@cstross also Google your main characters names, just to make sure you haven't accidentally written a novel whose main character's name is the same as the Croatian word for vagina... Or similar... Unless of course that was the aim... On which case go for it...
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Footnote: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS run a title search for your proposed title through Amazon's database, and maybe Goodreads and one other (non-AMZN) source, to make sure you're not stomping on someone else.
Also, run individual words through web search (NOT AI) to see if they overlap with a famous band/film/play/TV show/trademark.
Unless you're Stephen King you're coming from behind, and a top-level search hit on someone else's IP will swamp readers searching for your book.
@cstross
Calling one's debut novel "Blank Canvas" is very unfortunate. I wish the author best of luck when the book is published later this year.
@cstross Just title your books like the names of Amazon sellers:
The Great Gozili
Mosptnspg's Baby
One Hundred Years of VRURC
🙃
@cstross And if you're an obscure writer, hope that much better known writers do the same, especially during a unrelated storm between two other authors about "I'm successful so they stole my title". Anyone not looking at the copyright dates would have assumed that I was trying to hang on coat tails. It's happened to me at least twice, with different authors.
(I would be extremely surprised if it was anything other than pure coincidence. It's not exactly unlikely for multiple people to think a word sounds like a nice fit for their book.)
@JulesJones I gather there are currently at least two books titled "Tradwife" in the publishers databases.
@cstross "Only two?" she says only half jokingly.
I wonder if this has ever happened with "zeitgeist".
@cstross Oh, and "check first" goes double if you're a children's author. I know that someone else with a similarish name to me decided to call their book "Dolphin Dreams" well after mine was published, because it somehow got attached as an "other editions" to the Amazon listing for mine and vice versa. Hers was a children's book. Mine... is not. I looked for Amazon's author customer service contact as soon as I'd recovered from the shock, and pointed out that it might be a good idea to fix that immediately if not sooner.
@cstross helpful federated search in library catalogues all over the world: https://kvk.bibliothek.kit.edu/index.html?lang=en&digitalOnly=0&embedFulltitle=0&newTab=0
"c34ee35e-3ef8-4467-9c3d-177b73a958bc and the Mystery of the Blue Lagoon"
@cstross Is that the reason why my erotic novel titled "Moby Dick" tanked really hard? 😳
@cstross also Google your main characters names, just to make sure you haven't accidentally written a novel whose main character's name is the same as the Croatian word for vagina... Or similar... Unless of course that was the aim... On which case go for it...
@quixoticgeek @cstross
I collect fictional characters with mangled Scandy names. It's a truly proud tradition, including Jules Verne's magisterial and ridiculous ARNE SAKNUSSEMM. ❤️
@quixoticgeek In my current WIP, all the aristocratic families in the crapsack empire of shittiness are named after parasite species. It works, because parasites (and other organisms) are often named after their discoverer …
@cstross when I DM DnD games, I use plant diseases as the names for NPC bad guys... Works really well.
@quixoticgeek @cstross I'm not a writer, but if publishing in English, I'd check Urban Dictionary as well.
@Lemmus @quixoticgeek During copy edits one of the jobs is to compile a style sheet (for consistency). My go-to is that the dictionaries should be Merriam-Webster (I'm edited for US publication), then the Oxford English Dictionary (for coverage), then Urban Dictionary (for slang/contemporary usage).