your book's on sale

the importance of choosing a unique title

One of the coolest things about being an author is seeing your book sold in major retailers and bookstores.  You can imagine my surprise this morning when I googled my book's titled, Act Early Against Autism," and found that you can pre-order it on Walmart. What a thrill!

And, you can pre-order on Amazon.com for the already reduced price of $10.17—a $4.78 savings off the cover price of $19.95. Thank goodness, it qualified for FREE Super Saver Shipping! (Pssst. Get it on Walmart; it's only $9.76 but you pay 97 cents in shipping!!)

What prompted me to google my book's title is remembering the advice of David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, when he said that it is crucial to come up with a book title that is unique so that it lands at the top of the heap in search results.

When my editor and I agreed on my book's new title, I googled it, and nothing came up.

I immediately grabbed the domain name, as well as a few related ones, to secure my space in cyberspace. Don't forget your name, and its misspellings. Luckily, my husband had registered our last name years ago, so I not only had lytel.com but now jaynelytel.com.

A month later, I googled again and found my book title in a Penguin catalogue for new releases, and my editor had mentioned me in a MediaBistro.com interview as being a well-positioned author.

Today, I now have 193 hits on Google. Yahoo!

All this validates Scott's advice: It's worth the effort to come up with a unique name that you, and only you, own on the Internet.