Your publisher will tell you. The most important thing about any book is its title. Get that right and you've caught your reader. It's the hook. You dangle it in front of them. Intriguing. Enticing. It promises so much but says so little. Their imagination does the rest. They have to buy it. You've got them.
And so it is that, if investment books were ever ranked by their title alone, The Zurich Axioms, a moderately small work of 164 pages by a Swiss/American writer called Max Gunther, would be the best ever. Sure, The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham's investment top seller - is a pretty good title; it uses flattery and we're all a sucker for that. And The Alchemy of Finance - remember, George Soros's venture into accessible investment writing? - has its attractions; yet that title is just a tad too contrived, so obviously thought up by a clever publicist.
There are many other good ones: for example, One up on Wall Street (US fund manager Peter Lynch on how he did it); The Midas Touch (investment writer John Train on Warren Buffett); The Money Game (broadcaster George JW Goodman writing as 'Adam Smith'). Short, punchy, alluring, all of them. But none beats The Zurich Axioms. With a title like that it could have been a prequel to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. With just three words it conjures images of hidden wealth, secret societies, inviolable principles. Spiced with a bit of sex and mystery, that would be a page-turner. But Mr Gunther got there first and made a speculators' 'how to' from it, which was published in 1985 in both the US and the UK.