Do you have a list of book ideas somewhere that are very out of your usual genres or don’t have time for? Have you ever thought about starting over under a pseudonym?
Yes, but probably not for the most obvious reason. 🙂
Let’s cover the more traditional uses for a pseudonym. From a publisher’s point of view, a pseudonym allows for a creation of a snappy author brand and it’s often carefully chosen to both be memorable, hide or reveal gender, and evoke a certain feeling. Pseudonyms are also chosen for the obvious consideration of privacy, but we will deal mostly with business reasons in this post.
Suppose your name is Leopold Swietokrzyski. 99% of English speaking readership won’t be able to spell this surname correctly. I am Slavic and I would have a difficult time spelling this off the top of my head. I could probably do it in Russian, because my brain is breaking this Polish surname into sviet and krug, which means light and circle (or county) respectively and may not even mean those things in Polish. But the English spelling is a bit out there. So Leopold Swietokrzyski becomes something like Leo Nowak or Leo Mazur. Easier to recall and easier to fit onto the cover.
Sometimes the pseudonym is chosen to hide gender. In 1960’s there was a real bias against female SF writers. Alice Bradley Sheldon became James Tiptree Jr. According to her, “A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” Carolyn Janice Cherry became C.J. Cherryh to both hide gender and to make the name sound less like it belonged to a romance writer, a change suggested by her first editor.
Sometimes the pseudonym is chosen to switch genre. In 1995, the name Nora Roberts was synonymous with romance, so when she chose to write a futuristic police procedural, she adopted a pseudonym of J. D. Robb. The two audiences would not necessarily intersect, and any reasonable person could foresee that if the new series was published under Nora Roberts, romance audiences would go into it expecting a contemporary romance. The use of a pseudonym helped to avoid disappointing reader expectations and allowed to better orient the book toward the audience that would love it most. When you are that established in one genre, sometimes a radical change requires a new name.
This is a risky move. For an author, an established audience is a guarantee of a certain income. We build it reader by reader, and we treasure it. However, there are times when that audience is abandoned for business reasons.
Suppose there is an author named Stella Butler. (I randomly generated the name.) Stella Butler writes cozy mysteries about a woman who works as a baker by day and solves mysteries at night in her little town. Stella’s first book does okay, her second sells a little less and her third sells a little less. The publisher renews the contract for another two books. (We are going back to the kinder days of publishing, when imprints like Ace would give you a chance to build the brand.) The next two books produce low sales, and the publisher cuts her free.
Stella Butler has a new idea. It’s about a young female park ranger, who stumbles onto a global conspiracy. It’s a great idea, the book is fast and snappy, and when she takes it to her agent, the agent is thrilled. There might even be a reasonable amount of cross-over between the audiences. But Stella Butler has a history of falling sales. The bookstore buyers, the people who work for bookstores and decide how much of each title they will order, won’t be excited about Stella Butler. They know how her books performed already. The readers won’t be excited about her either. Readers are loyal when they like your books but fickle when your work is meh. They like new, and sparkly, and different, because it’s exciting.
So Stella Butler becomes Silvia Adkins (another random name) and is treated by the publisher as a brand new author who has a debut book coming out.
Choosing a pseudonym is a complex decision. Doing so destroys whatever visibility you already have, especially when self-publishing. For example, if your brand is Science Fiction Romance and you have built an audience, but then you decide to write a Fantasy Romance, choosing a pseudonym makes zero business sense. The audience is basically the same. When you publish that new book, the electronic retailers won’t be contacting your existing readers to let them know your book is coming out. By employing a pseudonym in this case, you would destroy the discoverability of your book and start from zero.
For Gordon and I, “Ilona Andrews” is our brand. We’ve written an Urban Fantasy, a Science Fiction Romance, a Paranormal Romance, a Science Fiction/Fantasy and you guys followed us from series to series, probably because all of our work has the same elements: humor, action-heavy plots, and most importantly, similar tone of the character interactions. As long as we’re writing in a related genre, it would be foolish to hide. Yes, we do have a list of ideas, and the projects we decide to work on are carefully chosen to both be creatively exciting and still, hopefully, appeal to our existing readers. We have to earn a living.
We do have an idea for which I personally would choose a pseudonym. It’s not exactly a YA because it has an adult tone and deals with adult issues, but it has a young protagonist. To be blunt, I wouldn’t want anyone to know that we wrote it. In a perfect world, I would give it to a publisher be like, “Hire someone to pretend to be the author.” {This is not usually a thing, by the way.}
I would do this because it’s a brutal book, and I wouldn’t want to deal with people going on and on about how this is not what they expected and why is the protagonist 17 and omg, how dare they write books about young people and put violence and sex into it. Young people are never involved in violence and they never find themselves in sexual situations. 😉
So the pseudonym in this case would be mostly for my peace of mind. I would read all the reviews that are incensed by the savagery of the book, sip my tea, and giggle, because it wouldn’t be Ilona Andrews who wrote it, but Joe Bobbs. And now you know my private publishing fantasy. 🙂
That makes a lot of sense! I can see where in your semi-YA book that you’d like it to be under a different name. Thanks for sharing!
Would you (eventually) let us know that you did that book, if you ever did it? ????
+1 ????
+1
Thank you for your input on pseudonyms.
I can say I would read your brutal book idea. I like darker books. Life isn’t always sunshine nor are my book reads.
But thank you to you both on all the great books you produce.
Agreed
But then if you consider the response to the “Alpha: Origins” series many people were cranky ‘fans’ because that series was considered darker than the other pieces written by Ilona Andrews…
So apparently they have already experienced some of the fanbase pushback. (Also, I don’t see it. It was a fascinating world and I wish they would write more in that world).
I didn’t care for the rapey tone at the beginning but I loved the world building. I’d love to see more in that world. Probably different characters but they could maybe get away with a reboot of the same characters. I really thought there was so much potential in that world.
Some people just need to share their opinions a little too hard. Like, Alpha wasn’t for me, but it would never occur to me to go banging on the authors’ door and demand to know why they wrote it. I adore literally everything else they write. I’m a happy camper.
Exactly how i feel about Alpha and House Andrews!
Wow really? I looove the Alpha series. I wish there’s a whole series on it because it clearly has depth and stories to be explored. I will happily take the rapey tone and all because that’s the natural byproduct of that intriguing AND savage world.
++1. I would love a follow up story in that world
As always your writing about writing is very interesting and easy to comprehend the whys and wherefores. Please continue writing these articles about writing.
I’m watching this kind of play out with Nalini Singh. She normally writes PNR with a few contemporary romances under her belt, but recently dived into mystery/thrillers. The amount of emphasis she placed on “NOT A ROMANCE!!!” for A Madness of Sunshine was almost more than what the actual book itself seemed to get. It’s a stellar book and I have Quiet in her Bones ready to start because I’d read anything she writes, but it had to be a risk “polluting” her established brand that way.
I agree. When I went out to Nalini’s blog when Madness of Sunshine was about to make its debut, she was adamant that there was no romance in the book. It was to be a thriller set in New Zealand. I took a chance in reading the book. It was very good.
Quiet in her Bones is another very good thriller book by Nalini. Again, she said on her blog that there was no romance in the book. 🙂
I didn’t like the first mystery book that much. I bought the second book because I like her other books so for that reason gave her second mystery a chance. I like the second one a lot better. I’m fighting myself because I keep wanting to jump to the last chapter to see how it ends.
Don’t jump! It will be worth it.
I wish I’d gone to her blog. For whatever reason, I just read her books and haven’t sought her out elsewhere so I had NO IDEA and kept waiting for the paranormal twist. LOL It was still a good book, but that expectation just kept taking me out of the story. I’ll definitely enjoy Quiet in her Bones more I think, now that I know. (it’s not too surprising since i really only follow a few authors outside of reading their work)
I really enjoyed Quiet in her Bones. The kindle reviews made it clear that it was neither paranormal or romance but reviewers thought it was a great mystery.
I personally like a good mystery and really enjoyed what I see as two of her other strong influences: Indian background and New Zealand. It was really pleasant to read about not only Indian x NZ-raised culture but the fusion of how so many different backgrounds really could show the worst and best of themselves when intermingled without labelling it a “X-cultural” thing. I totally couldn’t guess whodoneit halfway through, either, which is a little unusual for me.
Totally feel Nalini deserves credit for another great book but can understand if a pseudonym was considered.
Wow, Leopold Swietokrzyski doesn’t sound that bad. The real challenge is Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Greetings from the biggest fan in Poland (yes, I talking about myself). I would like to hear how You speak this pseudonym.
This reminds me of this village name in Welsh: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
The things people do to make sounds fit into the standard Latin / English alphabet. Wooo.
Almost none of us English speakers are taught how to handle the phonics of Cyrillic, Welsh, Chinese, Japanese or Korean written in the Latin alphabet. Each one has rules, but they’re different from each other. For example I believe the sounds of the doubled letters are not the same between Welsh and Dutch and German.
And then in words like “cooperation” it isn’t really a doubled “o” vowel, it is two separate “o” sounds but writing it in English left off the diaresis from “coöperation.”
That’s one of my biggest complaints about phonics. It just doesn’t work in English unless you already know the source language of the word.
Yep, double L’ s have a different sound like my (very Welsh) last name. Llewellyn. I now just treat them as English l’s because it is way to hard the other way. But I have been to some of those Welsh villages whose names look like gibberish.
Wow. ???? I can’t even begin to think how to pronounce that last name. 5 z’s, 2 y’s and a k thrown in 2/3 of the way through. It reminds me of a few years back when traveling through Wales. I couldn’t pronounce town names there either. Look for the exit with the town that starts with Ys. Ystradgynlais. Even when I thought i had sounded it out correctly i was wrong.
I would make a lousy diplomat ????
You can actually hear out the name (Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz) spelling in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
It is a part of a renowned Polish movie and a recognized joke (the Polish soldier makes up this name in order to throw the bad Nazi out off balance, when being captured).
Looking at all those letters, I just keep flashing back to an Eddie Izzard bit: “That’s just cheating at scrabble!”
????
LOL +1
I had the same problem in Iceland and Sweden.
Great information of why pseudonyms would be used (or not), Ilona.
I also second Breann’s question. You don’t have to let us know that you and Gordon wrote the book, but can refer it to us like you’ve done for many other authors.
You can list the premise and we can decide if we want to read it, and then when it’s widely successful you can tell us it’s you.
Of course any time you refer an author, I will try to guess if it’s you two????
That’s why I liked Jayne Krentz, Amanda Quick, and Jayne Castle all the same author different genres. I knew exactly what type of book I was getting.
She writes in different time periods and the author indicates that (e.g., all Amanda Quick are set in a historical period). She does follow the same themes across time and settings (even to new planets). Her Arcane Society series exemplifies this as it spans time and place over 12 books and 3 authors.
+1 on that. I totally lived on her books throughout my teenagehood????
Jayne Krentz’s author “voice” is so strongly and uniquely hers that it doesn’t matter which pseudonym she is using (and she used to have a few more) I could always tell who wrote the book.
There are other authors who are similar. When I first started reading a romance by Elizabeth Lowell, the style was so familiar I thought I’d read the book before, even though it was new. Then, I realized it was because the voice was an author I knew well, a science fiction author named Ann Maxwell.
So some authors can change names and genres…and their loyal fans will *still* recognize them!
And I still long for Ann Maxwell to finish her Fire Dancer series decades later!
me, too! I still have my battered paperbacks.
And me!
Lori Foster wrote her Servent series under L.L. Foster. Kind of dark, but one of my favorites. Amazon lists it under both names.
I always wished she did more with that series.
Uuuu, Joe Bobbs is now in my auto-buy list. ????????
My thought exactly! ????
Lol, just what I wast hinking????
How long would the anonymity last? Especially in the time of Google? There are authors whose websites list their pseudonyms (Jennifer Ashley & Eileen Rendahl come to mind) and give you a complete list of the authors work. I find I have definite preferences for some genres but it has led me to books I otherwise would not have picked up. But I tend to be “complete-ist” by nature and like to browse all works of authors I enjoy. Your work being an excellent example. Thanks for many happy hours!
You would be surprised.
There is an alien romance author I’ve followed for years who self publishes under a nom de plume because her main gig is being a “serious fiction” NY bestselling author (phrase not mine, I loathe genre snobbery).
No one has figured out who she is so far! The reverse of the tech coin means you can upload your books onto Amazon in complete anonymity.
Can you tell us the name of the author? I have been wanting a new alien romance 😀
Ruby Dixon ☺️. She has a massive Ice Planet series and spin-off series that I cannot get enough of. Alien romances have been my Covid fixation – must be the desire to escape ????
I have to agree about the desire to escape. My favorite space aliens are from Viola Grace.
Always looking for more alien romance- who is the author? I’d love to read!!
Ruby Dixon. I hope someone figures it out. I’m dying to know.
Yeah….look what happened to J.K. Rowling! Someone from her publisher spilled the beans that she was Galbraith.
I follow you to related genres for all the reasons you mention and at least one additional one–your writing is fabulous. It is complex and uses big words. You go into detail where needed but don’t overdo it and skip it if it doesn’t push the plot or character development forward.
NGL. I’d be one of those that wouldnt read that YA book. Im old school about teenagers and teenager issues (I obviously grew up in a bubble in the 80s) and it’s why I dont read YA books at all. Im sure it would be great, as all of your books are, but I’d skip it completely.
Ah, and then there’s also the use of a pseudonym when a well-known author wants to know if the books sell because of the name, or if the books sell because of the writing. Which is a fun experiment, but one you’d only want to take a chance on if you aren’t desperate for the money… ????
Aaaaaand in the years to come, people will watch out for all the YA books with a 17 years old protagonist, with violence and sex… ????
About Nora Robert’s In Death series in the beginning: I saw the books, and thought “is this a new author or an author I already know?” It wasn’t until I looked in the copyright section did I realize it was Nora Roberts. I have all the original covers of the 7 books at the start of the series. All of them say “J.D. Robb”, not “Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb”.
This could have been a decision of Nora and her publisher, but I was a little put off when I started seeing “Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb”. I liked knowing it was her under the pseudonym only. It was like a little secret those of us who read her beginning In Death series book knew. Oh well. 😀
Back in 1994 La Nora took a big risk with the In Death series, so I imagine that is why they kept it a secret at first. Don’t you just love the covers on the first “what five” books? They are gorgeous!
Which to me is funny as I love the In Death books so much and the sometimes her Nora Roberts stuff is hit or miss with me.
All seven are gorgeous. The covers also depict what the story is about. I found that out after reading the back of the book, and then took a good look at the cover.
I have either donated or sold a lot of books over time. Those original In Death ones I have kept since they were published. One time I lost a copy of Vengeance in Death. I panicked until I was able to buy another copy at Barnes and Noble.
I was floored when I found out that Jennifer Ashley and Allyson James were the same person. I had no clue till I saw it on her website. I was a fan of series under both names and had no clue.
Now when I find an author I really enjoy, I check to see if they write under other names, because typically I will enjoy their other books as well. ie, found Susan Copperfield and discovered R.J. Blain. It is hell on the TBR pile though. 🙂
And Ursula Vernon —> T. Kingfisher. Although that went in the opposite direction, where Vernon made her name writing kids’ & YA, and then took T. Kingfisher as a pseudonym for adult stuff.
Susan Copperfield is the name on the Royal States books. I waited, as I didn’t think I’d like them, but they’re my favorite series of hers. I reread them constantly.
I immediately looked up Joe Bobbs.
That was intesting. I read a lot of Gini Koch’s books and she writes different genres with different pseudonyms but she doesn’t hide it. You can find them all on her website.
So I’m curious now about awards. For example, I think Goodreads had a section for best debut author or something like that. If “Silvia” is nominated, does “Stella” have to step up and admit Silvia is a pseudonym and therefore she’s not a debut author?
Just to be clear the reason your readers follow you from series to series is you’re phenomenal writers. If you started writing on the back of Cheerios boxes I would buy Cheerios, and I hate Cheerios. I also wouldn’t read a story like the one you described as your secret publishing fantasy unless I knew it was written by you as YA doesn’t really appeal to me, but your writing does so I know it would be good. Kelley Armstrong had a series the Otherworld stories which she has continued with a couple of YA books which I have read and enjoyed as the writing is good, but I wouldn’t have purchased them without her name on the cover. Don’t sell yourself, your writing, or your fans short, write whatever you want but let us know it’s yours so we know to buy it. Another example, I didn’t particularly like Julie and despised Hugh in the Kate Daniels series but bought their books when they came out because I trusted you as writers and of course absolutely loved them and can’t wait for the next installment.
Plus there’s the fact that the BDH haunts this blog so we know about all books as they’re being written and you bless us with lots of snippets that get us hooked.
Amen on that, Tink!
Hello Ilona Andrews and the BDH. This is off topic, but I don’t know if there is a better place to ask this. I was rereading the edge and came across a reference that implied the broken is where the Alphas live. I then realized the multi verse is a common theme for Ilona and I was wondering which of the books are tied together? Also, George and friends as wandering heroes sounds fun.
Hello Dj,
The only series crossover characters are George, Jack, Gaston and Sophie and that is because they are Arbitrators. They appear in both the Edge and the Innkeeper Chronicles series.
Ilona Andrews do not have a multiverse, but that is a cool idea :).
George and friends make several appearances in the Innkeeper series
“Young people are never involved in violence and they never find themselves in sexual situations.”
My favorite YA author has always been Tamora Pierce, from the days when I was waiting for the second Alanna book to come out*. She may fade-to-black, but her heroines start thinking about and becoming sexual around the average age of 16 — something people seem in complete denial about, including (maybe especially) the ones who bloomed at that age.
Since then, I’ve only found teens having or even just thinking about sex as a normal part of growing up in a couple of self-published books (until very recently**). And those include graphic sex scenes that fall under the “unfamiliar with female anatomy” category. The other big criticism I have is that for the most part, the stories aren’t about teenagers, they’re about 16 or 17-to adults.
I would love to read your YA. At least here, you present as very grounded and reasonable about the normal rites of passage, and that’s so important. Add a real understanding of what people are like at different ages, and I bet you’d have teen followers out the wazoo***.
___
*not dating myself or anything
**Rachel Caine’s Honors series is fabulous. And, I say sadly, over.
***technical publishing term
“Young people are never involved in violence and they never find themselves in sexual situations.”
This made me think of “Flowers in the Attic” by V.C. Andrews. I don’t know if that counts as YA, though. I looked it up and it came up in genre of “gothic horror” and “family saga”, so I guess not YA??
Except we all read them as young adults didn’t we. I thought of them that way at the time. Don’t forget Forever by Judy Blume. Loved that book but I remember it was controversial when it came out, at least to us.
And Summer Sisters by her too. I think it got by our public school librarian because of the author, otherwise I don’t think they would have had it. My friends all loved how “racy” the book was, but by that time I had been reading adult books for quite awhile, so I didn’t think as much of it.
The original VC Andrews books were horrible things to pander to kids. I don’t think any of the adults who bought books for schools ever read them. I remember reading them when I was like 10. Way too early for that trash.
I think the author died and the latter books stopped being as problematic because someone else was writing them. Which is the other side of having a well known name as an author. Someone else can step into writing, like Anne McCafferty and the dragonriders of pern. Her son was a horrible writer in comparison, but the series kept selling, because it was under her name.
I chose to publish under a pseudonym for a similar reason to your last one: at the time, I knew my books would have sex and violence, and not only is my day job in education, but my husband teaches high school English, and we were like, students never need to stumble across your wife’s SF and F with the occasional sexy times in them. In hindsight, probably not as big a deal as we’d feared, although high school kids are enterprising and our last name isn’t super common. Still, the pen name is considerably shorter, which makes it easier to fit on covers.
I’ve debated a new pen name for other genres, but honestly, building ONE brand is hard enough, I don’t really want to put the work in for a whole new author brand. Like you, I think some of my readers will follow me no matter the genre, and some won’t. There are usually characteristics that will appear in an author’s work, whatever genre they’re working in. Some readers will still prefer SF, some will prefer F, and if I branch out beyond those one day, I’ll worry about that then. I think the average reader doesn’t realize the sheer amount of work that goes into building an author brand.
I just started reading your books, Carysa! Binge-read the Telepathic Space Pirates so now waiting on #4. Just downloaded the first of the related swag books.
Thank you so much for telling me! Stuff like that always makes an author’s day. I’m so glad you’re enjoying them, and I hope you enjoy the Swag Stories just as much. Book 4 is coming, I promise!
“Hire someone to pretend to be the author.”
That actually seems like it would be a fun thriller. Anonymous Author hires another woman to pretend to be the author of her books which center around a serial killer. A few years in, a reporter sees a pattern between the books and real murders. She starts to put together that the author of the books is just a little too on the nose and includes details in her books not released to the public. The Anonymous Author sends in the manuscript for a new book at the same time that they discover a new body. Suddenly, the pretend author is framed for these murders and has to prove her innocence.
I don’t read thrillers anymore, but I’m sure something of the like has been done a million times.
Sounds like an episode of Castle!
The only prob with getting someone to pretend to be the author is somewhere along the line they will start demanding changes in the book since their name is on it *lol*. That was the plot of a classic black comedy called ‘The Front’, based in the McCarthy era where blacklisted writers would hire fronts to submit their work. Woody Allen was the front, and starts deciding he was the artist.
Elizabeth Peter’s “Die for Love” had a fake author who looked the part of a romance writer but couldn’t recognize any of the literary allusions from her “own” books.
There is an Australian movie based loosely on this premise, stars Hugh Jackman as a trucker who writes romance novels.
I would buy that book!! Because you and Gordon are amazing and I know I would love everything you create!
This kind of behind the scenes business-related posts are always very interesting!
P.S. if Marvel & DC can manage a crossover, shouldn’t Avon & Roc be able to do the same?
Thank you for being writers.
Świętokrzyski actually is an adjective from the noun that in english means Holly Cross. Fun fact – you can find Świętokrzyskie voivodeship on Polish maps – it’s a land administration unit that got it’s name from the Świętokrzyskie Mountains which got their name because in the cloister on top on one of the hills relics of the Holly Cross were hidden in the treasury. Now you can impress your friends with knowledge of european geography and polish language ????
If you, hypothetically, wrote that book, I would read it anyway… because with your books, I cannot predict the outcome, or if the outcome is fixed (Happy End) I cannot predict how you get there.
So, you realize what you did? From now on, we will analyze everything you post or write for obscure hints to that hypothetical book. Even if you never write this book, some BDH-members will be convinced they found this book.
Argh!!! 😉
Swietokrzyski (with Polish letters Świętokrzyski) means “from saint cross” as an adjective and is also a name of the small mountain range and region in Poland.
Greetings from Poland!
I believe in both of you as a storyteller. Whatever you create others will for sure pick up on the quality (with any name you go under). I just hope we can get a clue so that we don’t miss out on any of your new work.
I’m always fascinated by pseudonyms and your explanation as to why some authors choose to use them really explains a lot of things. Meg Cabot (Princess Diaries) used a pseudonym when she was first starting out writing adult romance novels. Supposedly she didn’t want her grandmother/family members reading her books because they contained smut which I thought was hilarious when she explained that. The books have since been republished under her real name.
And then are those writers who really do not want to have a public profile such as Elena Ferrante. I’ve read several articles trying to identify who the hell she is (I think some journalists have figured it out since they followed the publisher’s money trail). She does interviews with the media but only through her publisher so there is this whole aura of mystery around her (or him, some have speculated she might actually be a he).
Now I am intrigued about this idea. I would read anything you wrote. You have a way with words that flow and can easily follow without treating the reader like an imbecile. Let us know if this is a thing!!!
Definitely about to go look for books by ‘Joe Bobbs. Ehehehe
I have a friend who had this very issue. He created a pseudonym as demanded by his publisher when he started a new series, due to iffy sales of his other books. I wonder just how common this actually is in publishing?
Is it wrong of me to now be wondering how many of the BDH are going to be keeping an eye out for books by ‘Joe Bobbs’ in the future….just in case you do use that as a pseudonym?
Out of interest, how much control do authors have over the amount of ‘publicity’ they receive personally – is it like the lottery where you have to tick a box?
I’m just thinking in terms of the Robert Galbraith ‘reveal’ – was that ever something that could truly have worked?
I know you mentioned that hiring actors to ‘be’ the author isn’t really a thing; but how much is author/public interaction demanded or required in order to build the brand the publicise the book – I’m thinking in terms of face-to-face, or photographs – things that can positively identify you as you.
I know a lot of books used to carry a photograph of the author, especially in hardbacks, but that seems to have died a death now (at least in the UK, maybe I’m wrong and haven’t noticed recently) – if you did pursue a pseudonym identity, and had a website etc. set up for that; would there be an expectation to ‘see’ the author and ‘show’ what they look like?
I will totally read it even if it doesn’t have any fantasy just because I love the way you write ????
Not only did Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels do this, but she also wrote complimentary blurbs for the back of some covers under the other pen name!
So did Sherrilyn Kenyon/McQueen=Kinley MacGregor.
Always enjoy your blogs. This one caused a chuckle re your ‘Silvia Adkins’ comment. Have you read Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Among her many writings is Corrina Chapman, a baker by day in Melbourne and solves mysteries on the side with her partner. Brilliant series. Kerry also writes the brilliant Phyrne Fisher Detective series. Have complete collections of both and a new Phyrne has just come out. Good luck with the house hunting – sounds so frustrating.
i love her. i love both of the series, she does some other non mystery books too.
Bwah ha ha ha. Thank you Ilona Andrews for the post.
Personally I prefer JD Robb stories not Nora Roberts so a good decision there.
One of my siblings is a Christine Feehan fan. She loves Dark (vampire) series. I like a few of sisters of the heart series and shadow riders series. Neither of us read the Leopard series that other sibling loves. Then we have the sibling that only reads regency romance. Sigh. We tease about being narrow minded.
One of my nieces has Aspergers. Given a choice she will only read American civil war history books. So we get her one requested civil war history book and randomly selected ebooks to equal cost of wanted book. Because she prefers ebooks— generation whatever it is called. She has to read random books and be able to discuss with us. It’s amazing how many authors use pseudonyms. In different fields.
Personally, I would buy anything you guys write. You are on my short and “must buy” list. That being said, I agree with all the points laid out in the post. As you said, you do have to make a living. However, know that I would definitely buy the project you described. If you do decide to develop such a pseudonym, I hope you will be able to allow us in the BDH in on it! 🙂
Oh man, I would love to read a book by Joe Bobbs!
I don’t know if you remember him but Craig Shaw Gardner. He didn’t realize he had built a brand of humor books and alienated his fanbase with a serious book under his own name
another Maud book would be nice. or another family member.
I completely understand the use of pseudonyms. But, I would love to read anything you write. How would I know it was by you and not a different person? That makes me sad because I would automatically read it, even if it’s different, just because you wrote it. I love your writing style. But may not even notice this book by an unknown author. So, I hope that if you do do this we will somehow know it’s you.
Just recently I watched “The Front” Woody Allen’s movie about fronting for black listed writers during the McCarthy Era. It didn’t turn out well…..
Is your true identity something that can be hidden through the contracting process? Does your agent have to disclose your legal name at some point during the sale?I have seen some authors copyright listed as a corporate rather than personal name. Other than for future merchandising opportunities, I have wondered if it was to further blur the true identity for privacy.
Hi Ilona, I have an aunt and uncle in Austin who have a mother-in-law garage apartment that’s available for rent about half a mile from the Triangle if you’re still looking for something for your daughter. They’re good with dogs as long as they get along well with other dogs. If you’re interested, please let me know and I can get you in contact with each other. I lived with them for a couple semesters when I was at UT, so know it works well for a student :).
I was hoping for this! Yeah Alexandra!!
Me too! I kept hoping the BDH would come through with some housing. ????
Okay but if you do publish that book under a pseudonym can you just tell me in secret so I hear about it and get to read it?!!!! I’ll sign an NDA I PROMISE. Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaaasssee!
I find it rather sad that an author feels like and has to pick a pseudonym when they decide to write a different genre/plot/style book because there are, lets admit it, plenty of stupid people who despite having it shouted in their face point blank that this is TOTALLY different from what the author wrote previously and DO NOT expect it to be the same or even close and has THIS or THAT…you guessed it – quite a lot of readers would still be all – whaaat? this is not what I expected, what is this crap???? – And would just go on badmouthing the author or their new book and give it negative impact overall because of big, fat nothing.
(-_-)
Like…wth.
You genuinely don’t like it, fine, but don’t diss it just because the author tried something new and it’s not like the previous books and what you expected DESPITE most likely having been warned that – hey, old readers, this is the OPPOSITE of what I wrote, so ye be warned, give it a try if you feel like it, but be open-minded.
So yeah, while I don’t really care for pseudonyms and wish all authors would write under just one name, I understand the many varied why’s of it.
Just feels bad if the author is pressured into it by moronic readers.
Personally, if an author does decide to go into different genre/plot/style from what they’re used to, I’d rather know it under their original name and be happy they have the guts and imagination to try/come up with something entirely different and if it seems appealing, I’d definitely give it a try.
If I like it – awesome, now know the author has even more varied exciting books for me to read.
If don’t like it that much, well, too bad, but it is what it is, doesn’t mean I won’t still read their next books should they be of the previous style I liked.
Or if they come up with something even more new, would give it a try as well.
And who knows, maybe someone who came upon first these new books would like them and then check out the previous works and like those too.
Oh well, as with everything, it has cons and pros.
If you guys do decide to write a YA-ish book which is rather brutal and has a young protagonist – do let us know, I’m all for it!
I’ve got no problems with authors trying new things & expanding their repertoire 🙂
You guys always somehow know the burning questions in my mind and put up a blog post.
I have been thinking about this for a while, as someone slowly foraying into writing. I also have a complicated non-White name so I just assumed that I would need a pseudonym. Book-wise, my interests span too many genres anyway. Plus… I don’t really want people to know my writing in person, I’ve never ever wanted to be even slightly famous. I’ll take my comfortable anonymity thanks very much. We’ll see lol, writing for fun, and writing as a career is a big jump.
Sherry Thomas is an author I’ve seen that has done this genre changing, she has Historical Romance, YA, SF, and now historical mystery under her belt, and I always wondered how much work that took to change her brand.
Granted, this was almost half my life ago at this point, but speaking as one who spent roughly five years dealing with half the walking appetites on Hollywood Boulevard: Yes, 17 year old kids do get involved with sex and violence – some of them at younger ages than that, and a lot of them just to be able to live.
I think my firstborn’s friends mostly liked me because I let them hang out and I wasn’t always yelling at them (though what I had to say on the subect of them using my toothbrush …. They didn’t think I knew those words). And the guys that it turned out really WERE members of what was said to be the most dangerous gang in Los Angeles were scared of me because I wasn’t afraid of them.
I remember reading that when Asimov was having his first science fiction novel published, he was expecting an epic battle with Boston University where he was an assistant prof in biochem about publishing it under his real name ( this was like 1948). His boss was like ‘is it any good?’ and that settled the issue,or so he said. SF was seen much like comic books back then.
If Gordon ever decides to write a book on his own , he could use Nicola Romeo. He was the founder of the Alfa Romeo marque, so would be perfect for Gordon since he is a rare thing,an Alfa owner whose car didn’t try to kill him ( come to think of it an Alfa is the perfect car for someone who writes about magic and the like,Alfas are magical, when they drive the way they are supposed to it is pure magic,the rest of the time they are possessed)
In the 60s as a nae so wee bairn I eventually learned to look for the female authors because they were held to a higher standard. Less rot, ye ken?
Not that a few didn’t slip through tears in the net, but better odds.
Today? Not so much.
Still plenty of excellent writers out there, just have to work harder to find them. Oh the horror…
Don’t forget Barbara michaels who wrote romantic suspense . She has new series about English lady who inherits money and goes to Egypt to look for mummies.
Totally different, her publisher said you need new name. So she became Elizabeth Peters. ( name of her children) Nora Roberts did similar JDRobb is ( name of her two boys).
Only women have to do this.
Both ladies highly successful!!
Bring up Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb is telling, around that time for myself I was getting worn down on contemporary romances and felt like I was reading the same series over and over again.
So instead of following and being disappointed by the NR name, I would have been turned off from trying the In Death series just by the name alone.
Thankfully until the covers changed to list Nora I had no clue and quite enjoyed them. That series is one of my auto-buys still to this day.
The flip side of the coin of what you’ve written I suppose. 😀
i read by author. if i find an author i like i generally buy all their books. 95 percent of the time if i like an author i always like the author. i like the way they write and sound. If i don’t like a book by an author i almost always don’t like anything they write. i am wrong 10 percent of the time. i have tried other books by an author i didn’t originally like and tried one in a different series and liked it. for example, an author i tried who wrote books that sold by the millions , but i couldn’t get past chapter 5, until she wrote a book called ‘the chemist’ and i loved it. if you were to use a pseudonym i’d like to know about it because i like the way you write and i’d want to give it a shot. But if you didn’t want to tell me i could look it up in fantastic fiction.com, because they give away peoples pseudonyms.
Call me crazy but if I don’t like what an author has written then I just don’t read it.
I certainly don’t think I should contact them and tell them what they’ve done wrong and how I think they can fix it. Because you know, I’m the reader not the writer. Talk about hubris!
I don’t mind pseudonyms and I don’t mind versatile authors. Some writers I will read anything they write even into genres I don’t normally go for – Kelley Armstrong seems to be universal for me and has taken me down a more thriller lane than I would have ever willingly gone but left me happy!
Yet others I can’t connect with in certain series even if they are in the same genres I would typically like – Seanan McGuire is such a one, I like the October Daye series, zoomed through them all but am just ok for the Cryptid books and find that series overall quite laborious reading to the point I stopped at book five I think. Though I expect at some point I’ll get to it just to see the cuckoo.
And for years I avoided Jim Butcher not fancying the sound of his Dresden books but then the Codex Alera came out and was so awesome I read his Dresden books too and also loved them. Elizabeth Moon yes to her SF stuff, no to Paksennarion.
If an author has a pseudonym I’d say that they should allow their associated names to be linked somewhere just to expand readership for those who actually search for the love of books. If it’s safe for them to do so of course. Otherwise how can I, an avid reader with disposable income, go and buy all your back catalogues under every pen-name? 😉
After all I can’t decide I don’t like it until I’ve read it can I? And hey, I might just love it so win/win!
May I humbly suggest you use the “new” name of Gordon Andrews, if you ever need to use a different name? Those of us here would still go buy it, but all the randoms out there wouldn’t necessarily link it to you automatically.
Also, it does make sense to me to use different names when doing children’s books vs adult books. I don’t remember who now, but (a long time ago) I got my younger sister a book by a favorite children’s author, but it was not a children’s book. ????
I would read anything you put out including a ya. But I judge a book on merit not author. So if you do write this …slip me an email : D
You missed (or I missed while reading) 2 other reasons for pseudonyms,
1. To avoid saturating the market with too many works coming out by the same name. How many in what period of time is too many used to be the publishers call but the rules have changed for indie.
2. To avoid having a publisher control your actual name (scared the heck out of me when i discovered they can hold your legal name hostage) or to continue to publish when a publisher claims ownership of your current pseudonym.
I do believe that is the case for Ann Maxwell, aka Elizabeth Lowell. She was changing genres from scifi romance to romance, but also she had publisher issues under Ann Maxwell so it was a completely new start.
Ann Maxwell books are written in collaboration with Elizabeth Lowell’s husband Evan, Elizabeth Lowell books are not.
“Elizabeth and Evan (writing as Ann Maxwell) have published four suspense novels, the most recent of which is Shadows and Silk. These novels appeared on nation-wide bestseller lists. In 1982, Ann began publishing romances as Elizabeth Lowell.” Source: https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/elizabeth-lowell-9001
“Why do you write under different names?
Originally I wrote only science fiction under my own name, Ann Maxwell. Then Evan and I collaborated as A. E. Maxwell on mystery/suspense novels. If a publisher wanted a pseudonym and/or there was a contractual conflict with using a previous name, a new name was invented. Thus, Elizabeth Lowell, which is my middle name plus Evan’s middle name, even though I write the Elizabeth Lowell books by myself. Confused yet? Just wait. One publisher wanted a woman’s name on the spine, even though Evan and I were collaborating. Thus, the Ann Maxwell romantic suspense books.
Under any name, and whether set in the past, present, or future, I write fiction that celebrates the possibilities of life.”
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070127181335/http://elizabethlowell.com/faq.html#9
1. Here is Nora Roberts Bibliography as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts_bibliography
As you can see, she published numerous full length books within the same year. Look at 1991 for example.
It is best to view traditional publishing schedule as a movie theater. The publisher has a set budget and finite resources, much like movie theater has a set number of screens. Some screens are in the larger rooms and are reserved for films that are popular and some are in smaller rooms that are for films that are less popular.
Traditional publishing is the same. Every month there is a major release and smaller releases. Every release must be edited, proofread, typeset, and marketed to retailers. The retailers also have limited slots available for physical inventory. The available pool of releases is carefully slotted into this schedule. Yes, there is such a thing as market saturation, but most of us can only aspire to the kind of output required to touch that ceiling.
2. No. They cannot hold your legal name hostage. They can offer you a contract that has a non-compete clause, which prevents you from publishing under your name for a set time period. They can ask for the right of first refusal, meaning they get first consideration on your next work of fiction. Anything else is considered to be an unfair practice.
This is why you should have an agent. A good agent will not permit you to sign a contract with an unscrupulous publisher or a contract that binds the author to unfavorable terms. There will always be shady publisher, which is why the author must read fine print and find an expert to actively advocate for their career.
Speaking of expertise, Mr. Mckenney, according to our blog policy, if you are going to position yourself as an expert, I must respectfully ask that you list your industry credentials.:)
Very interesting! Yep, I agree the pseudonym would be a good idea with such a large variance from your norm. Frankly, I would without a doubt read the reviews and say, nope! I have no problems with violence and sex, but the age would be a major turnoff for me. Weird, I know.
Here’s hoping the house hunting is not still as horrid as previously reported! Keeping the fingers and toes crossed for y’all.
To be honest I’d read a book like that knowing it’s from you than from anyone else.
If you guys write it, it will be automatically bought by me. I like your writing style. I would love to see what else you create. Don’t be shy and go for it. Most of us will be thrilled.
It’s a funny thing, genre. Nalini Singh is a fantastic author and I love her urban fantasy books. She’s also recently started writing contemporary fiction with no paranormal element at all. It’s still good, but I didn’t realize when I started reading A Madness of Sunshine that there was no paranormal element. I kept waiting and waiting for the “twist” introduction of something fantastical. There was nothing and it interfered with my enjoyment of the book, only because I didn’t know ahead of time. I will almost certainly enjoy A Quiet in Her Bones more now that I know she’s trying different things than her long-running successes.
Kelley Armstrong. I don’t know if my brain was just more elastic, or the blurb about the series was more educational but I did not have the same issue when Kelley started her non-paranormal, contemporary fiction series featuring Nadia Stafford. In fact, aside from individual favorites (Bitten will always be my first love from Kelley), I like the Nadia series and her Rockton series even more than her UF.
It would be interesting to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions these two authors had with their publisher about whether to go with a pseudonym or not. I do think it’s easier to go from romance to UF/paranormal and not generate a new author name, than to go the other way. Perhaps just because there’s a lot of romance in UF generally, but also because we all know most romance novels are already suspending disbelief for the happily ever after. I don’t suppose it is really more fictional than a spy novel where the protagonist survives countless dire encounters, but it feels closer more based on reality when the dominant emotions are darker?
So how many of us searched Amazon for Joe Bobbs or was it just me? ????
If that was kind of a test of tipping your tous in the icy river: YES OF COURSE WE WILL READ YOU YA VIOLENT SEXY NOVEL!!!!
And of course most of us will like or love it! Why? Because you won’t be able to hide your writer ability and art! So there… your readers are ready and will wait until you are, too!
Greets from Switzerland!
Inga
P.S: so glad, you have a suggestion for a place for your kid in this blog!
toes, not tous!!!
You will never know if it comes out. Muhahahaha!
I understand the use of pseudonyms and can appreciate their use. I still remember one Christmas my Mom and I were talking about the In Death series and how much we both enjoyed it. My one brother piped up how much he liked the series as well. Really liked it. He was then shocked when later in the conversation it came out that JD Robb was Nora Roberts. Not sure if he ever read another one. Think it would be ridiculous if he had stopped since he already enjoyed them but it was really a romance author behind the stories – the testosterone horror!
Jayne Krentz, Jayne Castle and Amanda Quick I appreciate because I can immediately tell more about the story based on which name is used and I know which one to reach for based on what I am in the mood for.
I buy under all three and have tried some of her other earlier psuedonyms. Not as fussed for earlier ones (Harlequin romances mainly)but I think that has more to do with longer novels creating more depth and her earlier works were limited to 180 pages of formula driven storytelling.
As for Nalini Singh not using psuedonyms I am also okay with that because even if I did not follow her blogs I would know which series I was getting based on the title so I know what genre to expect. Same with our Authorlords each series has series specific titles. I think is a good alternative to psuedonyms.
The books, the blog and the BDH have helped get us through a crappy year so I really hope everyone is staying safe and staying healthy!
I want to read that book! go find yourselves a pseudonym.
I’m in. I love your writing “voice.” Best of luck!!!
Yeah, I don’t know if you could hide behind a pseudonym from the BDH. To paraphrase Derek, we would know it’s you by the way you rode your horse.
What about male authors writing romances who adopt female sounding pseudonyms? Especially m/f romances? Romance can be a profitable industry and I feel like a lot of the Harlequin type books could have been a good steady job which has now expanded to self published. Do straight men really not write for this industry?
Male romance authors who are pressured to publish under female sounding name seems a bit …. behind the times for gender equality. Is this because female dominant reader expectations are behind the times (despite being glass ceiling’d and pigeonholed for other historically male dominant careers ourselves)? Or they started when they established themselves and now “coming out” seems risky? Or do readers accept a man in the industry but a female sounding name still sells better just like having the expected bodice ripper or topless man cover?
I know there have been some male fans on here who probably enjoy some of the romance aspects of your work. I don’t know if they’d appreciate the representation but I feel some would, if only to one day boast to their male friends over a beer that their kid is a romance novelist or book cover model and have friends be happy the kid has a good income & career, regardless of gender.
Actually “Joe’s” proposed book might well fit in the classification of New Adult Fiction which is aimed at 18-30 year old or Mature Young Adult. These genres generally deal with more sex and violence than the traditional Young Adult novel and are sold or marketed differently. Some bookstores/libraries shelve them in a separate section so the YA audience “won’t be shocked” and so adults won’t feel bad browsing them.
I have often thought about writing a book, but because of my semi-public profession, I wouldn’t want my name associated with the books. I asked my husband if he could just be the author but he felt that would be plagiarism. When I read your post about hiring someone to pretend to write the books, it reminded me of my husband’s comment.
Is it really plagiarism then?
No.
Plagiarism is a deliberate act of copying someone else’s work and claiming it as your own. So if you copy the post above and you claim you wrote it without the author’s permission, it is plagiarism. 🙂
If you give your husband permission, then it’s not plagiarism. I would advise against this, however. You never know what may happen. Marriages break and you don’t want to be in the position of trying to sort out who has the claim to the name. Just go with a pseudonym. If you absolutely must involve your husband, formalize this agreement through an agent or a lawyer.
I want to read the book about the 17 year old. From my experience of you two as authors, she’ll be traumatized, cope, and overcome. She’ll have scars psychologically and maybe physically, And she might always carry around some damage. Sound awesome. I hope you write it and I find it.
I also want more of *Alphas:Origins.* I hope that’s not a futile hope.
+1
Charles de Lint had a similar ‘fantasy’ (heh) and has a few books under his pseudonym. They are pretty brutal.
Thank you for sharing this info. Makes a lot of sense!
It all makes sense to me. Go ahead and write your fantasy pseudonymous book! We will be looking for it. And yes, kids do sex and violence whether we like it or not.
I remember in the early days, Steven King published some non-horror books under the name Richard Bachman.
Karen Marie Moning managed to pull off a hard turn from time travel romance to gritty urban fantasy without using a pseudonym. Granted, they were all set in the same universe, but I don’t know if I can overstate how drastic the shift in tone was. She must have lost fans; I know that I didn’t take well to the change initially (I have warmed to it a bit over the years), but as far as I can tell, her new series does very well.
I often wonder how the conversation went with her publisher when she wanted to shift genres.
There are some really good sexy scenes with Eve and Roarke in the In Death series!! Not sure if that counts as “classical” romance, but they will certainly fog your glasses if you weren’t expecting that in a sci-fi/cops series.
Funny thing about writing, I think sometimes voice is very obvious. Maybe I wouldn’t recognize your YA novel, maybe I would. I would love to read it. I don’t normally read YA, but was sucked into Susan Ee’s Angelfall trilogy a few years ago. That was some strange, weird shit and I loved it. That wasn’t you was it? 🙂
I volunteer to be the imaginary schill. I shall be Hilt Bladestone writer of over the top YA fiction. 🙂
As I recall it Iain Banks published under Iain Banks (mainstream) and Iain M Banks (Science Fiction) so that they were tracked separately so that the sales of the two streams didn’t affect expected sales of each other
Sw-, Sw-???? oh forget that!
Yeah I can see how if you only had 1 small series published, that dwindled into low sales, it might be better to change your pen name than fight the apathy left from the previous series.
But as an established author with many successful series, you would probly only use a different name if you were gonna publish completely off your target map. And the giggle evilly, as you described!
Oh please, that one is easy. My ex’s last name is Wojciechowski (Woe-jah-howe-ski) or one of my favorites locally Kukkakauppa (Koo-kah-cow-pah means florist in Finnish) and then there is my Serb-Croation friend Mrdjenovic.
How odd. I had friends with that same last name, and they told me it was pronounced “watch a cow ski”. We all laughed because on every form they filled out for colleges, they ended up being “watch a cow” because the rest didn’t fit in the little blocks. I worked with someone whose last name was Kbrdl, pronounced “kib er dull”. She was not dull at all.
The link gave me the best name:
Toney Fries!!!
I had a weird reason for using a pseudonym–I worked in a publishing company in editorial, and they had a really lousy policy of claiming first refusal rights on anything an employee wrote in their field, even though you didn’t write it on company time. (Doubtless illegal, but I had no other employment options at the time, and we needed health insurance.) I didn’t want them taking my new book, and they didn’t really want it, and so we played “let’s make a deal”–I agreed to write under a pseudonym and they kept their paws off. (I’m long gone from there to a place that is much more sensible and ethical.)
That’s funny. I went to work for the University I used to attend (many years before) and refused to sign the Intellectual Policy agreement. I told them that I write and have contractual obligations under my own business and I didn’t want the university to end up owning the copyright to my books or software just because I worked for them. They told me they would NEVER. I told them they had, back when I was a student, a couple of janitors had come up with a food thing (pizza nuggets) and they’d scrounged up money and opened a little business and did pretty well in their off time… until the University decided to take it over because the guys had signed the IP agreement.
It went out of business very quickly because the University had no idea how to make and market pizza nuggets. And the guys were back to being only janitors instead of the inventers of pizza rolls.
I ended up with an amended IP agreement which specifically mentioned ONLY the work I did for the University was covered under the IP agreement, and not anything I did as a contractor for other people or my writing.
Some places think they’re entitled to everything in your life. I was ready to walk over the issue… so they “fixed” it. I wonder about the people who did work for the University who signed it because they really needed the job.
That’s when reading the big and fine print in any contract comes into play. I don’t sign anything until I really look over something in a contract. Drives people nuts. However, it saves you from anything biting you in the rear in the future. 🙂
I’m not usually a fan of YA because I get impatient with the characters. I’m listening to one now, though, “The Girls I’ve Been” and enjoying it a lot. It’s not sunshine and roses but the traumatic bits are not too graphic. Young does not necessarily mean immature.
You didn’t mention Jayne Anne Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jaynne Castle. I have read all her books – yes, I started off with romance. I even made Jo Beverley laugh when I met her at a book launch and told her I thought of the romances as fantasy because, really, who would put up with those men in real life?
But … Janyne Anne Krentz – her books are set in different centuries (or the future) but ended up having connections. They started off as different series (I assume) but ended up having a strong element that you could tell was her writing.
And CJ Cherryh was my FAVOURITE author for many, many years. She does aliens so well.
It’s interesting to notice that some of the authors i like: Krentz/Quick/Castle, Viola/Zenina, Shelly Laurenston/Aiken, Nalini Singh, Jennifer Ashley are mentioned here. And obviously we all love Ilona Andrews, since we are here.
So i wonder if this means that all these authors even if they write very differently still have something in common. That certain something that pulls you in, makes you connect to the characters, be able to immerse yourself in the world painted and lose yourself in the story to the point where when it all ends you have to take a moment to reconnect to the real world.
Also for me it is very important that the good guys have their HEA. The world we live in is a dark place, i don’t want/need the world i escape into to be the same.
I like it even more if some of the “bad” guys can be redeemed. I felt for Hugh even before he had his own series, as i considered Kate to be irrational in her hating him for Voron’s death. If Voron hadn’t died when he did Kate would have become Hugh 2.0 since she was under his influence from a younger age and he was a master manipulator. I always felt that Hugh did her a huge favor by confronting Voron when he did.
On another note i wish i were obscenely rich so that i could buy rental properties for people with pets. Asking someone to give up his pet is like asking someone to give up his kid.
This was a really interesting post. Thank you. Pseudonyms and the reasons for choosing them have always fascinated me. I’m proofing / helping clean a dear friend’s memoir that has some very dark places, both in childhood and as an adult, and she keeping her own name. I think she is doing so partly as a way of healing from trauma, and, in this case, I find her decision to not use a pseudonym incredibly brave.
I have an author I like who writes different genre under different names. She doesn’t advertise the names, even on her FB pages. I’ve spent some time hunting them out because I like the way she writes and I like a wide variety of genre. (Copyright pages are wonderful things). I think she’s losing audience because she doesn’t want to piss off the people who read her space opera by suggesting they might like cozy mysteries… (I like both, btw, and a lot of other stuff besides).
I accidently bought the first JD Robb book (when there were 3 out) and liked it so well I went right back and got the 2nd and 3rd. By the time I’d read the 3rd, I said “This author either IS Nora Roberts or has read a LOT of Nora Roberts” There were patterns, especially in the sex scenes, that were Nora. I think the 4th book was “Nora Roberts writing as JD Robb” and I felt vindicated 🙂 My husband would never read Nora Roberts. He’d tried a few and thought they were silly. But he likes JD Robb and still reads those.
So… if you want to write a violent YA book, and publish it under another name, please let us know somehow. I like not just the stories you tell, but the way you write and would buy it.
slightly off topic – but it is about “naming” – Plowy McPlowFace plows through the competition to win snowplow naming contest …how did Julie get in the naming contest??
I read J.D. Robb first, then went and read Nora Roberts. And I can say I’m a bigger fan of J.D. Robb. I still read books written under either name, but the J.D. Robb ones usually require a day off from work.
There is another author I read that publishes under two names. I’m not a fan of the books under one name, I just couldn’t get into the series. So I don’t read books under the second name.
I would probably read the first book by Joe Bobbs and probably because I have yet to find a book/short story of yours that I didn’t like the second and third books.
I can see using a pseudonym whenever you are a public figure. It would keep the crazies one level removed from your personal life. Plus, you could try to keep your personal life personal.
My sister is a realtor and had an established brand under her maiden name. Then she got married and switched to using her husband’s last name, and the name recognition was lost. Fast forward several years, a divorce, and back to the issue of trying to reestablish her business under her maiden name.
A friend had a similar dilemma when she got married. She ended up using her maiden name for her business.
One of my favorite series is the Pax Arcana books by Elliott James. But after the 4th or 5th book, the series just stopped. I haven’t been able to find anything online about this author, and their bio blurb in the books is very obviously, sarcastically, as anonymous as possible. Their website has no new updates, nothing comes up in searches. I have a theory that Elliott James was the pseudonym for an author who (for whatever reason) just decided to stop writing Pax Arcana. Their prerogative, sure, but as an avid fan I wish I knew more.
Thanks for the lengthy answer. ????????
I think there is a lot of understanding fans who would support you no matter what. But there are always people who just have the need to complain a be jerks. So it’s completely reasonable. I’m just glad you keep writing, because yours are the books I am always most excited to read.
Hi Ilona and Andrew
Can I just ask if you do write a book under a Pseudonym would you let us know, because I would love to read it.
Also Kelley Armstrong jumps from genres, like you do, and she also writes YA, where the teenagers have to deal with murder and falling in love, I love all her writing styles as she does it so well. You might be surprised by your fan base if you do decide to write a YA under your own name. PS love all your work.
Seanan Mcguire does this with her sci fi VS fantasy Vs young adult/kids. Seems to work well enough for her, and she’s one of those authors who I will read anything by like house Andrews.
I would at least consider (enthusiastically) any book you wrote, as I love the work I’ve read.
However, I like the idea that *something* obvious indicates a change from the author’s usual category. When a author new to me has a large backlist, it is very annoying to struggle through 15 titles to find the three that are not YA, for instance. I’m starting to get more clues from the artwork, but how hard would it be to add a line saying “A New Contemporary Romance from…?” I guess I should read more blogs????
I always appreciated how you built the relationship for Kate and Curran, the slow development of good days and bad. It was actually what got me to read some of your books that were filed in the romance section, which I equally enjoyed. It was because it had Ilona Andrews on the cover that I picked it up, despite my aversion to the genre. Also, thank you for tagging Honor Raconteur’s books. It was a delight. Cheers.
Thanks for always taking the time to explain the business behind writing and publishing. It’s absolutely fascinating.
” I would read all the reviews that are incensed by the savagery of the book, sip my tea, and giggle, because it wouldn’t be Ilona Andrews who wrote it, but Joe Bobbs”….aaaaaaaaaaaaand now I want to read it.
Something like Dark!Inkeeper you once shared with us from your treasure chest or different genre?
If anyone is looking for a female baker mystery series, Kerry Greenwood doesnt only write the Phryne Fisher series, but the Corinna Chapman series starting with Earthly Delights. Modern setting, not between The Wars