Back at the end of November 2024, I released my 7th book — a Christmas romance — and, to be totally blunt, I did just about everything wrong with it; from releasing it too late for the Christmas rush, to a marketing ‘plan’ that wasn’t actually a ‘plan’ at all, and which relied almost entirely on one of my videos about the book going viral on TikTok, even though that had never happened to me in my life, and I had absolutely no idea how to make it happen now. It was a masterclass in How Not to Release a Book, basically.
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Of all of the things I got wrong with that release, though, the thing I got most wrong was the title of the book — which was, as some of you will recall, The Ghostwriter of Christmas Past.
Now, I loved that title. I’d come up with it all by myself, and I was really quite pleased with it; especially given how perfect it was for the book. Or so I thought.
Terry hated it. He argued strongly for something different, but, try as we might, we just couldn’t come up with something we both loved. And so, The Ghostwriter of Christmas Past it was. At the time I’d come up with the title, I’d had a look on Amazon to see if there were any other books using that name, and had found just one, which had been out for a few years, didn’t appear to be being actively marketed, and which had a very different cover style to my book.
Now, this still wasn’t ideal, obviously. In an idea world, you’d want your book to have a totally unique name, which no one else has ever thought of, let alone used. In reality, however, books share titles all the time, and, as titles can’t be copyrighted, there generally isn’t an issue with this, as long as you make an effort to differentiate the two (or three, or four, or however many there are) books.
So, we decided to go ahead with Ghostwriter, on the grounds that my book seemed unlikely to be confused with the existing one … and then, on the very same day it was released, so was another book with exactly the same title.
So, now we had three books with identical titles, two of which had been published on exactly the same day, which … yes. I have no idea what went on there — and, to be totally honest, it doesn’t really matter now, and may have had absolutely no effect on my book anyway. We will never know.
What we did know, however, was that although the book sold moderately well, and got some amazing reviews (I think, to date, it’s still the best reviewed book I’ve released…), it was not the success we’d hoped for. Sales were slow. Everyone was so distracted by Christmas itself that they didn’t seem to have time to read books about Christmas. Someone on Bluesky created a post making fun of the fact that there were now three books on Amazon called The Ghostwriter of Christmas Past — two of which had been released on the same day— and, like how unoriginal do you have to be as an author to copy someone else’s title and release date? LOL. How we laughed.*
(*We didn’t. To be totally honest, by this point I’d already started to deeply regret choosing that particular title, and was beginning to think the book was cursed…)
What’s more, December proved to be an impossible time to market the book, because I was so busy with other stuff I felt like I was struggling just to keep my head above water all month, and, by the time January rolled around, I realized it was probably too late to start now, because Ghostwriter’s title and cover placed it very much in the ‘Christmas book’ category, and while there obviously are people who’re willing to read Christmas books all year round, it just doesn’t tend to be something a lot of people are actively searching for once Christmas itself is past, unfortunately. (And I don’t blame them.)
I’d well and truly messed up, basically; I’d spent precious months writing a book hardly anyone had read, and now there was nothing I could do about it until next Christmas, when there would, once again, be a brief window of opportunity to try to sell it. So, my best reviewed book seemed destined to also be my least-read book, which was … a bit of a mood killer, to say the least.
Just to add to the general ‘missed opportunity’ vibe that surrounded this whole thing, almost as soon as Ghostwriter was released, I started to notice a growing trend for ‘books about books’ — or about authors, editors, and more or less anyone else connected to the publishing industry. This has been going on for a while now, but lately there seems to be more of those books than ever — which was particularly galling to me, because Ghostwriter was a perfect match for that particular trope, being the story of two authors, and the book that changed both of their lives.
“We should really have marketed it as a book-about-books, rather than as a Christmas book,” I said, more than once. “At least then we’d have been able to market it all year, rather than just at Christmas.”
“Well, what if we changed the title?” suggested Terry.
Now, ordinarily, I’d have been completely against this. Changing the cover is one thing, of course, but changing the title of a book is basically the ‘nuclear’ option. You have to be incredibly careful to make sure people who’ve already read the book don’t try to buy it again, thinking it’s a new release — and there’s obviously no guarantee that it’ll sell under the new name, either.
But.
In this case, not only did we feel like we had nothing to lose by doing it, we also felt there was potentially a lot to gain from it. And, to make a long story short, that’s why The Ghostwriter of Christmas Past is now called The Book Feud:
The story inside is exactly the same, so, you know, please don’t buy it if you already have it as Ghostwriter (unless, of course, you particularly want to have a copy with the new title, in which case, hi, I love you…). The changes only went live this week, so I don’t even have a copy of the paperback myself yet, and it’s obviously way too soon to know if it’ll make any different at all to its sales (At the end of the day, it is still set around Christmas, which might put continue to work against it the rest of the year…), but I really wanted to give this book the best possible chance of finding its ideal readers, as opposed to just giving up on it altogether, so … well, here we are, and, if nothing else, I guess we’ve at least learned a good few lessons along the way. Like, ‘think very carefully about your book title, kids’, say. And ‘don’t try to kid yourself you’ll be able to accomplish anything at all in December, Amber.’ Yes.
Suffice it to say, I will probably never attempt to write another Christmas book. But if you’d like to read my book set at Christmas on this sunny spring day, you’ll find it here.
