From the bridal website Just Jen

No, the title of my first novel is not “Hugs and Kisses”, and the truth is that my story could probably use a few more of them. Rather, the title of this book has always been “One” and its plot has always been about the ways humans are alike. You know, at some level we all are one.  Somehow, that theme wasn’t as conducive to love stories, much less hot sex scenes, as the themes of my other novels. Hopefully a suspenseful plot makes up for the relative lack of kissing in this book.

So why isn’t it called “One”? Well, somewhere along the way I decided that “One” had been used too often for it to be my book title. One is a wonderful sounding children’s book about colors by Kathryn Otoshi. One is a metaphysical fable for adults by Richard Bach (remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull?)  1 is the exact number of people it takes to make a difference in a delightful 80 page treatise by Dan Zandra and Kobi Yamada. One is an exciting sounding new suspense thriller from J.A. Laraque. You get the idea.  And that’s not even thinking about books called “The One” which are another whole matter.

So in an attempt to be clever, I decided to call my first novel “x raised to the power of zero”. I’m a geek you see, married to a math teacher, and x raised to the power of zero is one. Isn’t that cute? What I wasn’t counting on was (a) an awful lot of people have no idea what x raised to the power of zero is and (b) you can almost never type a superscript anywhere that matters. This includes on my own blog, and anywhere at Amazon, Goodreads, and every other avenue for publicity that a beginning author can turn to. Out of necessity my book became x0 because I couldn’t get it to show up any other way.

Worse yet, at smashwords (the other main sales outlet for independent authors) it is required that the title start with a capital letter and include lower case letters, meaning that one cannot call a book either x0 or X0. Unless one contacts a smashwords rep directly and pleads, which of course, is just what I did.

So now family and friends call my book “ex oh” and strangers sometimes call it “hugs and kisses”. It gets confused with Ashley Whitaker’s book xo about a woman with Turner’s Syndrom and Aspergers and my searchers often find Jeffery Deaver’s thriller xo about a stalker instead.

You’d think I would have learned my lesson about giving a book a title with a superscript in it. But no, apparently not.  I went and called my second book “y raised to the power of one”.  Why? Because it equals y.  But that’s another story.  Please visit my other blog Fire Dancing for Fun and Profit to hear more.