The Shocking Truth Behind Sharing My Book Title With a Stranger Revealed!
The Short Of It
Practicalities of book title selection
I’ve indie published two collections of short stories. When you indie publish/self-publish, all the decisions about your book production and design begin and end with you, even if you do decide to hire some professional help (like a line editor or a book cover designer) along the way.
This includes your book title.
So what happens when you come up with the perfect book title — perhaps one you brainstormed and refined for ages, or perhaps one you’ve had from the beginning and can’t imagine changing — and you search it up on the internet and some other book is already using it?
The reality is…
Someone probably does have the same book title as you. Certain turns of phrase, puns, idioms, and quotes tend to pop up in more than one person’s brain. Complete originality when working with something that is typically one to a half dozen words in length is a difficult measure. In other words, don’t immediately panic and go back to the drawing board for titles. There may be hope for your precious title yet.
The scale of considerations…
There are some things to consider when judging your book title against books with the same or similar titles.
Is it the same title as a major bestseller or a major classic? (Presumably something somehow your head is in the sand about.) Look, you don’t want to name your indie book Jurassic Park or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. But these are very specific titles.
More generic titles that match famous books might not be as big as a problem. Go on Amazon now and look at how many books have the title The Outsider, including Stephen King, and that doesn’t count all the results for one of my personal favorite books (with a plural ending), The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
