Truepenny over at LiveJournal (that’s Sarah Monette for those of you what don’t know) reports that she’ll be changing her name for her next book. Which seems to make sense, given the common wisdom which goes that publishers like you best if you’re either a bankable superstar or an unlimited-potential debutante.
Now, there’s only so much an author can do to impact whether he/she becomes a bankable superstar. But the good news is we CAN be an unlimited potential debutante with each new book or series! Imagine this on every book you write: “A stunning debut by [insert current nom de plume here].” And if the reviews are bad, then [insert current nom de plume here] can discreetly retire into the corner to sob over her shattered dreams while a new contender slips into her place.
Anyway, I think this is an excellent strategy and I think I’m going to use a brand new writing name with each book or series I put out. Disposable identities! It’s the wave of the future!
Here are some names I’m staking a claim on, along with the use to which I shall put them:
- Scribner Q. Goldwright (historical fantasy, 19th c.)
- Taffy Trianon (historical fantasy, 18th c.)
- Anselm Dorkenschmidt (historical German Illuminati fantasy, 17th c.)
- Evangeline Heartsblood (inspirational gothic christian romance with sexy undead priests)
- Cornwall Urquhart (intellectual disquisitive fiction featuring an impassioned symbolic attack on modern mores)
- Gryffyn Stump (literary short stories about dead pets, sexual disappointment, and parents who fight)
- Welt Striker (men’s military adventure fiction, except gay)
- Bakunin Rand (paranoid libertarian conspiracy fantasy about the gold standard and maybe lizards)
Well, that’s enough for now. What are some of the names YOU’D like to stake a claim on, writers?
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“This is not a rebranding?” Well, I guess, if you live in the universe of Opposite Day. (And yeah, I know, I’m responding to her, here, but…I don’t really know her.)
Otherwise…just changing your name for life purposes is a pretty classic branding illustration used in classes and at work, everywhere. Changing your name for professional purposes, especially when you’ve just spelled out the reason, and it’s “My real name lost value,” is a pretty definitive and basic rebrand.
Sucks, that’s how book publishing is, now. But it’s not like it’s new or anything, either, really.
If I ever have to use a pseudonym and tell everybody it’s me, it’s going to be Fart Starter, and I’m going to put diacriticals all over it, tell everybody it’s Finnish, and they had better not pronounce it like it looks.
Yeah, I don’t know what else you’d call it other than a rebranding. There’s nothing wrong with rebranding. Or as I like to call it, “smartbranding.” (I am so stuck in 2006).
I love Fart Starter but I think you need a couple extra “a”s, and maybe a “y” — Faart Staartyr.
Much better!
X-D
People, especially as you go leftward, are ashamed of marketing or think it shameful or something. Which, I gave up telling people a long time ago, just leaves you wider open to more evil marketing: nothing sells like shame.
It’s a lot of what, IMO, makes the lefter and righter wings of The Property Party in the US do like they do, and where we get the jokes about how the GOP’s evil, but at least they do the shit they say they’ll do. They have way beyond no shame about propaganda and seizing control of the public conversation.
I get why people have qualms about that, but I don’t. And I know I’m not the only liberal/left American who doesn’t. Somebody start putting some serious money behind taking control of the story, and making it out of better stories, please. That can’t possibly be evil, you just have to admit that most people (who vote) are likely to be swayed by very simple, totally manufactured stories.
I think President Obama would agree with you wholeheartedly.
His admin’s done better with that than the last two, yeah, among other things. I have my great disappointments, but…mostly I’ve been kind of impressed.
Unfortunately, the “African Stalin took over the White House and liberals eat Christian babies’ blood baked into their matzoh” story is still winning. This is a critical juncture, there, though – the religious right in the US, in particular, has been whipped into such a frenzy of unreason, of late, that they’re becoming unmanageable for the GOP. This is scary, but it also provides opportunity: the story can get crazier and worse, or the story can change to something better.
I hope. And I hope somebody with some funds and position to do something about it is thinking similarly.
I don’t have a list of author names as such, but after I heard someone’s anecdote about having to choose a new name very quickly I started lists of first and last names just in case. Most of the last names are plucked off my family tree. (I admit I was a little sad when I found out there was an author named Felicity Savage, as that means I probably need to cross Savage, my grandma’s maiden name, off the list.) I figure at least the first name should be something I wouldn’t mind people accidentally calling me all the time.
Oh, I do have ONE designated: if people stop letting me publish literary and spec-fic under the same name, my literary self can be Anne DeCourcey (middle, mother’s maiden). It’s not Cornwall Urquhart, but I like it just fine.
Ooh, Anne DeCourcey sounds like a winner. It inspires confidence. Anne DeCourcey sounds like she would deliver the goods.
I *love* Anselm Dorkenschmidt.
I had an ancestor named Ignatz Walldinger. Maybe I’ll use that.
I’ve thought about writing hard sf under the name Ada K. Riney.
Otherwise, I’ll just use different ethnic variants of my names. Aidan Michaelson, Felicity Braun [Ada means happy in German], Gloria [my original middle name] Michols. I get mail addressed to Adam Brown, so I might bow to the inevitable.
Ignatz is a MAGNIFICENT name. If I had a boy-child, I would have been seriously tempted to name him Ignatz.
Of course with a name like Ignatz, you really MUST come up with a middle name that starts with “M”, and then find a last name like “Adork” … hence, “I.M. Adork”
Why yes, I am still 12 years old, why do you ask?
My son was really relieved to learn that his dad talked me out of it when I wanted to name him Vladimir. God knows what he would have thought of me if I named him Ignatz.
I. M. Adork. Sigh. You do understand, that when your name is Ada, people keep talking about Ada Sandwich, Ada Fish . . . .
And back in the late 1970′s, when I’d hear people say, “I saw Eight is Enough last night,” I’d go, hmm, who is this Ada Zenov everyone keeps talking about. True story.
Taffy Trianon?
How about Duffy ‘Doc’ Dunham?
I love names like “Taffy” and “Duffy” and “Tippy”. Must be the Wodehouse in me. Speaking of which, I bet I could find some great names if I went back and reread my Jeeves & Wooster!
Here’s another one: Lanyard Cox. That sounds kind of ’30s to me, kind of Sinclair Lewis meets Booth Tarkington. But see how easily I can age it back about fifty years: Lanyard Cox Graves, mystery author!
I have no idea why these names conjure up such concrete images for me.
I like old women’s names nobody uses anymore, like “Olive” and “Eunice.” I made a half-hearted effort at giving Kate a name like that. My ex was probably wise to decline.
Oh, and Anne DeCourcey sounds like she could use a good rogering from Lanyard Cox.
“And back in the late 1970’s, when I’d hear people say, “I saw Eight is Enough last night,” I’d go, hmm, who is this Ada Zenov everyone keeps talking about. True story.”
For years, I thought there were two diseases: namonia, the one I heard about, and pewneemia, the one I read about.
Yeah, I had the same problem with debris, which I thought was pronounced dehbriss and was a synonym of a word pronounced dehbree, and panache, which I thought was pronounce panakee and was a synonym of pahnash.
Now when I was small, I thought there was a disease called ammonia.
I was thinking “Kelly Kelly” this morning in the shower. And that tells you just *exactly* how creative I was this morning.
I can’t believe I’m admitting this.
Other faves:
Yolanda Higginbotham
Scrofula Roastmuffin
something or other Bonesteel (Actually a serious contender. Bonesteel is a family name.)
Also, your Lanyard Cox just make me cackle. Cackle out loud (COL). HAH!
I don’t understand why you would want to change your name. Wouldn’t that be like starting all over again. It’s like puting out your first book. I think that you would want to stick with one name and let it become known. If you want to start over again because you got real bad reviews, that’s a different story. In that case I think I would give up writing altogether.
Hi Angelo:
What you’re talking about is building a “brand” (as we discuss upthread) and there’s nothing wrong with that … if the brand is viable, like a Robert Jordan or an Isaac Asimov. But most author “brands” don’t get anywhere close to that. And even an author with five or ten moderately successful books can find him or herself shuffled to the side by a publisher to who’d rather take a chance on a new, untested author who *could* be a Robert Jordan or a J.K. Rowling. It’s like gambling. People play for the big win, not the slow grind for pennies.
So I guess I was being a bit cynical to make a humorous point. But I also think I’m not too far off-base in my prediction that we’ll see a lot more authorial name-switching in the future.
I know a few authors who rebranded themselves because their True Names were associated with poor sales. (Foreign names tend to be sales-killers.) So they’d build a new identity, with the full public knowledge of their editors. Why? Well, that allowed them to fool the tracking softwares of the sales staff, or it allowed the latter to fool the bookstores into taking a chance on ‘new’ authors.
“Fools! I will destroy you all! (Ask me how.)”