Why do authors keep making the titles longer and longer? AND WHY DO I KEEP FALLING FOR THEM?! So here is the thing, I keep finding novels/manga with interestingly good titles, but the moment I check them for myself over 90% of them are bad. But the titles were so good and captivating that I ask myself why do they all go so wrong? Any thoughts?
Only JP novels tend to have really long titles but they have been at it so long that every experienced reader out there has realized the longer it takes to read the title, the shorter the time the story is able keep you engaged. If you still keep falling for them over and over, then you must have no resistance to clickbait.
Nah, (obviously) IMO, 9/10 are straight up just bad. Hell, it's gotten to the point when I see titles exceeding something like this -https://www.novelupdates.com/series/why-is-the-prettiest-girl-in-school-trying-to-talk-to-a-loner-like-me-during-lunch-break/ I've already established a bias and will reluctantly give it a try. As for absurdly long titles like - https://www.novelupdates.com/series...un-as-a-dark-healer-now-so-the-treatment-wil/ I don't even give them a chance anymore.
Because it will raise reader's interest. Look at how you keep falling for them, they succeeded. Our first contact with the story generally through the title, so it's understandable that they put a lot of effort on it. However most wn are basically original fanfiction, their quality will vary. Even some officially released book are not worth it, would you expect wn with great quality pop up all the times?
Because people have the attention span of goldfish. Not everyone reads the synopsis, but psychologically we read the entire title. And in doing so they can explain what their story is about. This is for the japanese stuff as the market is light novels which are physical books. For things like CN and Korean, many of them are actually short. Because too long titles can get cut off. The only thing to this day I can't figure out is why some novels (mostly CN), put unrelated poetry instead of a synopsis...
I honestly thought that jp novels had that long titles because after translating into their alphabet it's much shorter. But reading comments here it may not be that way.
People nowadays lack the interest in even spending the time to properly read the summary, so particularly in Japanese novels to combat this an initiative seems to have been taken for the titles to in part take on the role of the summary.
I have my suspicion that the title is actually shorter in the original language. Remember, oriental languages can reduce a word to a single pictogram while English has to type out the whole word, so I suspect the long ass titles are the result of long English words rather than any intent to long windedness.
I always forget the long clickbait-y titles that all sound similar to each other. On the contrary, the novels with short but sweet titles tend to stick in my memory.
You’re right but it’s very miniscule. Then again, isn’t this title in katakana? Thought one of the JP language systems was newer than the other(in turn, more bloated with characters to make up foreign sounds)
It's because in syosetu, it's hard to gain readers if you put your title like "lord of the mysteries" or "chrysalis". Mostly they won't open new page just to read the summaries. Maybe your novel just got skipped because other title is more captivating before they even read your novel's summaries. Clickbait and long title atleast they will get the idea.
Depending on the website, many pages i cant even see the picture attached to the book, i can only see the name and the most recent chapter number(whether its ch20 of volume 1 or 20 idk either) if the name does not seem to be similar to what im looking for many times i just skip it. Especially often i do this in the case of infinite novels or fanfic type novels. When im looking to read about azeroth im sry but your lord of the magical world thats 65% similar is annoying. Not to mention the amount of short name books that are already taken are the more usable ones your left with odder names and longer names.
Well if it from Web novel they usually have longer title because if you using search function, there is chance they appear instead if it only 1 or 2 word for title.
I think that they're all just trying to do me a personal favor. They know that I despise books with titles like this so they are kind enough to let me know that I should be staying far away!
This comes up again and again so often that there is no real excuse not to know that anymore. The titles are a symptom of the readers habits on an over filled site, because in Japan publishers will seek out and pick up web novels as opposed to most of the world where self publishing on amazon is your best bet. Title is little more then a dog whistle used by bigots to try and justify their unfair hatred of Japanese novels, or trolls trying to look cool by being edgy and finding something to complain about, at this point. Same when you keep seeing people complaining about how so much of it is trash, conveniently forgetting that the vast majority of material from every nation and language is trash, look at all the garbage on Scribblehub or Royal Road which are also mostly trash, there are gems mixed in but when taking from the free posted armature work the trash rate is much much higher.
Counterpoint 1: While there are a lot of terrible books in every language, most of them avoid trying to reveal this in the title. Counterpoint 2: Japanese web novels tend to be a lot worse than those in any language I've come across. Amateur writers everywhere aren't going to be great at writing, but it's the Japanese ones who don't seem to have an idea what good writing even is.