he gave about how he came up with the name of his book.
4 Hour Work Week was originally titled "Dealing Drugs for Fun and Profit." For a variety of reasons this wasn't going to fly with publishers or retailers.
Ferriss and his team came up with twelve alternative names and were pretty much deadlocked.
Ferriss decided on the name by running a Google Adwords campaign. He bought ads for relevant keywords for all twelve potential book titles and tracked which titles performed the best. The clickthrough rate for 4 Hour Work Week was by far the highest, so that is what his book is called.
I think this is a smart and novel approach to naming. Google Adwords as a cheap and real time focus group.
