Pretty radical approach but no wonder it's working. The article is about authors though isn't it? The editors I know of have been messing up my headlines afterwards without even asking me for permission, removing all the click worthy incentives for example.

If it helps back up the point of the original post, I went through ~40-50 titles for my "We Can Do Better Than This" post before settling on that title. And it sort of killed me inside that it didn't have any keywords of real, semantic value... but it was still the right title for the post.

It would be interesting to see someone collect and curate the titles that they don't use for posts with some discussion as to why they rejected those draft titles and why they ultimately settled on the title that they did. Metablogging!