One of the most important issues a new author must consider is whether or not to adopt the use of a pen name.
There’s many reasons an author might want to consider a pen name, but the most important is only applicable to people who publish via traditional means. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a great blog post about this. If you publish using traditional print publishers, there is one big reason to have (at least) one pen name, and it has to do with genre expectations.
Basically, traditional publishers have always been very hesitant to publish works in different genres under a single author’s name, but for good reason. Different genres sell at different rates, and if an author were to first publish a book in one successful genre (say, romance) and then publish in another less successful genre (say, literary fiction), chances are the author would sell far more romance books than literary fiction novels. That’s fine from an objective standpoint, but a bookstore stocking that author’s novels would look at the romance book sales, order lots of novels of the literary fiction novel, and then be very disappointed when very few of those sold. That would then cause the bookstore to return lots of those literary fiction novels to the publisher, and the publisher would be very unhappy.
In a world that is increasingly dominated by indie publishing, however, that isn’t a concern anymore, but there are still good reasons to consider a pen name.
I recently realized that I needed one, even though I plan to pursue indie publishing first and foremost. Here are my reasons for making my choice:
1) My name is impossible to spell.
I know this from a lifetime of personal experience. People can’t even pronounce it, much less spell it.
Now, in this internet age, unique names are good, and the reason has to do with SEO, or search engine optimization. If I Google my name, the first two pages of search results (at least) all have to do with me: social media sites, college research groups, work info, etc. This is a good thing. You want people on the internet to be able to find you.
But, as I found out, if you misspell my name in Google, I don’t show up in the search results at all. This is a bad thing when you know that people will misspell your name.
2) My name is hyphenated.
I checked Amazon.com and looked at their top 100 bestseller lists in all different categories of fantasy and mystery, the two genres I like to write, and I didn’t encounter a single author with a hyphenated last name.
Now, I don’t think there’s any real prejudice by readers or publishers against hyphenated last names, but when it comes to selling books, if quite literally nobody else is doing things a certain way, take note.
3) My name is long.
The reason long names are bad for publishing is that they have to be printed in smaller type on book covers. Nowadays, in a world where we tend to browse for books online and only see small thumbnails of books at a time, it’s important for your name to be easily legible even on a small book cover image. It’s for this same reason that short titles are better for books.
So there you go, those are the reasons I decided I needed a pen name. But if you are in the situation of needing a pen name, how do you choose one. The reasoning is fairly simple:
1) Pick something you can remember.
Remember that in public, people will talk to you and refer to you by your pen name, so picking something that mimics your real name is a good idea. In particular, if you can keep your real first name, that will be a big help.
2) Pick something that is unique.
You don’t want other authors already writing under your pen name. Similarly, you don’t want to pick a pen name that is the same as someone who is famous for any other reason.
3) Pick a name based off of web and social media availability.
As an author, you want to run a website from a domain name of www.yourauthorname.com. When picking a pen name, make sure that domain is available first. Also, make sure that you can set up Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts with that name too.
And so, with all that in mind, Alex P. Berg was born. I like it. Hopefully you do too.
Image credit: Featured image by jack dorsey (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr.