Day: March 7, 2014

BookBub’s mystery word cloud

Most of us on this blog haven’t thought too much as yet about what we’ll name our books when they’re finished. In class, we talked about the burden a title must bear—a good one should suggest genre, theme, tone, maybe even setting and character. Getting it right is difficult.

The words used in book titles have trends, according to BookBub, an ebook promotion  services company. Using data from the last six months, BookBub analyzed 3,850 books to see which words turn up most frequently in titles. BookBub looked at multiple fiction categories, including mysteries, thrillers, women’s fiction, historical fiction, action and adventure, horror, contemporary romance, historical romance, children’s and middle grade, and religious and inspirational, and built word clouds to show the results. Which word was used the most often across all categories?

I’m guilty of ending sentences with prepositions. I sometimes use “hopefully” wrong. Maybe I say, “I feel bad” instead of “I feel badly.” Even worse, just recently, I said “absolutely” in an interview (an overused answer, though absolutely viable–just a pet peeve). But here, I will give just a few pet peeves I’ve encountered in the last week–things that made me go grrrrr:

I’dof instead of I’d have. Example: I’d of thought he’d buy me that ice cream. How lazy is that? I know the brain doesn’t always coordinate with the fingers. They type what they sense from those crafty synapses, but this one frightens me. It sounds right!

Nonplussed means confused, not indifferent. Grrrr. She was so nonplussed when Justin Bieber knocked on her door (I’d be indifferent–and confused).

Aspiration vs. inspiration. Zac Effron–though I loved him–mixed up these two at the Oscars. As he said the…