I struggle with titles. They keep me up at night. Distilling the essence of a novel into a few words can be agony.

Or ecstasy.

Some of the all-time greats suffered their own travails. Did you ever see Trimalchio in West Egg on anybody’s shelf? No—that’s because the publisher prevailed, and F. Scott Fitzgerald agreed to call his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

(Anybody else think the trailers to the new movie are over the top? But I digress.)

Cover of The Sun Also Rises

Maybe you’ve seen Fiesta. But the book we’ve all read is The Sun Also Rises. Again, the publisher prevailed. All I can think is, What a tough job. Can you imagine telling F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway that their titles sucked?

Mary and I were discussing the ordeal of naming a book recently and, in true MBA fashion, decided to run the numbers. Ordinarily, I assign spreadsheets to the same bucket as root canals.

But hey, I thought, what’s to lose?

Methodology and full disclosure: our universe was limited. We looked at the top fifteen titles on the New York Times Print and eBook Fiction Bestsellers list from February 3 of this year to March 10.

Then, we analyzed titles according to four broad categories: i) number of words, ii) number of syllables, iii) starts with what word, and iv) about what. The last category, about what, probably needs the most explanation. We studied whether bestselling titles referenced characters, emotions, events, places or whether they included numbers.

Here’s what we learned:

1. 91 percent of the books had three words or less in their titles.
2. 77 percent had fewer than five syllables. So if you’re trying to strut your vocabulary, forgetaboutit. Just as aside, “Forgetaboutit” is a good title according to the first point, but not so good according to the second. I would have called this post, The Title Maker, but that’s one syllable too many.
3. 29 percent begin with “the” or “a.” No big surprise. There will always be a spot on the NYT bestsellers list for John Grisham. I loved The Racketeer.
4. Only 3 percent started with gerunds. Frankly, I was shocked. Defending Jacob is great, both the title and the book. Gerunds, to my way of thinking, are outstanding tools to convey a noble quest. They also work for Hollywood. Saving Private Ryan is one of the great movie titles of all time.
5. 43 percent are emotional, which, okay, okay, is somewhat subjective. We included titles like Hopeless or Lost to You in this category, which tends (not always) to be the province of romance.
6. 29 percent are about a character that makes us scream for more. I’m thinking Beautiful Bastard, Gone Girl, or Alex Cross, Run.
7. Only 11 percent are about a place, Safe Haven and Private Berlin.
8. None of the titles in our universe used alliteration, and nobody attempted the “About Trifecta” of character, place, and alliteration as I did with The Gods of Greenwich.
9. Only 11 percent convey an event. We included titles like The Power Trip and Collide in this category. If 29 percent of the NYT bestselling novels during this period had titles about people, does this mean that character trumps story?
10. Sex dominated the 17 percent of bestsellers that used numbers in their titles. If I ever see Fifty Shades of anything again, I may send The Fifth Assassin to shoot the book with The Third Bullet.

Mary and I also learned that an MBA is the wrong degree to conjure up a great title. Spreadsheets don’t cut it. What we really need is somebody from Silicon Valley to code a Title Maker app similar to all those random name generators.

Please?