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falcolas

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).

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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.

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. –"

> 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.

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.

How do they title their Haiku?

    The title
    Is the haiku is
    The haiku

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.

I like

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

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.

They started as a ridiculous way to stand out, transitioned on to basically self-parody, then once the novelty wore off everyone just went "huh, why not use a sentence as a title?"

Once it stopped being weird it turned out that shoving a short description of your story into the title is a good way to grab readers.

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

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

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

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