What kind of title influences people’s interest in fiction books?

Title is an important feature that could affect the aesthetic judgement for cultural goods. Book is one of the cultural goods, but also experience goods. Which means that unlike other artworks such as paintings, photographs, etc, people cannot know its content immediately unless they decide to take time and read through it. Therefore, in order to let people experience books, they first have to be interested enough to decide to consume them. This characteristic makes book title have an important role which is a key factor to attract people so that they might want to search further information or actually experience a book. In this study, this role of book title is the main focus and the following research question is proposed: What kind of title influences people’s interest in fiction books? To figure out the answer to this question, three types of title conditions are prepared based on the literature review; informative title, title with a character’s name and whether there is a title or not. And based on the previous studies, the following three hypotheses are proposed; “People’s interest in a fiction book is greater when the title is informative.”, “People who prefer a certain fiction book genre tend to show high interest in a book in the genre when exposed to its informative title.” and “People who frequently buy books online tend to show higher interest in a fiction book through exposed to its informative title.” To test those hypotheses, the experiment was conducted online. In order to analyze the data collected, the multiple regression analysis was performed with aforementioned three title conditions as independent variables and participants’ interest in book stimuli as the dependent variable. The variables of participants’ reading and consumption habit and the control variables that are their socio-demographic characteristics were also added. From the result, it turned out that whether there is a title, and if so, what the title of a fiction book is, do not significantly influence people’s interest in fiction books. However, the variable of the genre preference, one of the variables of participants’ reading and consumption habit turned out to have a significant positive effect on the dependent variable. This means that the more people like the genre, the higher their interest gets towards books in the same genre.