I’m at a publishing workshop, learning how to write pitches, blurbs, and promotions. That drove home that my SSH book title might not be the best choice.
I’ve been planning to use the title “OpenSSH: Your Next Steps.” The book will take you to SSH competence, making sure that you use basic security precautions, master using keys for authentication, SSH tunneling, and so on. That title’s fine. As far as it goes.
But I think I can do better. I’m pondering calling it “SSH with OpenSSH and PuTTY” instead. The first title, I’d have to rely on keyword search to bring up SSH. This title brings all the key words into plain sight.
I learned with PGP and GPG that a title is important. If I had called that book “Email Encryption for Everyone,” I would have sold a lot more copies.
So, what do you lot think?
Title of everything that you write must begin from “Absolute” or “Ultimate” (I do appretiate your writings).
Like Absolute FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
So this book should be called – “Ultimate guide to OpenSSH: literally fullest guide to absolutely everything you’ll need to know about secure shell. I mean it. Period.”
Hope that helps.
When I saw the title in the first portion for review I thought “eh, makes sense”, but thinking about it from a marketing perspective it’s probably not ideal. If you put PuTTY in the title I suspect you’ll get more hits via Google on it. I think “SSH with OpenSSH and PuTTY” isn’t descriptive enough though – you’re going after the fact that beyond simply logging in, many people don’t understand what they can (and should) do with SSH. That target audience may see “SSH with OpenSSH and PuTTY” and think “well I can log in to SSH with PuTTY just fine!” and pass it up. So something more descriptive in addition to that would be good I think.
Actually, less than half of my books begin with “absolute.” I save that word for a comprehensive work on a subject. But I’m glad you like my stuff. 🙂
I’m contemplating a subtitle like “Keys, Automation, and Tunnels,” to help describe what it covers.
Titles are hard.
Maybe still a little bit exagerated, but what about something like “Mastering” as the prefix instead of “Absolute”? It may be not that far fetched, as you lay down the foundations to things a lot of ssh-users do not know about.
Hmmm… it looks like “Mastering” isn’t taken as a generic series title. That’s a good idea. Thanks!
Beware O’Reilly, they have got some Mastering titles. But I don’t know trademark status though.