It Says What?

A couple of posts ago, I talked about the importance of making sure your intended book title is unique online and if people search for just part of it, no nasty surprises come up.

Another consideration along this same line is how does your prospective title read when it's all smashed together as a url? Here's an example: Northwest Ink Slingers: Murder, Mystery and Ugly Tattoos. (Note- I just made this up, didn't check, I have no idea if it exists in any way shape or form).

If you set up a domain to point to a book page or wanted to build a site around the book, a logical shortened form for the url might be nwestinkslingers.com Notice any other words that you didn't intend to be there?

In my opinion, either the book title needs to be reworked or, at minimum, there should be another try at a domain name. In addition, I believe this kind of analysis is particularly important if you write for kids or even young adults. If a four letter or unacceptable word can be found within a url, they're probably going to find it and I doubt that's what you'll want them to focus on.

It has been said that any publicity is good publicity, but I don't think you'd want that publicity to come from people passing around your link just to make fun of it. Take the time to do this extra step and you'll have one less thing to worry about.

Good Writing & God Bless,
Cheryl Pickett