OK, so they exist.

No, it's much more persuasive than that. All you have to do is to go to his website, to the "convert's corner" and start reading the letters from people who have done exactly that; converted because of his book. Convert's Corner

I also know both Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens mentions the tons of letters they receive thanking them for opening their eyes. These books are doing a lot more for changing people's mind than you let on.

I very much doubt that a book titled "Comparing God and Science" would have attracted nearly so much attention though. Richard Dawkins was already fairly well known, and his books already had antireligious elements, but The God Delusion was far more famous than his previous books.

I find that Dawkins is often characterized as being rude on far less basis than people arguing for a different position would be, but he's certainly brazen, and it's made him a public figure in a way that he almost certainly wouldn't have been otherwise, and allows him to reach a lot more people.

There are books in support of atheism which take a less openly provocative approach, and they may reach an audience that titles like The God Delusion don't, but I can guarantee that fewer people picked up this book than The God Delusion.

But I think the title and presentation of 'The God Delusion' would dissuade a lot of religious people from picking it up at all, if they have any of my wanting-to-please-the-group-by-following-norms instincts...Some people who would curiously pick up a book called 'Comparing God and Science' or something similarly innocuous, might literally feel bad about reading a book whose very title implied that many of their friends and family were deluded.

I know religious people who I think were significantly provoked by the title into buying it. In neither case did one deconvert (as far as I can tell, again, for all I know they were closet atheists and the book made them genuinely religious by attacking their social group).

Apparently, the book gave them an experience of encountering ideas of an opposing ideology, and having not been swayed by it (perhaps due to the rhetoric), they (apparently) have more conviction than before.

One thing to take from this anecdote is that people differ from each other greatly in how they interpret and react to things. You're generalizing too much from your responses to writing styles and such.

Bear in mind that my anecdotes are of religious people reacting defensively and failing to be convinced by the book, exactly as you predict. Nonetheless, there is diversity among such people and it's not at all clear that a more restrained title would have had more success among religious people by any metric.

Whereas coherent atheist message control is impossible, the best option is probably to have media catering to all sorts of personalities. Those whose receptiveness to moderate books depends on the absence of strident books, or vice versa, may be untargetable.