Well, if you’re an author or want to be one, everything. Your name is the most important part of your brand, and you have to make sure that it is protected at all costs.
By far the best way to protect your name online is to register it everywhere you can – along with the titles of your major projects. That includes domain names (even if you don’t have a website yet), Twitter accounts, Facebook groups, YouTube channels – in fact, just about any social networking site that allows the registration of account names.
The vast majority of these accounts are free to set up and the time it takes to open the accounts will be worth it to stop anyone hijacking your name and possibly posting inappropriate material under it. A lot of celebrities were slow to realise that about Twitter and, in its early days, the micro-blogging service was awash with imposters tweeting as though they were the stars themselves.
Even domain name registration is a lot cheaper than it used to be. The service I use is 123-Reg, where a .co.uk domain costs just £2.99 for a year, and the .com equivalent for £9.99 a year. Many other domain registration sites – such as GoDaddy – are available, so find one that has the best deal for you. When I began to suspect that my Scream Street series might sell, I registered screamstreet.co.uk to use for the official website – but was disappointed to discover that the screamstreet.com domain had already been registered by someone else. In the end, when the series launched in the US, I had to buy the .com domain name from the owner at a much higher price.
I’m already planning to buy the domain names for what I hope will be my next series of books.
A handy online tool to check whether your name is still available at various websites can be found here: http://namechk.com/
So – what are you waiting for? Get registering!
Tommy
