An area that has caused considerable angst for us, is what to call your book. You have sweated and teased your books for months, spending hundreds of hours honing the best possible book from your raw material only to fall at the final hurdle.

I suppose I have thought about titles more than a little, as I have one very unhappy author who is upset over the title of a best seller. ’50 Shades of Grey’ was an unfortunate encroachment of our own Shades of Grey series, first written in 1995 and published by us since 2007.

There is no spin-off advantage over any confusion of titles, Mai’s books do not contain much in the way of sexually explicit S & M passages and ’50 Shades of Grey’ does not  reflect Mai’s story telling ability, quality of English and superb grammar.

From our perspective, we advise our authors to sit on Amazon or Google for an hour or so trying different titles and seeing how many times they have already been used, until they come up with a unique combination that fits their book. As I have suggested, this does not stop other people from taking your idea and copying it, but at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you were first.

Mai’s books suffered badly as they looked like spin-offs, instead of the originals. They are now being being re-released as the Ghostly Echoes Series. It was, however very poor practice by the other Author and Publisher who did not bother to check before they published their titles.