Light novels are infamous for their “clickbait” titles, but honestly, any general book lover can probably tell you about a title that was single-handedly responsible for reeling them in, for better or worse. The other day, I read a book called Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone for reasons I’m sure you can understand. It’s also hard to argue that the provocative title of Jennette McCurdy’s memoir didn’t play a role in it becoming a massive bestseller last year.
On the other hand, not every book is blessed with an eye-catching title. Let me tell you about a light novel I enjoyed recently, but which did not inspire confidence when I first encountered its title.
To be absolutely fair, Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture is not the worst-sounding title ever. If you’re the type whose eyes glaze over looking at the titles on the J-Novel Club’s series list, then you might even find Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture appealing, in a nerdy hipster sort of way. Sure, it sounds more like an essay than a novel, but it doesn’t mention getting reincarnated in another world with OP skills, and that’s got to count for something, right?
Yet that lukewarm positive appraisal would probably not result in you buying the book, which has a low sales ranking on Amazon US and only three customer ratings at the time of this writing. The sad truth is that Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture sounds boring, from its title. The “Folklore Studies” bit on the cover alludes to this being a supernatural mystery of sorts, but in a dry and academic sort of way. Indeed, a good chunk of the book itself is filled with the titular professor lecturing on his topic of expertise; he is characterized as a “fun” professor, so the lessons are actually fairly accessible to read, but it admittedly does not make for riveting fiction.
But the story is genuinely quite interesting, especially if you are a mystery buff and you enjoy approaching the genre from a different angle. If you like the In/Spectre anime series, you will probably like Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture. Like In/Spectre, the main characters in this book are intimately connected with the supernatural, but when they get involved in incidents that seem like ghost stories, they use logic and deduction to find non-supernatural explanations for what happened. It’s a neat setup; I always enjoy the irony of a supernatural entity lecturing the audience about facts and logic. The appeal is nerdy as hell, but some of us are into that, so don’t judge.
The other appeal of Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture is that it focuses on an intimate friendship between two male characters. It’s not as romantically charged as the central relationship in The Case Files of Jeweler Richard, but the point is that it fills a niche in the English light novel market that desperately needs filling: stories of male friendship, BL, and all things in-between. That alone was enough to push this book onto my to-read list, despite the lacklustre title.
So, yeah, I basically wrote this post to recommend Associate Professor Akira Takatsuki’s Conjecture for anyone who may be interested, but now that I’ve said my piece on that, I’m going to make this discussion a little more general. After all, there are plenty of other interesting books with not-so-interesting titles. For light novels, you could perhaps argue that any series that doesn’t have a descriptive title is fighting an uphill battle against the algorithm. 86 is the obvious poster child here; that series has some of the strongest word-of-mouth recommendations you can find in the entire light novel community, but that title is an undisputed SEO killer.
In the Narо̄ web novel community in particular, long titles are basically a necessity. This is because the stories don’t have cover images, and the Rankings page (which is where most readers discover new stories) only lists titles, not the tags and synopses. The latter two features do exist on the site, but they’re not as important for discoverability as they are on other popular web fiction sites like Archive of Our Own.
Still, just because a title is long doesn’t mean it’s inherently good. Some of the biggest web novel successes ever include Overlord and Yо̄jo Senki (The Saga of Tanya the Evil), which both originated on Arcadia, a different web novel platform from Narо̄. In the traditional print light novel market, short and sweet titles like Sword Art Online and Ryūо̄ no Oshigoto! (The Ryuo’s Work Is Never Done!) have also been huge sellers in the past decade. Clearly, there’s more to success than just long titles, or even just titles in general.
What’s a light novel that you think has a bad title but a good story? Which light novel has a good title but a bad story, and why is it The Detective is Already Dead? (Sorry, couldn’t resist the jab.) How often does the title influence your decision to pick up a book? It’s an interesting topic to think about when it comes to media in general, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Frogkun.com 
My experience is that at this stage titles are like Youtube thumbnails. Because they all have to follow an algorithmic pattern, their quality is so divorced from the enjoyment I end up deriving from the work* ** to which it is attached that it doesn’t influence my decision to pick up a book beyond the absolute most surface-level list skimming. The bigger influence for me is blurbs/summaries, observed levels of interest and discussion on various forums, and reviews for works I’m considering, and only rarely does a title by itself make a significant difference.
*Works with “non-clickbait” titles that bored me: Unnamed Memory, Overlord, Dead Detective, Seirei Gensouki
**Works with generic clickbait titles that were actually fabulous: Otome Mob, Min-Maxing my TRPG Build, Instant Death Cheat, Yuri Magical Engineers
Yeah, that makes sense. I am a little sad that you’re not a fan of Unnamed Memory, but I’ll live with it :P
Well, it is the same problem as with YA novel and fanfiction, right? Genre fiction are increasingly being written and marketed around the “tags”. I’ve friends working in the publishing industry, and “tags” is what always drilled into their head when it comes to editing the works by whatever young writer they pick up. Personally I feel like this is only going to make the whole genre worse.
I’ve got to agree with you on The Detective is Already Dead, great name for a not-as-good series lol.
Other bad names for good series for me would be Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? (I know many of us are used to yelling about this one is better than the name suggests, but still), Brave Chronicle: The Ruinmaker, Bond & Book, Haibara’s Teenage New Game+, The Other Worlder Exploring the Dungeon.
In all of these cases, I think the names give off generic isekai vibes or aren’t quite informative enough to interest a reader. Both Bond and Book and Haibara’s Teenage New Game+ are excellent titles, but Haibara’s sounds like a fantasy (despite the fact I can appreciate what they were going for with it) and Bond and Book is just too generic for anyone to ever stumble across it.
More recently there’s You Like Not My Daughter?! which sounds like a generic high school romcom/forbidden love and I was pleasantly surprised to find the MC was already a college student, so while there is still an age gap it’s not as scandalous as the name would make you believe – particularly matched with that cover art.
On the whole I don’t put a lot of stock in the title of a LN though, I’m willing to check out anything if I find the premise interesting or it has an author/illustrator I’m fond of involved. I guess danmachi taught me early on that you can’t judge a book by its title!
Frankly, I struggle to think of a light novel with a bad title but good story, but I think that could be attributed to the fact that I rarely pick up light novels with a bad title lol
A good title with a bad story, however, damn, I hate Bluesteel Blasphemer.
Since the title has been such an unreliable indicator of how much I’ll like it, I usually go to Goodreads and hope there’s a review that’s detailed enough.
Oh god Bluesteel Blasphemer, I still remember that legendary trainwreck of an ending.
This is very off-topic but I really enjoyed the thread on sakurasou you made back in 2013. It helped me as a reviewer and prevented me from making an emotionally-driven review that missed the point of the anime. Long story short, I was really attached to nanami aoyama and mad about how she was thrown away in the light novel. But you helped me realize the point of the LN was that life is imperfect, things don’t go the way you want, and you should work to get around your shortcomings, even if you don’t have talent. Specifically, you mentioned that aoyama and sorata getting together would have been a cop out from the main message of the LN/anime. I then realized the sakurasou wasn’t a story that was trying to be beautiful and perfect, but rather one that is realistic and tries to tell a message, even if the author implies many things and goes about it in a roundabout way. Even if Aoyama may have been better in my eyes, more attractive, better match for sorata, etc, you helped me realize it was more than just that. Mashiro and sorata getting together was ideal because it symbolized sorata working to improve himself and defeat his insecurities through working through relationship issues all while being with someone far more talented than him. I review every anime and manga I consume and while I take it really seriously, I am also young and inexperienced so I was grateful to see your open-mindedness and passion while discussing the LN/anime with others on your blog/thread, which after reading, I was able to recognize different perspectives and conclusions on a series I was hell bent on driving this negative narrative on in my review , almost completely subconsciously. That thread made me realize my discontent for what happened to Aoyama subconsciously drove me to grasp at straws to find any way to criticize sakurasou so much that I was looking for information that fit my negative outlook (confirmation bias) and realize that I had made an error in judging the series and missed the point of it completely. I now am aware of the impact of bias and preference in my reviews and how something I don’t even recognize can completely shift my outlook on a positive series to something completely negative. I think that now I can become a better reviewer and I feel much more at ease after getting closure on something that was bothering me. I look forward to reading more of your threads as a newcomer to this blog. Once again, thank you
Thanks! I’m glad you could get something out of an older post like that! Best of luck with your reviews and writing.
“スチーム・ガール” by エリザベス・ベア (“Steam Girl” by ‘Elisabeth Bea’, only writing the Katakana pulp there because it’s basically unfindable in Romaji) for me, because Steam Punk fan (proper one, not the “just glue some gears on it” kind) and finding it in a crammy little book store in Osaka being a good feature. Oh, also, it’s SciFi, not Steam of course.
Also, if I may remind everyone of “The Tatami Galaxy” and “Night Is Short, Walk On Girl” regarding (not that ‘light’, to be fair,) titles that do not disappoint.
Other than that, to follow suit with the more concise fancy-or-clickbait-title-to-quality scales on a few works (not only LNs and WNs, honestly sorry about that):
Narm but charm:
∙ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Isekai” (arguably, it’s basically “Red Dragon/Chaos Dragon” TTRPG level of meta jokes),
∙ “WorldEnd”, aka “SukaSuka” and “SukaMoka” (the shorthands..),
∙ the franchises “B”, “C”, “K” (we slippin’ into MiB territory now) to very varying degrees each,
∙ “Welcome to the N.H.K.!”,
∙ “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy (everyone knows and recommends it but it just sounded like a cheap slash fic title to me at that time),
∙ “Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction”, “Texhnolyze”,
∙ the short-titled series you talked about here (always yay for Kino : ),
∙ The ToAru novels (I personally really do like and enjoy most of the books and adaptations a real lot to this day, but I can’t say that most of it is ‘amazing’ from an attemptedly less biased view…though it might be in a limbo between this an below category depending on the volume; I’ll still be a ToAru fan),
∙ “All You Need is Kill”,
∙ “FLCL”,
∙ “The Girl Who Ate Death”,
∙ “Frieren at the Funeral”,
∙ “Mimizuku to Yoru no Ou” (didn’t know this one had an English title yet (or a manga–what?!) so I’ll leave it as is),
∙ the Fafoo trilogy,
and many more…
Narm but Narnia:
∙ most (but not all) of the mid to long Isekai and Gameikai novel titles, even the lesser known ones (everyone gets to beat the dead horse at least once, especially if I actually have delved down into that rabbit hole long since and have read most of them to an annecessary degree and amount; there’s a vending machine, a barrister, and a literal toilet one, dammit! How much worse could they have gotten if syosetsu didn’t call it a cut a decade in),
∙ most of works starting with “Steam”. (´ . .̫ . `)
(Not sure where to put the Snegurochka and Kolkka novels, I feel very mixed about those.)
To contrast with boring sounding names but beautiful content: “Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan”, or mostly anything by Izumi Shikibu. Old Japanese is very…gritty though, so English translations are surprisingly welcome (and her stuff is free for on Project Gutenberg thankfully).
A thing that made me pick it up due to not only the item itself but also heavily due to the (sub)title is this little piece of art. Best Gacha, ever.
(On a completely different note: After full six years from my last comments I finally came across your blog again! Not sure why it took so long either with that incredibly hard-to-remember blog title, but things, stuff and matters as well as a change of laptop to a functioning one might have been the culprits (and having wordpress-access on my own now). So glad to have found it again. You have an awesome blog! On to catch up! …Bit by bit.)
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