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Names are a very important and sensitive issue, and I happen to be terrible at naming so I don't know why I'm chiming in.
I've been accused in reviews of choosing very trite, overdone and/or cliched names for my fantasy characters, but from some of the specific comments I receive, I suspect that the names I choose are not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon for people to relate to. There is a segment of readership out there that is turned off by names that sound too alien.
I happen to have a high tolerance for odd-sounding names because I've traveled to Ethiopia and Thailand where names can get pretty exotic. I can easily picture the same people who criticize my current character names, making fun of some of my actual Ethiopian friends' names (Eshesha, Yi-Ebiyo, Yihenew, Saba, Tefera, etc.). I won't even get into how weird names from Thailand can sound to a Western ear.
My tact was to choose names that had some sort of resonance to me, no matter how cryptic to the reader. So what I did, on one hand, was to modify place names for in the world that are important to me.
Another tact I've employed was to make anagrams of the names of some special people in my life as well as people in popular culture whom I either admire or detest. This helps make these characters resonate with me in a way that might not happen so easily if I named them more randomly.
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