Search Engine Consequences of Characters' Names

How my web pages and blogs appear on on search engine results never ceases to amaze me.  In short, be careful of the names you apply to your characters.  My web denseness has tangled me in a strange Google results.  Fortunately the spider's web hasn't caught this blog yet.  I've landed myself in interesting web territory two times now.

First was labeling my characters "half-elven".  When I started writing about the half-elven of the Far Isles ... I knew J. R. R. Tolkien had popularized the concept.  For years, I had reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy yearly.  On the other hand, I knew there are many kinds of elves in European folklore ... and figured they could breed with humans as well as any other elves.

What I didn't know was the gaming community [eg. Dungeons and Dragons players] has also made a huge mental and web investment in the abilities and quirks of beings resulting from human/elf matings.  The prime pages of the Google results are filled with their web listings.  I'm happy to appear on the third page.  Maybe ... some day ... I'll get enough smarts and energy to play with my meta tags to get the Half-Elven home page higher.

More recently, I bounced my head against another search engine problem when I started working on my free story blog ... site ... whatever. A new phenomena reared its presence when I tracked the statistics for this site.  I had visits from a huge number of TinyUrls that linked back to porn sites.

Seems there's an extreme sex character [web presense?] by the name of Renna.  So, while Renna remains one of my characters, I've been changing the emphasis of the site. Until the search engines change, I'm sure I'm disappointing a lot of people.


Bottom line:  You might check the names of your characters before you put them on the web.

"Taking Vengeance" Trailer Copy

Next promotion step: writing a trailer for the WolfSinger Half-Elven novelette, Taking Vengeance.  Pulling it out of my head turned out to be more laborious than pulling a boat along the Volga River.  [Yo. Ho. Heave. Ho.]  You don't want to know how many hours I've spent to come up with the words below. [ I spent less time editing/revising two 10 page short stories. ]

As things stand at the moment, here's the copy I've come up with:

Once, Mariah was a warrior hero who saved her Half-Elven people.

Now, she’s shunned … by the ruler, who was once her comrade-in-arms.

Abandoned … by her ring-mate, who disappears to spy on their southern enemies.

Alone … when pirates leave her daughter at death’s door.

Now, is the time for Mariah to belt on her sword again and seek vengeance.

Taking Vengeance by M. K. Theodoratus [www.half-elven.com]

Available from WolfSinger Publications in May (?) 2011.

[list of where available to come later]

I'm sure the script is too long, but I could drop the first sentence.  Still, it's the best I can do from all the tips I've gleaned from the 1st Turning Point blog site, always your site for lots of tips on promoting your books.  I'm just glad my NYC daughter's Christmas present was doing the trailer for YouTube.

Hey.  If you have any suggestions on how I might improve the script, I'd appreciate hearing them.