Early Retirement Extreme – A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence.

Jacob,
I chose a couple actually and submitted.

“Complex simplicty” Is that an oxymoron? But…., is it a profound oxymoron or what? 😉

You are right… ERE is quite SEOish.. 😀

Best,
Surio.

I think it depends on your target audience and their age. Who do you think your target is? Students? Adults with successful jobs? Singles? and so forth. Once you define your main target audience, you can identify what their purchase and reading behavior is like. For example, you don’t try to sell vinyl audio disc to teenagers since it won’t work with their iPod. I think the title has to represent the audience you need to reach and grab. The audience will need to associate with your titles in order to pay attention to it.

Just my thoughts …

totally agree with chris’ title. if you get extra philosphical info once you start reading thats great, but need that title to grab them and draw them in.

How about something more catchy and provocative:

“Work is for suckers”
or
“cut the crap”
or
“Sleep or work? – You decide”

Why don’t you do a google adwords survey, Tim Ferriss-style? That way, rather than a few people, who already like your message (and thus are checking your blog) telling you what to name it, you could see what titles actually bring in the most readers. Try lots of different titles in the box and describe what it is – you’re effectively using the ad as a book cover. I know Tim wrote in his book about this – that’s why the title is “The Four-Hour Work Week” instead of “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit”.

If I may… I’d like to cut one of your subtitles down from, “Early Retirement Extreme – A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence.” to simply: Early Retirement Extreme – A Guide To Financial Independence.

‘Philosophical’ sounds a little hokey to me, makes me prepare to roll my eyes for some new-agey nonsense. And ‘practical’ sounds like it’s below me, too basic. That’s just my gut reaction to those words when I see them in book titles.

I apologize in advance for the random nature of all the following title related thoughts.

I don’t like any of the titles out there.

I feel that “Extreme Early Retirement – A practical response to runaway consumerism” best captures your philosophy and message. Sorry, I never liked ERE as a title. Just my personal preference.

As a title, the one above is more geared towards an educated and introspective audience. In other words, the kind of people who read your blog. If your book is written the same way as your blog, I doubt that the average IWTYTBR reader would make it past the first chapter. If you want Ramit’s audience to read your book, it had better be written in a way that appeals to them.

On the other hand, the title I suggested lacks the glamour factor. I’ll post another comment if I come up with something better.

If you try to pump up the retirement aspect alone, people are going to slam you for suggesting that they live in an RV and become vegetarians. On the other hand, despite its title, Ramit’s book doesn’t really teach anyone to be rich, it just rehashes standard issue PF advice and relays it in a tone more acceptable to young people. So maybe it’s okay to make an all hype title.

I hate to say it, but your version of early retirement as espoused in the blog is really only palatable to people who either utterly hate their job or have a strong anti-consumerist mentality. You may wish to stress one or both of those in the title.

People who’s job is so-so or who like buying stuff and doing things will by nature be drawn to authors like Ferriss and the rest of the lifestyle design crowd. In other words, they aren’t the ones you need to pitch your book to, since they probably won’t be interested to begin with.

PS: If you do go the self-publishing route I hope you’ll invest in a professional editor. I know you don’t like spending money, but it’s probably for the best if you consider your message important. You don’t want your book to be full of typos or other readability problems that will make you look like a schmuck and thus demean your message.

Perhaps your book’s jacket cover could have an eye grabbing graphic along the lines of ‘E.R.E.’ (curious people are going to want to know what ERE stands for plus it’s already your brand) with “Doing Better With Less – A philosophical and practical guide to extreme early retirement” as the main explanatory sub title. You do need to brand yourself otherwise you’re going to be one in a sea of many. Also, branding a graphic enables you to write other books that tie in with predecessors.

Jacob-

Count me among those that don’t feel that any of the titles are particularly good. You might want to take a few hours to web surf some direct marketing copywriting sites to see what they do with headlines and titles.

In particular you need to find a way to convey some sort of benefit to the potential reader.

Also you seem to have a real penchant for the word philosophical. I think you need to drop that word immediately from any title or subtitle. It only generates bad memories for most people of dense, mind numbing into to philosophy classes in college.

I agree with glippy & Frankerson. Keep it short and to the point. Whenever I see a book with a loooong title, I’m predisposed to think the contents will be loooong and rambling. Like the author wrote as much filler as possible to make people think it was a valuable book. Of course, that’s not always the case.

“Extreme Early Retirement – A practical response to runaway consumerism”

ERE is backwards 🙂

I picked “Doing Better With Less – A philosophical and practical guide to extreme early retirement” and “The next step in voluntary simplicity” because I agree that your blog isn’t just about early retirement; it’s about doing more with less. And you can use those strategies to “fire” your boss or to do any number of other things. But “simplicity” isn’t really right, either.

Your blog is more about living life more fully with less dependence on money. As you knew when you started your blog, Early Retirement Extreme is a way to grab the attention of regular people who do not already think in terms of voluntary simplicity in such a way as to make them start considering it.

After reading the comments, I’m thinking–who is your ideal audience? I suspect it’s consumer-driven people who don’t realize they want your book. What do they most suffer from? My guess is stress. Your blog says something like instead of having it all—and being stressed all the time—you can pick out just the good parts and just be happy. I don’t think anything about voluntary simplicity is going to appeal toward your ideal audience (those who could get the most from your book)—that only appeals to people who already know there are benefits to voluntary simplicity. Not that any of that gives me any good ideas for your title, but maybe it will give someone else a good idea.

I do kind of like Frankerson P’s “Early Retirement Extreme: the Book.” It sounds modern and catchy. Very attractive to the Type A personality types.

And on reflection, I agree that many philosophers are bad writers and thus philosophy comes with bad connotations. Similarly, Americans are afraid of math, so you would never have a title about how simple arithmetic can help you improve your finances.

Sorry, not excited about any of your titles.

But Chris had some great suggestions:
– RETIRE EXTREMELY EARLY
– Early Retirement Extreme – How to retire in 5 years or less.
– Early Retirement Extreme – Financial Independence in five years.

Some other suggestions, not saying they’re better than yours, just trying to help the brainstorming going on here 🙂

Retire young

Retire in 5 years

Retire in 5 years or less

The 5 year career

You can retire in 5 years

Life is short, retire young

Life is short, retire NOW!

Early Retirement Extreme – Get financially independant fast

Happiness is an early retirement

Got early retirement?

No time to work – How to retire in 5 years or less

I know that many ERE readers are pursuing more moderate plans than 5 years. Thus I don’t want to put 5 years out there. Actually, what I have are graphs relating savings rate to number of years so people can pick their own number. My primary worry in that regard is “bad reviews from mainstream people”. How to retire 5 in years sounds a bit too much like “How to make a million bucks”.

That said, I was thinking about making a workbook with more hand-holding and specific plans. The title of that one could include the 5 year part.

Here is another:

Early Retirement Extreme
“Planning Your Escape from the World of Work”

Jacob, I am a writer with five self-published books including two for sale on Amazon; the others I sell at classes and seminars.

Before I get into your title issue, have you considered Lightning Source to self-publish?

A book title, IMHO, needs to be short and catchy and the sub-title used to explian what is in the text.

For example:

Money Well Spent (title)

Seven Steps Towards Greater Financial Peace of Mind (sub-title)

or

The Debt Whisperer (title)(I love this title, by the way!)

How to Get Out of Debt and Stay Out of Debt Withour Wrecking Your Credit, Your Future, or Your Life (sub-title)

I would go with ERE as the title because it fits the criteria and it is already a working brand. Leverage it!

I read your blog but would need to see the text to suggest a sub-title but I don’t much care for any you listed and anything with “a few remarks” is a non-starter as others have replied here.

But this is all cart before the horse here typical of the new author: You need a marketing plan. Do you have one? Is the sum total of your marketing plan to date: find a publisher and let them do all the heavy lifting? (re: selling)

If so, let me tell you that it doesn’t work that way. If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.

Writing a book is the easy part of the process! Marketing is where you make money or not. In your marketing plan you need to state why you are in the business, that is, to sell books or see your name up in lights.

If it is to sell books, you can try going viral; blog posts and linkbacks from articles, etc. Or, you can do like that Flatten Your Stomach e-book and go affiliate. By the way, that book is making a ton.

The internet has made book marketing easier but it is still a tough nut to crack. The old mtehod does still work by the way: Throw a ton of money at infomercials.

And it is a waste of imagination to worry about your e-book getting ripped off. If it’s that good it will take off all on its own.

Good luck. R/

“Philosophical” is not hokey – independent thinkers will not think so, anyway. Precisely why we need it!

Recall Steve Pavlina’s title:

“Personal Development for Smart People”

you could have “financial freedom for independent thinkers” or something like that….

Hallo Jacob,
The way our inputs are flowing here… this is going to reflect the age old:
A camel is a horse, designed by a committee. :-D… LOL!

Your suggested titles are OK. So do a bit of eeny meeny miny mo if you’ve got to and pick one.

My father used to say, if there was a public consultation before a hospital is to be built, the hospital would never get off the ground.

Go with your feel. It will come out good.
Best,
Surio.

And,

“How to retire 5 in years sounds a bit too much like “How to make a million bucks”.”

I agree completely with you. I disagree with previous comments suggesting that this is the way to go. You are going to be too far over the normal person’s head to be as popular as Suze Orman (though I hope I’m wrong, for all our sakes), so I think you should target your demographic. And, if I’m an example of your demographic, that title is wrong, because it sounds like snake oil sales. It appears, as most titles of books this type do, to talk down to me. Of course, it doesn’t.

Early Retirement Extreme: Doing Better With Less.

Whatever you choose, choose something that makes people dream. (“The four hour work week” did that)

I’d be careful with the word “less”, at least in the title. Doesn’t sound like much fun in most cases.

The point of the title is to get them to read the first sentence (or table of contents, as the case may be); the point of the first sentence is to get them to read the first paragraph.

I’d go for something in the area of Early Retirement Extreme – How to quit your job sooner and do more with less.

I say use FB instead of Google for testing because it’s cheaper and their algorithm won’t kick you out before you have a statistically significant sample if you happen to be a little off. Plus, you already have the fan page set up to bring them in slowly. Once you have a few narrowed down, then look at the intent of each response group.

Jacob,

First I saw the titles, then I saw the line where you say that you suck at writing titles, and I have to agree. If your goal is to catch the attention of the general public, drop those ABSTRACT titles and use something SPECIFIC like “Retire in 5 years”. I understand your reservations, but remember all the subtleties that are missing from such a title can be found in the book. While the title does just what it needs to do: grab people’s interest.

Remember the 4h work week, with the hammock picture.

P.S. “Early Retirement Extreme” not bad either IMO.