Like every weekend I went over to the Barnes & Nobel for my weekly dose of literary steroids. This time I had a plan to randomly choose about 15 – 20 books & see how marketers are using superlatives to get attention.

I left the Marketing & Sales section intentionally thinking that those would be the shelves screaming for attention. I went to the Self Help & Kid’s section instead. But I was wrong in my assumption!

95% of the books I randomly laid my hands on had some sort of a superlative in the title. “Biggest Challenge.. “, “Top 15 Ways…”, “The Best of…” titled books were all competing for attention. I paused to think. Are we running out of superlatives? What words would market products better without sounding fake?

Much like the banner blindness syndrome that render website advertisements ineffective, the book publishers would also suffer from some sort of a title blindness. Much like we fail to see the best ads on websites,  do we ignore the books containing certain words that we intrinsically know to be a hype?

Book marketers do not suffer the wrath of Google for hyping up the names of books, or even to name a book that has no resemblance to the content, but if visitors to book stores starting to ignore books from their names, the situation would be far worse.

How do you react when you read a book with a superlative in the title? How many times do you go in for a book with titles like “Best of..” or “The Greatest…” or even “The Most Important…”?