I stumbled across the Dummies site the other day. I’m not making fun of anyone. I’m actually referring to those books like, Carpentry for Dummies, Accounting for Dummies and that sort of thing. The page I read through talked about the Writing A Romance Novel For Dummies book by Leslie Wainger of Harlequin. The excerpt dealt with writing the romance heroine.

There’s a lot of information in there dealing with how to pick the heroine’s name. Wainger says:

Unisex names are trendy now. But if you name your heroine Jamie or Sam (short for Samantha), be aware of one challenge in her future: back-cover copy. For a reader, flipping a book over and reading about the perfect romance between Jamie and Jake or Sam and Rafe can be a little jarring. Unisex names are less of a problem in the books themselves, but know that you’re creating a challenge on the marketing end.

I had to laugh at this because more than once I’ve read a heroine’s name in the first chapter and thought I was reading the hero’s name and got all confused. I then had to flip to the back cover and figure out if “Skip” was a man or a woman. Which is one of Wainger’s points. She says bad names or wrong names or even confusing names can pull a reader out of the story.

Do you agree? Does the name of the heroine impact you at all? In other words, when you read an Amanda Quick book and see a heroine named Igphinia, does it stop you at all? See, I never really thought about this until my editor asked for information on a novella I was writing for the 2008 holiday anthology, TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT, so the good folks at Kensington could write the back cover copy. It turned out Jill Shalvis, Donna Kauffman and I all planned to write novellas with heroines named Emma. What are the chances of that? Needless to say, two of us had to rename our heroines. But, the experience - in addition to making me laugh - did make me think about what goes into a heroine’s name.

What are your thoughts? Let me know and you could win a $15.00 Amazon gift certificate. I’ll pick a winner at random from those commenting.