Should You Use a Pen Name?
Picture this: you’ve finished your book. It’s edited and ready to go, and you’re ready to start talking cover design. Suddenly, your cover designer asks you a question that throws you for a loop: will you be publishing this under a pen name?
Should you use a pen name? Maybe you hadn’t really thought about it. The truth is, there isn’t a wrong or right answer when it comes to using a pen name. The biggest thing to consider is what works best for you.
So here are a few things to keep in mind when considering the manner in which you’d like to be credited for your writing.
Safety
This is a pretty straightforward one, but it's still important to think about. Would using your full name put you, your family, or someone close to you at risk? For instance, if you’re publishing a memoir of your escape from an abusive ex-spouse, parents, or a cult/high-control religion, putting your story out there under your real name might put you and your family back on the radar of your abusers. Using a pen name could help keep your identity secure while also giving you the chance to speak your truth.
Comfort
Maybe you don’t have a specific security risk when it comes to putting your name out there, but that doesn’t mean it feels comfortable to you to let strangers know your full legal name. Additionally, it can make it easier to create an online author platform and talk to readers in real life if you can easily separate your author persona from your everyday persona. Even if you can’t articulate a clear reason, if you just feel more comfortable, safe, and free to write under a different name, that alone is a great reason to explore a pen name!
SPS Marketing Director Melanie Calahan uses a pen name in her writing for similar reasons, finding comfort in conversations and interactions with readers and making it easier to build a platform for herself online. “I wanted to use a pen name to give myself a buffer between my author self and my personal self. I write sweet romance, and even with the ‘sweet’ categorization, there are still people who behave as though that's an invitation to be inappropriate. However, even if I wrote some other genre, I would still want a pen name. We talked about author personas in a recent blog post. I find it easier to successfully market my books if I have a separate entity to ‘work for.’“
Keeping Your Writing World Separate From Your Work World
It’s also important to consider your day job when deciding on using your real name or your legal name. Do you have a job that might be impacted negatively if you use your legal name on your books? Or maybe you just want to be able to draw a clear delineation between your work and your personal writing? A pen name can be a great way to draw some clear boundaries around your writing and work life.
SPS editor and social media manager Kendall Davis started using a pen name initially to keep her day job separate from her personal writing. “I started out as an entertainment journalist, but I had also just started working in editorial at a Big Five publisher. I was so new in my publishing career, and I was worried using my real name for my journalism work might cause me problems when it came to acquiring books, and I wanted to have some clear boundaries between my nine-to-five and my own personal writing work.”
Allowing For Writing in Various Genres
Maybe you are currently writing a romance novel, but you also have a great idea for a horror novel. Once readers fall in love with an author’s writing, it’s not unusual for them to blindly pick up the next book from their faves, so writing something vastly different could cause some tension in your audience. However, writing in different genres under different names can help keep those worlds separate (think J.K. Rowling and her crime novel persona, Robert Galbraith). Additionally, you might also write for genres that don’t particularly play nicely with one another. For instance, if you write raunchy, bodice-ripper romance novels but also want to write deeply spiritual, conservative, religious books, using the same name for all of your books might hurt your chances with publishers and cause readers to not trust you. But using a pen name for one of the genres would allow for you to keep those worlds separate, and offer you the chance to control who knows about your entire body of work.
Clare Wood, the Editorial Director at SPS started using a pen name to keep her different writing work separate as well as some practical reasons, “I started using a pen name when I was a journalist, and I was known as Clare Wood in my nonfiction work. I chose Clare Tallier not only because it's my husband's last name but because I thought it sounded like a writer. I kept Clare, so I didn't have to remember to respond to another name at conferences.”
What feels authentic?
Of course, sometimes putting ourselves into these strict buckets can feel inauthentic to who we are. Sometimes part of what makes us special is that we have such broad and varied interests, and the platform you want to build is one that encapsulates all of your interests. Separating those identities into different pen names might feel inauthentic to who you are and how you want to present yourself online. If that’s you, a pen name might not be a good choice for you—even if you’re advised to use one. What ultimately matters is that you build a platform and a writing persona that feels authentic and not stifling, and if putting everything you write under your name, regardless of the genre, then that is precisely what you should do!
Author Melanie Dale wrote parenting books like Women are Scary: The Totally Awkward Adventure of Finding Mom Friends and Calm the H*ck Down: How to Let Go and Lighten Up About Parenting, she’s a contributor to the faith-based parenting website, Coffee + Crumbs, and she’s authored a book about infertility called Infreakinfertility: How to Survive When Getting Pregnant Gets Hard. But also? She was also a frequent extra on The Walking Dead playing various walkers (the in-show word for a zombie, if you’re unfamiliar with the show), and she wrote the teleplay for two episodes of the horror television show Creepshow, “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” and “Sibling Rivalry.”
One might assume she’d use different names to separate her more parent-focused, faith-based work and her horror work, but that wouldn’t be authentic to Melanie. “I wanted to stick with my real name because I’m okay with people knowing I have layers. I’ve written faith content and horror stories and parenting books. My readers find me in different ways. Recently I told a writing workshop I lead that most people won’t like everything I do, but they’ll like something. I also really wanted my name on my horror stories because we need more women horror writers, and maybe a girl needs to see my name and know there’s a place for her in the genre. Shirley Jackson is a huge inspiration to me. She wrote hilarious parenting memoirs and is also one of the greatest horror writers of all time.”
When it comes to pen names, you’ve ultimately got to decide what’s right for you. What makes you feel safe, what makes you feel confident, what places boundaries where you need them, and what makes you feel like you’re being your authentic self? There isn’t one right answer for every writer, so just find what option makes you feel empowered in your author journey. Of course, if you want to talk through your author platform with someone, we’re always here to help, so don’t hesitate to reach out to talk about platform development!