This post, by David Farland, originally appeared on his site on 12/18/13.
I was asked recently to write an article about selecting a writing name. Many authors would never consider using a pseudonym. Their identity is intimately tied to their name, and they long to see it in print, even if it’s a name as silly as Ernest Lee Funklemeyer.
For me, a name is a brand. Choosing an author’s name is more like choosing the brand name for your new line of automobiles. Sorry, I don’t really get a thrill about seeing my name in print. Maybe I did twenty-five years ago, but it really wasn’t that important to me.
I use David Farland for my writing name, but I was raised as Dave Wolverton, and wrote my first dozen novels under that name. Why did I switch? There were a couple of reasons: When I wrote my third novel, I got a glowing review which advised people to “make sure to look on the bottom shelf at your bookstore, where Dave Wolverton’s novels are likely to be found. . .” My heart sank.
You see I had read an article a few years earlier, in which marketers for Campbell’s soup had found that 92% of all people would not bend over to pick up their favorite flavor of soup from the bottom shelf at a supermarket. People prefer to buy their goods at eye level. Which meant, of course, that no writer wants to be on the bottom shelf. By using the name Wolverton, I was losing a huge number of potential sales!
Immediately, I began investigating how hard it would be to change my writing name. I was already a bestseller in science fiction, hitting high on the science fiction bestseller lists, so I wasn’t sure that I wanted to change my name back in 1991.
When I began to write fantasy (which was my first love as a reader), I recognized that I had a second problem. Fantasy tends to sell better than science fiction, so I figured that sales would be more robust in the fantasy genre.
Click here to read the rest of the post on David Farland’s site.