Hypothetical Question: Alter Ego Writing

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by omk3

Sounds like a huge project and a very interesting exercise in styles. I'd love to read the whole set, as long as I knew, as I do now, what is (meta)fictional and what is not. And I think it would be very funny to see how many people actually like the fictional pulp novel more than the main novel itself.

I can almost guarantee that if the original novel were put up against the pulp novel, and all other things being equal, the pulp one would see ten times more downloads.

[jaxx6166]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I'm doing it now as part of a meta-fiction narrative experiment called 'The Domino Effect'. One novel under my own name focusing on a fictional writer, whose work will be released before the novel, which will then be the study of a fictional academic whose writing a fictional non-fiction book about the characters that appear in my fictional writer's book (which in itself will be a fiction)

Wow. That made my brain hurt

How about the TV show "Castle" which is about a mystery writer in NY who helps the cops catch killers. "Castle" also published two novels now, one for each season of the tv show. Novels were believed to be penned by James Paterson, Steven Cannell and/or that dude from the cosby show...

Or Gabriel Knight, written by Jane Jensen, which is about voodoo murders while Knight is solving said voodoo murders and writing his book AND running a used book store

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Now unless that stigma of "book dumping" is no longer applicable, and releasing more than one book every six months in the same genre (sci-fi in my case) is alright....

Ah, but the stigma is still there, to some degree. And if you are writing short stories, for submission to the genre magazines, most of them don't even want to see more than one submission from you at any given time.

If you happen to be prolific enough to churn out good material, and if you are submitting to the top-tier genre magazines, and if you don't mind having some of your stories associated with a different pen name (bearing in mind that copyright for pseudonymous works is a little different than for works under your own name), and if you can keep straight which stories go with which name, and if you can remember how to sign your alter-ego's name convincingly should the need arise... well, then you might as well experiment with it. Doing so hypothetically doubles your potential frequency of publication, if you can produce enough good material to warrant the ruse.

- M.

[DaringNovelist]

Originally Posted by Vintage Season

Ah, but the stigma is still there, to some degree. And if you are writing short stories, for submission to the genre magazines, most of them don't even want to see more than one submission from you at any given time.

If you happen to be prolific enough to churn out good material, and if you are submitting to the top-tier genre magazines, and if you don't mind having some of your stories associated with a different pen name (bearing in mind that copyright for pseudonymous works is a little different than for works under your own name), and if you can keep straight which stories go with which name, and if you can remember how to sign your alter-ego's name convincingly should the need arise... well, then you might as well experiment with it. Doing so hypothetically doubles your potential frequency of publication, if you can produce enough good material to warrant the ruse.

- M.

But magazines are a different case. It's not a case of a stigma, it's a case of an individual magazine balancing their issues. They don't discourage you from writing more and submitting elsewhere.

Book publishing, though, is more career oriented. Your publisher wants to manage your brand. In spite of James Patterson, there's a common wisdom that you should only have a certain number of book releases in a certain period of time.

Camille

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by DaringNovelist

But magazines are a different case. It's not a case of a stigma, it's a case of an individual magazine balancing their issues. They don't discourage you from writing more and submitting elsewhere.

Book publishing, though, is more career oriented. Your publisher wants to manage your brand. In spite of James Patterson, there's a common wisdom that you should only have a certain number of book releases in a certain period of time.

Camille

Valid points... but remember, if you are prolific enough to produce frequent magazine stories, you are also prolific enough to assemble frequent anthologies.

That gets you right back to the accepted release schedule, although single-author anthologies are a little more flexible in that respect.

- M.

[Moejoe]

Aren't we just trying to apply the modes of what was to what none of us can possibly know? Digital publishing isn't traditional publishing. You can do whatever you like. Multiple pseudonyms, any genre, no genre, free, priced, given away with a bag of oranges. This is the perfect opportunity for all writers to ignore what they've been told in the past, and do whatever they feel like, and with very little risk either. If we persist in holding onto the ideas of the past, the future is already lost.

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Aren't we just trying to apply the modes of what was to what none of us can possibly know? Digital publishing isn't traditional publishing. You can do whatever you like. Multiple pseudonyms, any genre, no genre, free, priced, given away with a bag of oranges. This is the perfect opportunity for all writers to ignore what they've been told in the past, and do whatever they feel like, and with very little risk either. If we persist in holding onto the ideas of the past, the future is already lost.

Again, a good point. My response was geared more to writers who are still trying to work within the established print industry... which does not necessarily exclude those who are taking advantage of the new era, as there are some authors who can comfortably do both.

- M.

[Steven Lake]

Well, as for being comfortable doing both, you almost have to do both, and then some. I've actually consigned myself to go pretty much anywhere my customers go, or want me to go. Right now that's only print and digital, but if some other medium comes up (we jokingly like to mention holo-novels in geek circles), then by all means I'll go. One shouldn't restrict themselves, unless there's a viable, and sometimes economical reason to do so.

[DaringNovelist]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Aren't we just trying to apply the modes of what was to what none of us can possibly know? Digital publishing isn't traditional publishing. You can do whatever you like. Multiple pseudonyms, any genre, no genre, free, priced, given away with a bag of oranges. This is the perfect opportunity for all writers to ignore what they've been told in the past, and do whatever they feel like, and with very little risk either. If we persist in holding onto the ideas of the past, the future is already lost.

I think that is the point the discussion. We're comparing notes on "So why do we have this rule?"

It's the old story about the family recipe. A mother is teaching her daughter to bake a ham according to the old family recipe. Just before they glaze it, Mom cuts off each end of the ham.

"Why do we do that?" asked the daughter.

"I don't know," said Mom. "That's just the say Grandma always did it."

So they call up Grandma, and she thinks maybe it has something to do with the glaze, but she's not sure. She just did it the way Great-Grandma did it.

They go to visit Great-Grandma at the retirement center and she just laughs. "We only had a little tiny pan to bake it in," she says. "I cut off the ends so it would fit!"

The problem is that in real life, each generation would come up with a different excuse, and you might not easily get back to the real reason.

Camille

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Max Brand wrote under 19 different pseudonyms (that are known) and published 500 average sized novels before his death.

Wow, that's wild. Sounds like he could write westerns like they were going out of style. Which then makes you wonder how someone would market themselves when you're carrying even one alternate pen name, let alone 19. Oy.

Originally Posted by DaringNovelist

Book publishing, though, is more career oriented. Your publisher wants to manage your brand. In spite of James Patterson, there's a common wisdom that you should only have a certain number of book releases in a certain period of time.

Can you elaborate on that a bit more? Especially the "managing your brand" part. Are you saying that too many novels too quickly can damage your brand, or is it more a case of "let's get this one handled before we go and tackle another one"? Or is it more a case of reader kickback if you're tossing too many new books out there too quickly, especially if someone has a slower rate of reading? Just asking, as you've struck my curiosity.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Wow, that's wild. Sounds like he could write westerns like they were going out of style. Which then makes you wonder how someone would market themselves when you're carrying even one alternate pen name, let alone 19. Oy.

Can you elaborate on that a bit more? Especially the "managing your brand" part. Are you saying that too many novels too quickly can damage your brand, or is it more a case of "let's get this one handled before we go and tackle another one"? Or is it more a case of reader kickback if you're tossing too many new books out there too quickly, especially if someone has a slower rate of reading? Just asking, as you've struck my curiosity.

Brand (Frederick Faust) hated what he wrote and he doubly hated the western genre that made him so popular. He wrote for money to subsidize his poetry writing and his lifestyle. His average output was 20 to 50 pages per day (an afternoon session) on a manual typewriter. But it was a different time, and Brand could occupy a whole western magazine by himself, with every story having a different pseudonym. Another amazing fact is that he was hardly ever edited. Straight from the page and into print.

[DaringNovelist]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Can you elaborate on that a bit more? Especially the "managing your brand" part. Are you saying that too many novels too quickly can damage your brand, or is it more a case of "let's get this one handled before we go and tackle another one"? Or is it more a case of reader kickback if you're tossing too many new books out there too quickly, especially if someone has a slower rate of reading? Just asking, as you've struck my curiosity.

I was speaking generally and using my own terms, so don't read too much into it.

Basically, I think it's a control and marketing issue, and it has more to do with how traditional publishing works. When it comes to the business end of publishing, a book is an event. It's a "release" not a physical thing. They're balancing a whole lot of issues and selling the book to a whole lot of people before they ever get to the reader. (As a matter of fact, you could say that publishers don't sell to readers at all - they sell to distributors and retailers.)

I think the desire to market books at a slower rate is more to maximize efforts than anything else. They want to play on anticipation, and that's where "brand" enters into it. I think the slogan was "a Christie for Christmas" later in Agatha Christie's career.

But if you don't have this monster distribution system to manage - and if you don't have book launches - then it matters less.

My theory (and this not based on anything except my own buying habits and that of my friends) is that when a customer discovers you, it's to your benefit to have a bunch of books available in the same series or genre so they can go to town on it.

What matters is that the quality is consistent and if you write in more than one genre or style, the audience can quickly find their favorites among what you write. You could use pseudonyms, or you could use title and cover to indicate different types.

IMHO, pseudonyms were great for physical books, because it would say right on them "writing as" so the audience could easily find all your books. (And librarians and bookstores will often file them all together.) However, in the electronic world, they search on author name, and so it's harder to find the things written under other names.

Camille

[DaringNovelist]

Oh, and one other factor in the "book dumping" issue -

Physical bookstores only have so much room. One reason traditional publishers want to slow writers down is because when the new book comes out, the booksellers clear the old books off the shelf and return them unsold. With physical bookstores, you actually do hurt your sales by coming out with new titles too often (unless you're James Patterson).

With Amazon, and other online retailers, that's not really a problem.

Camille

[jes1]

I don't mind the use of pseudonyms for different genres or for whatever other reasons the author has to use them. I would like to see lists of various author's pseudonyms to track down other works I might enjoy. I like works in so many different genres, so would love to discover unknown (to me) works by my favorite authors. Maybe we need to start a Mobile Read author pseudonym list.

[Steven Lake]

Ah, well, that makes sense. So let me ask another question, and it's a bit hypothetical based on several of my already existing stories or series that are currently in the "to be written" or "in progress" bins.

One series I have is a sci-fi (which is what I primarily write) with heavy Christian overtones and involves an adventure race through nature itself, so it contains some outdoorsman stuff as well. So it's not all space ships and high technology (well, yeah, there's some of that too, but not for the main characters), but rather a mix of genres to some degree. Sci-fi for the main villains and the alien creatures seen in it, adventure/wilderness for the main characters involved in the race, and a heavy slice of adventure/mystery/suspense for the entire book in general. So if I were to boil it down to three key elements, I'd say it's a sci-fi, a wilderness adventure, and religious fiction (exp: Left Behind). That's outside my normal orbit of writing, even though it does contain some aspects of what I'm good at.

The other is a three part fantasy novel. Actually, it's more than a fantasy novel, as it's not pure fantasy. It's a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid. One half of the story deals with pure sci-fi, the other with pure fantasy. Again, this is something that's outside my normal orbit of writing, even if it does contain elements that are familiar to me.

It's part of what spawned my original question. Since the styles and story structures are so off center of what I normally write (if you guys have read "oort perimeter", you'd know what I'm talking about), I wasn't sure how one would go about marketing them. Plus there's the fact that I feel a little hemmed in by the traditional 6 month release cycle for novels. Maybe that's because I'm a writing machine when it comes to novels. (I already have 35 total in various states of completion!) lol. Anywho, I had mentioned these little "problems" to a friend of mine who actually talked about possibly using the alter ego idea.

I hadn't thought about it up until that time, and personally wouldn't have done it, as I don't like using pen names, but the idea still intrigued me, hence I ultimately asked this question in order to learn more about it, how it might be used, who uses it, etc. So far the replies have been interesting and informative.