Titles in an eBook World

I figured out something when I started thinking about publishing online. Potential readers would be searching online for both me and my book. What could I do to stand out in a search that might get thousands of hits?

I knew I needed a good title to help hook in readers. Titles catch attention and convey some sense of what to expect from the book. I thought my working title was pretty good until I got curious and ran an online search for it. I came up with eight or ten books by that title and every one was a romance or erotica. Oops—not my genres. So I thought about it, looked at titles in my fusion of genres for a sense of word choices and phrasing, and ran searches on several ideas. That’s how I arrived at Carico Trails, a title that got no hits on Amazon.com leaving the way open for my future publication. I think it sounds appropriate to the book, has the potential to be part of a series, and is short enough to be readable on a thumbnail of the cover. [Something else I have observed—great print covers may not work well for ebooks. More on that some other time.]

The same search consideration applies in choosing my pen name. ‘Nancy Ballard’ gets a bunch of hits including the usual people-search sites and social media. Hard to stand out in that company.  I thought about using my initials, N.C., and my last name. Turns out that there is a place called Ballard, North Carolina, that dominates the search. But ‘Nan C Ballard’ thins the pack to the point that someone might actually find me. Unique but not weird; mine but not the everyday me; and it fits on the thumbnail cover pretty well too.


Once I realized how important Internet searches would be to marketing, I enjoyed using them to weed out options. (Have you ever “googled” your own name?) Now my book won’t get lost in the crowd—Carico Trails by Nan C Ballard. Of course, I still need to let people know there is something to search for.