I need to change the name of the book I'm writing

It turns out it's NOT a Christmas romance after all...

Picture it. You come up with what you think is the perfect name for your book. You’re feeling pretty clever. You Google it, and there are no other books with that name. Check you, with your mad book-naming skillz! You go girl! Or something.

So you set up a pre-order for the book in question, and you start writing it. Maybe you even buy yourself a cute little customized notebook with the book title on it, so you can use it to write down your important thoughts about this work in progress of yours. Maybe it’s pink, like the book cover will be. Maybe you sometimes pick it up, and stroke it lovingly, thinking, “One day Max will probably be able to auction this off for millions, once the book has become a bestseller. One day this will change my life.”

(You might do these things, I mean. I obviously would never. But, like, you could if you wanted to, is what I’m saying.)

Everything’s going great. Well, I mean, it’s going OK. Ish. But you’re on track. It’s all systems go. You’ve even started marketing the book on TikTok (or what passes for ‘marketing’ when you’re an anxious introvert who’s scared to draw too much attention to your work in case people are mean about it…) under the title you chose. What could possibly go wrong?

A couple of months after you set up your pre-order, an advert pops up on your Facebook feed. It appears to be for your upcoming book, only with a different cover, and a very slightly different title. Like same title, but one word is different, and it means the same as the word you chose, so it’s the same, really.

“That’s strange,” you think. “I haven’t set up any adverts for this book? Or tweaked the title?”

And no. No, you haven’t. Because it’s not an advert for your book, is it? Nope, it’s an advert for another book, with an almost identical title.

The Other Book is also now available for pre-order. It’s due to be released just a few weeks before yours.

The two books on release day.

It’s a coincidence, obviously. Just, you know, One of Those Things. But it’s One of Those Things that will now make it look like you shamelessly copied Other Author, who is — naturally — far more successful and better-known than you are, and who probably has better hair, into the bargain.

The upshot of which is that I need to change the title of my book.

Fortunately, this isn’t as much of a disaster as I’ve made it sound with all that DRAMA up there. Sorry ‘bout me. I have plenty of time to do it, for one thing. No one except me will particularly notice, or even care, for another. And, if I’m totally honest, the plot of the book has actually changed quite a bit since I came up with this title, so it’s not as great a fit for it as it was when I started, meaning I could choose to see this as an opportunity to come up with an even better title.

I could do that. The problem is, though, I have no idea what this Even Better New Title should be. Or, I mean. I do. I want to call it The Ghostwriter of Christmas Past: a title that came to me last week, and which I’ve been chuckling to myself over ever since. But this is not a good title says my husband, who is in charge of marketing the books. It’s too long, which means it won’t fit neatly onto a book cover, or look good in thumbnail size. Quite a lot of people won’t know what a ‘ghostwriter’ is, which will be off-putting. Also, he just doesn’t like it. So there’s that.

Another option is to call it The Snow Globe, because, well, there’s a snow globe that features prominently in the book. Also it’s kind of a book-about-a-book, and the book the book is about (R U FOLLOWING DIS?) is called The Snow Globe. So calling my book The Snow Globe would definitely make sense. But I think that’s a bit bland and over-used, and although there are (as far as I know) no other Snow Globe’s due to launch at exactly the same time as mine, there are still quite a few of them out there, which puts me off.

(Also, I don’t know why I think this, but I feel like The Snow Globe has semi-serious vibes, which suggests it might be a bit earnest and literary, and this is a rom-com which is — crucially — written by me. And I am not very earnest and literary, so…)

Anyway, here’s the blurb for the book:

Holly Hart lives in a town where everyone’s obsessed with two things:

1. Christmas and...

2. Holly’s ex-boyfriend, Elliot Sinclair... who just so happened to write a bestselling Christmas novel based on his relationship with Holly, before disappearing from her life completely.

All of this makes life pretty tough for a Christmas-hating grinch like Holly, who’s completely given up on romance. But when she’s given the opportunity to ghostwrite a Christmas romance novel for popular author Vivienne Faulkner, Holly sees an opportunity to get her revenge on Elliot by using the book to tell her own — true — version of the story.

It seems like the perfect plan. But now Elliot’s suddenly back in town — and rumor has it he’s working on a new book, too. Can Holly write the perfect Christmas romance, while somehow avoiding her ex… or will the ghosts of Christmas past continue to haunt them both?

Here’s where you can pre-order it, if you’re into that kind of thing.

And here are some of the titles I’m considering, so you can vote vote and tell me which one you’d be most likely to pick up, if you were in the business of picking up Christmas-themed rom-coms:

Just to add: some of these — or variations of them — do already exist, which, despite what you might think given all of the OMGDRAMA above (Which, again, apologies…), isn’t necessarily a huge deal. Lots of books have the same or similar names, after all (You can’t copyright book titles, and it’s almost impossible to come up with something that’s 100% original); this one is only really an issue because these two books will be released at (almost) the same time too, and I just feel I’d rather go with a different title, than have people on the Internet accuse me of copying. Which, given that people on the Internet once accused me of fabricating a random tweet about bottled water, is always a possibility.

Anyway. Please vote in my poll, or just leave me a comment telling me what to do. Please and thank you.