Google Yourself Lately?

I did a couple of days ago.

And it can be very eye opening. Luckily, I'm a 9o-year-old woman from Colorado who does something with her state fair every year. Or maybe I could be a mid-40's woman who comments on writer's blogs and discovered this blog as the last entry on the first page. Or I'm an endocrinologist. *WooHoo*

So far I'm pretty clean. But you might want to check yourself out. For all you know, you might share a name with a stripper, or KKK head honcho, or porn star, or a leftist radical that the government is closely watching. Now, if you write erotica and you share your name with a porn star--more power to you! Bet you will get some good hits for your new book!

But if you write children's novels and you share the name with a porn star, you might seriously consider changing to a pseudonym. See To Pseudonym or Not (1/3/09) {I'd link it, but I don't know how to link to my own blog, sorry}, and start working on name recognition.

It's simple. Put your name in the search engine (google, webcrawler, yahoo) and hit enter. Now, there are various tips out there. Use quotes around the name tends to cut down on the site from randomly grabbing your first name and matching it with someone else's last name. Or you could use + in between each part of the name. This also tightens the hits some.

"Margaret A. Golla"

Margaret+A.+Golla

Just because you have a bazillion google hits, it doesn't mean they represent anything current. One of my first hits was from a blog comment two years ago. And yeah, I do comment on blogs a little more often than that.

The reason I googled myself was to see who else might have my name. I write in two very different genres and though I've bought two domain names I haven't set either one up yet. I googled myself and found out Margaret A. Golla comments on many, many topics, but M. A. Golla does not.

Guess which one I'm using for my kid's books?

Write on!