You might have noticed that there are a lot of colons flying around in these titles:
It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life.
Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games.
Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever.
Yeah. They used no less than twenty-four words to describe the basketball team that won the 1992 Olympics. Why couldn't they have just called it "Dream Team" and felt good about that?
Well, we have two theories. One: some study showed that people like the way those titles sound, so publishers push them on the authors. Two: the colon/explanation format is the best way to quickly and easily communicate what the book is about.
We'll go with what's behind Door #2: there's just something inspiring about pairing an informational sentence with a snappy phrase. (See what we did there?)