CAN YOU BE CERTAIN YOU HAVEN'T PICKED A SIMILAR BLOG TITLE???

I don't know the answer to your questions, but I'd like to ask you this: Why is your thread title all in caps, as if you are screaming at us? And why did you use such large text in your original post?

Do you think we are all hard of hearing and/or seeing here?

As long as you're not blatantly ripping off someone's blog address/name to steal views like "Ammazon.com" then you should be fine. If Google turns up with nothing when you type in the blog name, then use it.

When I type in "Lizzy's Dark Fiction" in Google, the only results that show up are the ones related to my blog (at least for a few pages of results). There aren't any blogs with similar names so if someone is searching for me, that's what they find.

Did you try putting it in quotes when you looked on google?

A dumb question: Why isn't the title of your blog your name? I'm amazed at the number of authors trying to promote themselves, give the blog a fancy name, and their name appears nowhere on the blog.

The title of my blog is my author name, that way if I ever become famous (ha! yeah right) people can find it easier.

Yeah, I'm in the "use your name" camp. I couldn't use "J.W. Alden" as the name because the url was taken, so I went with the next best thing. But I made sure my name was in there somewhere (and my full name is on the front page as well).

I think the same way when I see people using the name of their book as their twitter or facebook page. That might be good for getting the name of your book out there now, but what happens when the next one comes out? Start all over again? Make yourself the brand and you don't have to.

Because not all of us are blogging as authors. I don't have an author blog, but I do have a blog where I talk about the apocalypse and a blog where I talk about books and reading.

With the apocalypse blog, there's another with a similar-ish name, but not exactly the same. This has never been a problem, as even though we cover similar areas, we do so in a completely different tone with a completely different focus. We have different markets, as it were. With the book blog, there's quite a few with a similar name, and a few facebook groups and twitter accounts (dead) with the same name. but I don't mind about that - I have no real ambitions for the book blog to become big and I don't update frequently or do more than the bare minimum to promote it.

If you want your blog to garner a lot of attention and to stand out, than a unique name is important. If not, I don't think there's any issue with accidentally having a similar name as another blog, especially if you aren't copying their content.

If you can't find a blog called that by searching for it in quotes, and it's not a common phrase, it's probably fine.

The common phrase thing is partly because a lot of random pages will obscure the results, and partly because everyone and their parrot will use that name.

I don't always blog as an author. Besides, if I ever get 'famous' the title of my blog will reward readers who are in on the references. When I rebuild my website, that will be under my pen name.

You google it first.

Then you are probably good.