pen name

Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name

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This post by Catherine Nichols originally appeared on Jezebel on 8/4/15.

The plan made me feel dishonest and creepy, so it took me a long time to send my novel out under a man’s name. But each time I read a study about unconscious bias, I got a little closer to trying it.

I set up a new e-mail address under a name—let’s say it was George Leyer, though it wasn’t—and left it empty. Weeks went by without word from the agents who had my work. I read another study about how people rate job applicants they believe are female and how much better they like those they believe are male.

The thing I was thinking of doing was absolutely against the rules, the opposite of all the advice writers get, but I wasn’t feeling like a writer, and I hadn’t written in weeks. Until last winter, I had never faced a serious bout of writer’s block or any meaningful unwillingness to work. A blank page had always felt to me like the moment the lights go down in a theater—until the day it didn’t. I was spending more time crying on the phone than writing and I had no idea how to get back to work. Every paragraph was a negotiation—my instinct leading one way, and then a blast against it—don’t do that, you’ll confuse people. No one wants to read that kind of thing.

So, on a dim Saturday morning, I copy-pasted my cover letter and the opening pages of my novel from my regular e-mail into George’s account. I put in the address of one of the agents I’d intended to query under my own name. I didn’t expect to hear back for a few weeks, if at all. It would only be a few queries and then I’d close out my experiment. I began preparing another query, checking the submission requirements on the agency web site. When I clicked back, there was already a new message, the first one in the empty inbox. Mr. Leyer. Delighted. Excited. Please send the manuscript.

 

Read the full post on Jezebel.

 

Chris Jane On The Power Of Gender In An Author’s Name: Right, Like a Man

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This post by Chris Jane originally appeared on Read Her Like An Open Book on 1/11/15.

I prefer the way I write when, while writing, I imagine being read as a man.

There’s an immediate freedom to not be apologetic. To do as we were taught in high school English and eliminate the self-conscious “I think…” from the writing.

I’m not sure when it happened, the shift into having to pretend.

My father, a single parent, never gave my sister or me the impression that being female was considered a weakness or would limit us in any way. Now and then we’d have to fetch him things, and we were tasked with decorating and undecorating the Christmas tree, but that was because we were his kids. It had nothing to do with being girls. That I was a “girl” was so separate from my identity that I would sometimes be confused about why I didn’t feel more like one. Females my dad’s age who had soft, styled hair and wore perfume and nail polish were curiosities. I wanted to ask them questions about womanhood. I wanted them to somehow infuse me with the kind of femininity I saw blooming in the girls my age who wore clanking bracelets and pink lipstick.

That absence of innate femininity combined with being raised by a man contributed to my being comfortable with – and preferring to be one of – the boys. I didn’t fear them and hadn’t been raised to defer to them. We were friends, and we were equals. It never occurred to me that their thoughts, perspectives, experiences, or opinions were (or should be) more valid than mine. I was pretty sure I was even as strong as they were.

 

Read the full post on Read Her Like An Open Book.

 

A Tale Of Two Author Brands

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn blog on 2/3/14.

Here’s an outline of my two brands and how they contribute to my business, as well as my recommendations if you’re thinking about these issues. I get a lot of questions about this topic so I thought I would address it head on 🙂

 

What is a brand anyway?

Whether you like it or not, you have a brand as soon as you publish a book, or you start tweeting, or blogging or anything.

It’s how people perceive you.

It’s the words and images that are associated with you and your books.

It’s the emotions and feelings you trigger in the person who notices you or something you put into the world.

Therefore, it’s important to control the perception of your brand.

You can do that by making sure everything you put out there in the world represents what you want people to see.

 

TheCreativePenn.com – and me as Joanna Penn

The site is aimed at writers, publishing industry folks, authors and people wanting to write and be creative entrepreneurs. I am always upbeat and I want to be a positive force for good 🙂 so I will only share what resonates with that. Of course, I have down days like everyone else, but I don’t share them here.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn blog.

 

David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—Your Writing Name

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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.