Woes Of Uncommonly Spelled Names

One of the many tribulations that plague a new and relatively unknown author is having your title constantly misspelled . I cannot even count the times people have called my book:

Brandon Hambric: The Farfield Curse

Bran Hambrick: The Fairfield Curse

Brian Hamric: The Farefeld Curses

to the point that I now just laugh when I see a new variation and add it to my growing list. I, obviously, am at fault for picking both a character name and a title that can be a hundred different words depending on how it is pronounced. Woe to me if I do a radio interview and tell people to go to BranHambric.com (for this reason, I also got TheFarfieldCurse.com, which is slightly easier to spell correctly).

Not only that, but my uncommonly-spelled name has doomed me to get the Caleb Nation equivalents on every site (AKA, CalebNation.com, Youtube.com/CalebNation, Twitter.com/CalebNation) in an attempt to ward off future squatters. Snapping up every Caleb Nation site was prompted by my research on who owns StephanieMeyer.com (the more common spelling of Stephenie Meyer’s name, whose real site is StephenieMeyer.com). Stephenie does not own it, unfortunately. A company does, and is demanding $4,695,200 for it. CalebNation.com costs me $10 a year. I think it’s worth the security

Another woe of having a book title made of obscure words is with bookstore search engines. Amazon.com, while being quite gracious in putting my book on the rankings (the highest we got was #85 in the 9-12 list, which merited a BlogTV party of course) has gotten me confused with Some Other Author who has written Some Other Book. Recent searches for Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse rendered these results at random times:

Maybe if Bran was a Hobbit.

Bran’s long-lost, super-smart cousin.

I Twittered about these a few days ago, and thankfully we all had a glorious laugh at the Amazon’s Search Monkey’s expense. Then, Laura at the Twilight Lexicon came up with something that might help Amazon’s failmonkeys: a Branagram.

I laughed so hard (funnier still: this post will appear on my Amazon.com page for Bran Hambric; perhaps they will notice it there?).

Still, there are even more advantages to having an uncommonly-spelled name. For some reason I’ve always liked that my name is spelled with a K instead of a C, despite the obvious wonders the initials CAN might have done for me if I was to become a motivational speaker. My uncommonly spelled name has served quite well over the past few years, including this glorious, one-line review from a blog:

“The author’s name is Kaleb Nation – I will buy it just for that!”

which makes all the misspellings and search-engine-fails completely worth it