I don’t think they know it, but Scott Simpson and Jason Kottke are reviving a practice made famous more than 80 years ago by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius.
From The Believer, September 2008:
Stodgy-sounding socialist treatises were repackaged as self-help titles; books with vague-sounding subject matter were renamed with provocative teasers like “The Truth About…” or “A Little Secret That…” When Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy was advertised as How to Argue Logically, sales jumped from a few thousand to thirty thousand per year; when Whistler’s Ten O’Clock was renamed What Art Should Mean to You, sales quadrupled. Haldeman-Julius had learned this technique from his days as a newspaper headline writer, and he made no apologies about his retitling strategy. “An important secret of successful titling is to be imperative,” he wrote, “to insist in the very name of the book that the reader have it. Now Life Among the Ants was much improved in its distribution by extending it thus: Facts You Should Know About Ant Life…. The public today wants facts and it likes being told that it is getting facts.”
As Haldeman-Julius readily found out, the public also liked titillation. Guy de Maupassant’s The Tallow Ball sold three times better when entitled A French Prostitute’s Sacrifice, and sales of Gautier’s Fleece of Gold jumped from six thousand to fifty thousand when it was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress. “What could Fleece of Gold mean to anyone who had never heard of Gautier or his story before?” Haldeman-Julius wrote. “Little, if anything…. The Quest for a Blonde Mistress [is] exactly the sort of story it is.” In this way, a book about Abelard and Heloise was sold as The Love Affair of a Priest and a Nun.
Haldeman-Julius published the Little Blue Books, as chronicled wonderfully in the aforelinked Believer article.