A great tagline can make the difference between your novel selling like hot cakes and it not selling at all… and that, fundamentally, is why you need to know how to write a tagline.
How to Write a Tagline: Why They’re So Important
Taglines are important because there are only a few ways people really choose books:
- Someone recommends it to them.
- It’s by an author they already like.
- They’re attracted by the title, the tagline, the cover, the blurb, and the first page.
The first two possibilities are largely out of your hands, which leaves the tagline, title, cover, blurb and first page as the only things you can control.
But why is the tagline so vitally important? Well, because it’s likely to be the first thing your potential book-purchaser reads.
How to Write a Tagline: Purpose
First, we need to understand the purpose of a tagline.
Along with the cover design and the title, the tagline has to intrigue potential readers enough that they pick up your book and read the blurb.
Making the potential reader want to know more about your book is literally the only purpose of a tagline. If your tagline grabs the potential reader’s attention and provokes them to pick your book up, then you’re a lot closer to them buying it.
Remember, the reader is likely to just glance at your book in a bookshop, surrounded by hundreds of other books all competing for their attention. Your book cover, title and tagline have to combine to intrigue them or they’ll move on to the next book on the pile.
How to Write a Tagline: Eight Tips
So, we’ve established that a great tagline is critical to selling your book. But how do we write one? Here are some ideas:
1. Use a Question
Lee Child, for one, believes people are hard-wired to want to know the answers to questions, and he uses that insight very effectively in his own novels. Questions are intriguing to lots of people, and wanting to know the answer to the question might bring them to pick your novel up.
For example, The Matrix had the tagline:
What is the Matrix?
Beware, though, of using a question that the reader can answer with “Yes” or “No”, and so easily dismiss.
2. Incorporate Your High Concept
The whole point of a high concept is to get the premise of your novel over in very few words and be attractive to potential readers. That makes it worth considering using as a tagline. For example, the tagline for Shaun of the Dead is:
A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.
3. Play on Words
This is where you take a common phrase or well-known concept and alter it. A great example is one of my favourite taglines, for Brendan DuBois’s Resurrection Day:
Everyone remembers the day President Kennedy tried to kill them.
4. Use Rhyme and Alliteration
For example, the tagline for The X-Files movie alliterated:
Fight the Future
And the tagline for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? rhymed:
Sister, sister, oh so fair, why is there blood all over your hair?
5. Employ an Isocolon
An isocolon is where you combine several related sentences, one after another, which have the same number of words or syllables. The most common is a tricolon, which combines three sentences. For example, this is the tagline for the James Bond movie Thunderball:
Look Up! Look Down! Look Out!
Another type is the tetracolon, which combines four sentences. For example, the tagline to the video game Half-Life:
Run. Think. Shoot. Live.
Isocolons can be especially effective if the last sentence is a twist. A good example is the bicolon (two sentence) tagline for the video game Sunless Sea:
Lose your mind. Eat your crew.
6. Include a Memorable Quote
If there’s a snippet of dialogue in your novel that you love, you could use that as your tagline. It doesn’t have to be dialogue either. Find some of the punchiest lines in your novel and try them out as stand-alone taglines. For example, though it’s not strictly a tagline, some of the publicity for A Kill in the Morning used the first line of the novel:
7. Intriguing Dissonance
This is like the question tagline, but instead of directly stating the question, it raises a question in the reader’s mind by presenting them with concepts that don’t seem to go together. As a result, they feel compelled to reduce their cognitive dissonance by finding out more.
For example, the tagline for Bonnie and Clyde was:
They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people.
A different type of dissonance is in the tagline for Alien:
In space no-one can hear you scream.
And note how that tagline gets the genre across. It’s clearly a sci-fi (“space”) crossover with horror (“scream”).
8. Aim for Euphony
Euphony is where the combination of elements in the writing is harmonious, smooth, and agreeable. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes a tagline euphonious, but any sentence that you just enjoy reading in isolation is likely euphonious.
An example, though not a tagline, from the replicant’s last speech in Blade Runner:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.
No one, including the writer and the actor, had the slightest idea what it meant, but it just sounds great. Similarly, the first line and last lines of many novels are chosen for their euphony, so it might be worth looking at some of your favourite lines in your novel and seeing if they provoke any ideas for a tagline.
How To Write a Tagline: Eight Common Mistakes
1. Anything with “This Time…” or “He/she/they are back!” In It
Taglines starting “This time…” have an unappealing level of half-heartedness. You may as well have the tagline:
Here it is: another lazy cash-in.
Unless your novel is a sequel to your massive bestseller (in which case, why are you even reading this article?) it’s likely to reduce the number of readers, as they won’t want to read the second book in a series if they haven’t read the first.
Similarly, a “He/she/they are back!” tagline is only going to be interesting to people who already read the first novel. Even worse is a tagline with both “This time…” and “…is back”, e.g. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the tagline for which is:
The Man with the Hat Is Back. And This Time He’s Bringing His Dad.
2. Making Out Your Novel Is Something It Isn’t
We’ve all read books that turn out not to be what we expected. How did it make you feel? Cheated?
It’s tempting to make your novel sound as if it’s in a more popular genre than it really is. It’s also tempting to have a funny tagline. The problem is, if you sell people one thing, but deliver another, they’re going to feel cheated. Your readers will feel duped, your reviews will be poor and your sales will drop.
For example, the tagline for All About Eve is:
It’s All About Women… and Their Men!
Which makes it sound like a romantic comedy. I mean, there are men and women in the movie, but it’s not a romance or a comedy. All About Eve is a great movie, but that’s a seriously misleading tagline.
So, try to keep the tagline consistent with your novel.
3. Trying to Squeeze the Whole Plot In
A tagline is a single, intriguing sentence. Its purpose isn’t to explain what happens in your novel. You can explain more in the rest of the blurb. Also, if your tagline is too long, then it’s unlikely to fit on the cover of your novel.
For example, here’s the tagline for Terminator:
In the Year of Darkness, 2029, the rulers of this planet devised the ultimate plan. They would reshape the Future by changing the Past. The plan required something that felt no pity. No pain. No fear. Something unstoppable. They created the Terminator.
Terminator is a great movie, but this is far too long and too ‘explainy’ to be a good tagline. And there’s a ready-made quote from the movie that would make a much better tagline:
It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
4. Using Nothing but the Genre
Some taglines, particularly for self-published novels, do nothing but explain what genre it’s in. For example:
A billionaire romance.
or:
It’s a spy thriller set in Rome!
Making the genre clear is important, but the tagline has to be intriguing too. Okay, it’s a billionaire romance, but what makes it stand out from the billion and one other billionaire romances?
5. Accidentally Using a Double Entendre
I mean a double entendre can work in a tagline, sometimes, especially if you’ve written a sex comedy, but it’s very, very rare that it comes across as well as you intended… as the actress said the bishop.
Even worse is the unintended double entendre. So think about if there’s any way to misconstrue your tagline.
6. Not Writing a Tagline at All
It’s a little known fact that the tagline for Citizen Kane was “It’s Terrific!”
This isn’t a tagline, it’s a self-endorsement, the worst sort of endorsement. Endorsements are an important part of a blurb, but taglines they are not.
Similarly, “From the author of…” is not a tagline, it’s an attempt to remind the reader that the novel is by an author they already like.
7. Repeating the Title
For example, the tagline for Clash of the Titans was:
Titans will clash!
What’s even the point of that tagline? That Titans clash is literally in the title already.
8. Being Vague, Meaningless, or too Obscure
Your book’s artwork should already have made the genre fairly clear, but the tagline has to reinforce that impression and make it absolutely clear.
If, instead of doing that, the tagline is generic, vague or confusing, the potential reader is more likely to put the book back down thinking something like, “Nice cover, but what’s it about?”
Similarly, it’s tempting to write a tagline that the reader will only understand in retrospect, an allusion to the ending of the novel perhaps, or something with a double meaning. It’s also tempting to be erudite, sophisticated and literary. There’s nothing wrong with being erudite and sophisticated, but are you trying to appeal only to that market? Remember, the mass market is called the mass market for a reason. And how many people, even erudite and sophisticated people, are really going to appreciate your reference? Are you sure?
How to Write a Tagline: Is it the Same as a Logline?
My Killogator logline formula is well known, and I’ve helped a lot of people develop their loglines. Some of them have sent me ‘loglines’ that were really taglines because they didn’t understand the difference between a logline and a tagline.
Although the tagline and a logline both try to sell your novel, they have different audiences.
- A logline sells your story to potential agents and publishers
- A tagline sells your story to would-be readers
Unsurprisingly, different audiences have different concerns and selling a story to a publisher and selling it to a reader requires a different approach. Three major differences are:
- A tagline is usually shorter than a logline.
- A tagline is rarely over ten words
- A logline is usually twenty-five to thirty-five words
- A tagline is intriguing, a logline is clarifying
- A tagline implies a tone, a logline gives specifics
- A logline gives the whole story away, a tagline doesn’t
- A tagline is often a question, while a logline never is
For example, here’s the logline for A Kill in the Morning:
In an alternate 1955, a burnt-out British agent infiltrates Germany on an unauthorised mission to assassinate a calculating German spymaster. In Germany, he discovers the spymaster’s wonder weapon, and has to sacrifice everything to stop him using it to win the long cold war against Britain.
And here’s the tagline:
You can see that the logline focuses on providing clarity on the core premise of the novel, while the tagline focuses on creating a tone and intriguing the reader.
(For more on loglines, see: How to write a killer logline)
How to Write a Tagline: The Importance of Testing
Writing a tagline is a bit like writing a joke. As I’ve discovered when doing my public speaking appearances, sometimes you come up with what you think is the funniest joke ever, and people just shrug their shoulders or look at you blankly. The only way to find out if your joke is funny is to tell it and see what the reaction is.
It’s the same with taglines.
So, don’t just come up with something off the top of your head, ask your mum if she thinks it’s okay, and declare the job done. That will not work.
Instead, write multiple taglines and see which one people in your target audience like best. Even better, mock-up some book covers (or if you don’t have that level of artistic ability, some flashcards) of the different taglines and try them out.
And a hint for when you’re looking for people to try your taglines on: your family are probably not in your target audience.
How to Write a Tagline: Things to Do
- Understand the purpose of a tagline.
- Look at the taglines of some novels or movies you’ve seen.
- What tone do they set?
- Do they reflect the tone of the actual novel or movie?
- Think about novels you bought in shops. Did their taglines attract you?
- If so, why? If not, why not?
- Practice writing taglines for three novels or movies you love.
- It’s always easier writing for other people’s work, and it’s good practice.
- Create a tagline for your novel:
- Write a shortlist of ten different taglines for your own novel.
- Mock-up book covers (or flashcards) of the different taglines.
- Trial your potential taglines with people in your target audience.
- Choose the tagline that gets the best response from the target audience, even if it’s not your personal favourite.
Don’t Forget
Remember, there are other elements that help you get a potential reader to read your book. See how to choose a novel title and how to design a book cover.
How to Write a Tagline: Need Help?
If you’d like help writing your tagline, please email me. Otherwise, please feel free to share the article using the buttons below.
