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Quite a mouthful
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Why are titles getting longer?
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We’d like this piece to be as concise as possible but that’s quite a challenge. For, we are talking of tomes with titles running to a few lines and merely listing them out will take up a few columns. Don’t trust us? Walk in to any b
ookstore and browse through the titles.
Anupama Chopra’s book is not just about the King of Bollywood — Shah Rukh Khan — but also about the “seductive world of Indian cinema”. Similarly, if you wondered what Kishore Biyani means by saying “It Happened in India”, the tagline explains it as “The story of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Central and the Great Indian Consumer”.
“With a number of books being released into the market, there is a necessity to reflect the contents of the book through the title. The attention span of the reader has also reduced; so it helps,” says Hemali Sodhi of Penguin India Books.
Sample this: “The Trouble with Physics” has this tagline - “The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next”.
“Explanatory taglines are more in non-fiction titles than in works of fiction,” points out Amitabha Bagchi, author of “Above Average”. “Originally I had a lengthier, four-word title but was asked to make it short and crisp. But the title has been misconstrued by some readers.”
Lengthier titles seem to work better online. “If you use keywords such as Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood or Indian Cinema on Amazon.com, you will hit upon Anupama Chopra’s book. The tagline helps on search engines,” says Amitabha.
Sridala Swami, who recently released her book of poetry, “The Reluctant Survivor”, offers a different take: “Research and academic papers tend to have lengthier titles that give them added respectability. Perhaps certain non-fiction works attempt to do the same.”
SANGEETHA DEVI DUNDOO
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