Early on in the writing business, say circa 2002, I made a mistake.  I didn’t use a pen name or pseudonym and I should have (more on this later).  Many authors do.  There are pros and cons.  I’ll analyze some of them here.  First, let me say that while “pseudonym” is used more in the writing business, pseudonyms go beyond writing.  The email address corresponding to my contact page, steve@stevenmmoore.com, is an alias, a type of pseudonym that points to my private email—yes, I have just the one account, probably something I should change (spammers, beware—I have both accounts equipped with heavy spam traps).  Aliases are internet pseudonyms that people use in most of the same ways authors use them—distinguishing different public personas or areas of expertise; private monikers from public ones; hiding certain personal characteristics, like sex, race, religious affiliation, or political views; or pretending we have some personal characteristics we don’t have (scam artists use that all the time, like the Nigerian princess who needs your help to get her royal but deposed father’s money out of the country).

Some famous pseudonyms, in fact, have nothing to do with writing.  I first saw L L Cool J, short for “Ladies Love Cool James,” on that first NCIS spinoff, NCIS Los Angeles; I learned that James Todd Smith was a rapper before he was an actor.  Actors and singers often become known by their pseudonyms; some go as far as changing their birth name to their pseudonym.  Israel Beilin became Irving Berlin; Reginald Kenneth Dwight became Elton John.  Angelina Jolie Voight became Angelina Jolie, presumably to distinguish herself from her father, John Voight, with whom she’s had a rocky relationship, but Drew Barrymore, Jane Fonda, and George Clooney kept their famous relatives’ last names.  You can have fun finding many other examples.

One famous writing pseudonym is Mark Twain.  In the eighth grade, I wrote an essay about Samuel Clemens titled “His Pen Name was Mark Twain,” maybe the beginning of my fixation on clever-sounding titles?  (I work hard on the ones for my ebooks.)  The origin of that pseudonym is a fascinating story in its own right, but not as much as the case of O. Henry, where William Sidney Porter used it to hide his prison background when publishing his short stories.  A recent pseudonym usage that made headlines, probably for the wrong reason, was J. K. Rowling writing her detective story, The Cuckoo’s Calling, as Robert Galbraith.  Funny thing about that: the book had poor sales until it was leaked that the author was really J. K. Rowling.

Does an author need a pseudonym?  Depends.  I mentioned J. K. Rowling aka Robert Galbraith because that case shows that a pseudonym probably jerks you back to newbie status when you set out to be recognized in another genre.  Even in that case, it might be worth your while.  Suppose you’re a middle level or YA author but you want to try erotica.  Parents might frown if you use the same name when their little darlings download one of your erotica books, thinking it’s another good YA adventure story.  Or, maybe you want to keep your sci-fi writing distinct from your romance novel writing, and you want to keep both distinct from your real name used for that Top Secret Pentagon clearance.  You should use your real name for the Pentagon, of course, but you could use pen names for the other two.

The Pentagon example illustrates an old use of pen names, hiding who you are.  Women in the 19^th century often had to counter the sexist cultural bias against female writers.  George Eliot was the author of Silas Marner, but her real name was Mary Ann Evans.  George Sand was Frederic Chopin’s one-time lover, but her real name was Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, although she went by Aurore.  These were women pretending to be men.  Less common back then, but maybe more common now for romance and erotica novels, is where men pretend to be women, perhaps more a 21^st century phenomenon, because it’s a fact that women readers outnumber men and women often trend towards romantic type of writing—from erotica to cozy mysteries.  In other words, a choice of pseudonym might aid you within a certain genre as an important female or male contributor.  Whether male or female, authors who are clergy probably would also want to keep their real names untarnished if they’re writing steamy romances on the side just for giggles.

Hiding can go to extremes.  In elementary school, I read a lot of comics…and Hardy boys mysteries.  The Nancy Drew mysteries were written for girls, so I didn’t touch those.  As it turns out, Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon are collective pseudonyms for two groups of authors who churned these stories out for their respective publishers (maybe the same?).  Maybe Congress should take lessons…sometimes committees actually work and don’t always have to follow that infamous IQ rule (the IQ of a committee is determined from the lowest IQ among the members divided by the number of members, which is as good an explanation for Congressional stupidity as any other).

Some more recent hidden pseudonyms, where either the real writer or writing committee isn’t known, can be found in the Castle mystery series, the pseudonym being Richard Castle, the character in the hit ABC TV show, who is a writer, and the Boston Teran book series.  I reviewed the latter’s Gardens of Grief for Bookpleasures a few years back—an excellent book about the Armenian genocide—and learned about that “mysterious author” at the time.  But I received a private email from someone who claimed that Boston Teran is a real person, not a committee.  I’ve also mentioned the mysterious Richard Castle here in these pages.  That’s a clever advertising gimmick because the Nikki Heat books, talked about in the TV show, really exist now!  (The poker games with James Patterson are free advertising that one-percenter author doesn’t need—but smart, because ABC paid him, not the other way around.)

Another reason a writer might use a pseudonym is when the author’s real name is too common.  This is my albatross.  Steve Moore is almost as common in the U.S. as Joe Smith.  Even Steven M. Moore is too common.  Having a common name doesn’t help an author to solve the “discovery problem”—people can’t recognize and associate your name to what you do if millions of people have the same name!  One option is to truncate your name in some way—like Angelina Jolie—or use your middle name and last name (in my case, I’m not particularly fond of my middle name).  The easiest solution: choose a completely different pseudonym, one that’s catchy, more unique, and not a swear word or otherwise insulting in any language you can imagine.

Except for Rowling’s experience and that business about genres, I’m not sure there’s any advantage to using a pseudonym for PR and marketing purposes, the Castle TV show being the books selling the show, or vice versa.  If your real name is unique enough and people like your writing, they’ll learn to associate your name with that writing.  I suppose a pseudonym is an escape from a bad rep, whether bad writing or worse, as in O. Henry’s case, so if you’re convicted of creating a Ponzi scheme, you might want to use a pseudonym, unless you want to sell books to people writing about your clever duplicity—call them confessions or memoirs, it’s all about existing and future name recognition.  The same goes for internet presence, although I tend to see more “handles” than pseudonyms—bookbuzzman, grammargal, themarketingmaven (I’ve made these up; hopefully they’re not real handles on the internet, but one never knows).

My recommendation?  Use a pseudonym if you think it’ll help you in your writing career, but it’s probably better to do it sooner than later.  For me, it’s too late.  People will just have to confuse me with the other Steve Moore’s out there.

In libris libertas….

 

 

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