Those "Girl" Books

I ran a sale last week on Blackbird Fly, and its sequel, The Girl in the Empty Dress, so maybe I’m checking my sales a little obsessively this week. I’ve become accustomed to un-fabulous ebook sales, to tell the truth, except when I can manage to run a BookBub ad (as I did last week.) All went well, and continues to go better than average (which is the point of buying advertising) but then out of the blue I saw a spike in The Girl in the Empty Dress over at Barnes & Noble.

You may have heard about this new mystery out titled The Girl on the Train. A debut, very good say those in the know, and a hot NYTimes bestseller. So my suspicious mind thinks, maybe those buyers of Empty Dress were really looking for that other book that starts with “The Girl.”

But then I realized how many books, many of them mystery or crime novels, begin that way, like —

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: the biggie. Plus the sequels
• The Girl Who Played With Fire, and the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
• The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes
• The Girl Who was supposed to die by April Henry
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King. (or… Wild Horses by someone else)
• The Girl Who Fell from the Sky or Saved the King of Sweden or Could Fly or Never Made Mistakes
•         and (I’m not making this up)
• The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making by Catherynne M. Valente (which sounds kind of amazing and won best children’s fiction from PW for 2011)
• And many more including Gone Girl, Not That Kind of Girl, plain old Girl.

So maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe you had to know which Girl you wanted if you were searching online for the Girl in the Empty Dress.

I love you, Nook readers!