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.
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