Quite a lot, apparently.
I'm quite happy with my new novel The Book of Pain; or more precisely as happy as I'm ever going to be with any of my books.
I did a considerable amount of research to ensure every historical detail was accurate. In fact I researched it to death. Every part but one it seems. The name.
A few days ago I googled it to see if Smashwords or even less hopefully, Amazon had entered it as they sometimes do, and found to my horror that I'm not the only writer of The Book of Pain.
Even one would be bad, but upon further checking I discovered ten books with exactly the same title. I know nothing is unique and everything is just a rehash of something previously written. And even though none of them apart from mine are novels, I really should have checked instead of feeling quite smug and hoping it was unique.
Lesson learnt.
Now that really is a pain! Still I’m sure all the others are just pale imitations compared to yours. :-)
ReplyDeleteVery droll. I thank you. It remains to be seen, after umpteen downloads of the free bit, only one sale so far. Within another week or so they should have made up their minds as to whether they want it. Fingers crossed.
ReplyDeleteThe same thing happened to me with my first novel--Storm Chaser was such an awesome title, of course it had already been used several times! I learned my lesson with the sequel, which had the working title of Storm Damage ... a title that had also been used more than once.
ReplyDeleteThere was once a novel called The Sunbird, all of different genres, and all did very well, so I'll make sure in future but I'm not going to sweat it overly.
ReplyDeleteMy friend, when I wrote 'Always' I did a thorough search everywhere and anywhere, and much to my delight, I was the only one using that title. However, after I published it, there were tons of books by that name. Guess too many of us are writing these days.
ReplyDeleteWe've both learnt from our mistakes. That's why I used Kongomato in my trilogy. At least I'm guaranteed to be different with that one.
ReplyDeleteI just realised I didn't include the number of the novels called Sunbird - it was eleven.