Hypothetical Question: Alter Ego Writing

Steven Lake · 07-08-2010, 12:05 AM

Alright, here's a hypothetical question for you writers, and even the readers here to some degree. Let's say you're already an established writer, but you want to do a slightly different genre than you normally do. Case in point: Stephen King writes romance under a pen name. Not sure how many of you knew that, but he does. And to make it even more interesting, he's using a woman's name.

Now that brings me to the point of my topic. If you wanted to write in a genre or write a series on a topic or subject outside of the normal field of writing you're known for, how would you best approach it? Most authors I've seen take on a pen name and hide behind it, using that to disguise who they really are. The book then goes on and either succeeds or fails without coming back to haunt the original writer. Or in the case of success, it wouldn't interfere with their primary writing focus.

So with that in mind, should you do something like that, how would you handle publishing the book under the alter ego? How would you handle signings, publicity, sales, etc? One idea that was proffered to me was to use a stand in, someone who would be the visible face of your alter ego. So it would kinda be like ghost writing, except in this case it would be ghost personality.

Anywho, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

jaxx6166 · 07-08-2010, 01:15 AM

When I attended the Superstars Seminar, there was a whole panel discussing author brand and identification. The established rule seems to be one name, one genre. "You don't want to confuse your fans" or the publisher.

nomesque · 07-08-2010, 01:55 AM

I'm a reader who follows an author, not necessarily a genre, so I get pretty irritated when authors do that. Hence, I don't and won't do it. Plus, I don't like people assuming I'm dumb, and I'd like to extend the same courtesy to my readers. They can just be bloody well confused, if they can't read the description and tags well enough to pick the genre of the book.

Then again, people offended by genre-switching will probably get too offended to read more than one of my books anyhow.

Poppa1956 · 07-08-2010, 02:28 AM

Idunno. I do like to follow authors, restraining orders be damned! Any I've enjoyed books in many a genre. FWIW, I'm told Nora Roberts and JD Robb only need to buy one ticket to travel together.

banjobama · 07-08-2010, 02:58 AM

If I really loved an author's work, I'd read whatever he or she wrote, even if it was a different genre, at least to try it.

However, I can't really think of any reason to disapprove of a writer using a pseudonym. I read a cheesy novel once where the main character was an erotica writer to pay the bills, and she used a fake name so that when the day came that she got a job with "real" writing, she wouldn't have this porn-type stigma attached to her name. I can totally understand this situation.

Iphinome · 07-08-2010, 03:46 AM

You know, this has possibilities. Costumes and fake voices. Hires some friends and do a pre-scripted panel together. Have your conservative writer alter ego blast your liberal one with literary bludgeons. Writing under several pen names as a form of performance art.

Then go for an Ender's game type of ending. Mwahahahahahahaha

Moejoe · 07-08-2010, 05:11 AM

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)

Lemurion · 07-08-2010, 07:52 AM

The most common reason comes down to economics. Different genres sell in different amounts, and romance sells more than any other genre, possibly more than all other genres combined.

If Jane Shmoe writes SF under her own name, and then writes a romance, it's in her best interest not to release that romance under exactly the same name. She may want to release it as Jane Doe Shmoe, but not Jane Shmoe.

The problem is order tracking. Bookstore chains base their orders of new books on how well that author's previous book sold. So if Jane Shmoe's first romance sold a hundred thousand copies, and the SF book she wrote next sold thirty thousand copies, her next romance will be ordered based on the thirty thousand sales of her SF novel, not the hundred thousand sales of her previous romance. She's just stuck her foot in her mouth and then shot herself in the foot.

Unless your name is huge you want different names for different genres so the slower selling genre doesn't drag your more profitable genres down. It doesn't have to be much, often an initial or a middle name will do it, but you don't want the computers linking your romance novel's orders to your SF novel's sales.

You really don't.

Steven Lake · 07-08-2010, 08:42 AM

Good points Lemurion. One other possible reason for doing an alter ego is to avoid the perception of "book dumping" that might happen if you release new books into a particular genre faster than the normal acceptable release schedule. For sci-fi and fantasy, that's about 6 months. IE, you don't want to release a new book in that genre any sooner than once every 6 months. The preferred time frame is 9 months to a year. With Romance however, 1 book a month is the accepted minimum. And we're not talking about 1 book from each series. We're talking about one book, from you, period, regardless of the series. For poetry and other "artsy" type books it's one year if I remember correctly. That's only the ones I *know*, and reality may be slightly different.

So if you wanted to release two sci-fi books every six months, then you'd need an alter ego (and a second series) in order to do that. 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, then the alter ego would not be required for that kind of situation. The other reasons for using one would still apply, but not with this one.

Moejoe · 07-08-2010, 08:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Good points Lemurion. One other possible reason for doing an alter ego is to avoid the perception of "book dumping" that might happen if you release new books into a particular genre faster than the normal acceptable release schedule. For sci-fi and fantasy, that's about 6 months. IE, you don't want to release a new book in that genre any sooner than once every 6 months. The preferred time frame is 9 months to a year. With Romance however, 1 book a month is the accepted minimum. And we're not talking about 1 book from each series. We're talking about one book, from you, period, regardless of the series. For poetry and other "artsy" type books it's one year if I remember correctly. That's only the ones I *know*, and reality may be slightly different.

So if you wanted to release two sci-fi books every six months, then you'd need an alter ego (and a second series) in order to do that. 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, then the alter ego would not be required for that kind of situation. The other reasons for using one would still apply, but not with this one.

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

omk3 · 07-08-2010, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nomesque

I'm a reader who follows an author, not necessarily a genre, so I get pretty irritated when authors do that. Hence, I don't and won't do it. Plus, I don't like people assuming I'm dumb, and I'd like to extend the same courtesy to my readers. They can just be bloody well confused, if they can't read the description and tags well enough to pick the genre of the book.

Then again, people offended by genre-switching will probably get too offended to read more than one of my books anyhow.

I totally agree with all of the above! Even if, for practical reasons others have explained, a writer feels the need to use different names for different books, I appreciate it if he/she at least doesn't hide behind the names, but makes it known that they are the same person. It feels more honest to me. For example Iain Banks vs Iain M. Banks is perfectly fine. But I always feel, as a reader, a little bit cheated when I find out that two writers I thought were different persons actually weren't. And I certainly don't want to be reminded of all the marketing planning that goes on. I'd like to think of fiction as something more pure than a mere "product".

Quote:

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)

I love the idea! I feel so frustrated that I can't actually read some real PP Penrose, or Kilgore Trout!

(though I think I'd hate it if I didn't know for sure if the author was fictional or real - hmm)

Moejoe · 07-08-2010, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by omk3

I totally agree with all of the above! Even if, for practical reasons others have explained, a writer feels the need to use different names for different books, I appreciate it if he/she at least doesn't hide behind the names, but makes it known that they are the same person. It feels more honest to me. For example Iain Banks vs Iain M. Banks is perfectly fine. But I always feel, as a reader, a little bit cheated when I find out that two writers I thought were different persons actually weren't. And I certainly don't want to be reminded of all the marketing planning that goes on. I'd like to think of fiction as something more pure than a mere "product".

I love the idea! I feel so frustrated that I can't actually read some real PP Penrose, or Kilgore Trout!

(though I think I'd hate it if I didn't know for sure if the author was fictional or real - hmm)

In "The Pier at the End of the World" (working title), my main character is the pulp writer Jon Wen, whose immediate financial troubles are assuaged when his reclusive Uncle dies and leaves him a Café cum cinema situated at the end of a pier. It's here that he decides, with inheritance money in the bank and owning property, to kill of his pulp creation once and for all. The novel that he's writing within the greater novel is called "Fortune's End", which is a play on the name of his pulp character, "Benny Fortune" a Hollywood PI and one time reporter.

The original idea was to merge the 'Fortune's End' book with the original book, alternating chapters, so that you had two self-contained stories. But then it grew after I'd had a conversation with a friend. The challenge is to write three or more distinctively different books that work fine alone, but when tied together, form a larger narrative. This is only possible using pseudonyms.

A novel about writing and the romance of writing.

A pulp novel that is written by the character from the first novel.

A false memoir of the pulp writer and his creation.

At the minute I'm up to the part where Jon Wen is listening to the song of mermaids out in the water beyond the pier, and Benny Fortune is quizzing a deluded and psychotic Hollywood agent in the LA Recording studio of Mermaid Records.

Robin O'Neill · 07-08-2010, 09:30 AM

Robin O'Neill is not my real name.
I switched to a pen name for a number of reasons (length and confusion with my real name) but genre was one of them. Robin is a cookbook writer, I'm not. If you have no food writing credits, tradpub doesn't accept you as a food writer.

I was a television writer for a while. I began to notice that if I used my name with the television credits on my resume, I was criticized for affectations television writers supposedly had. If I submitted the same project under Robin's name, a writer who has no television credits, no one ever complained that she sounded TV-ish. For years on my resume I left off my substantial TV credits because unfailingly they hurt instead of helped. Now I use it as a stick to poke them with ;-)

Am I glad to have gone digital? Do you really have to ask?

Cheers!

Robin

omk3 · 07-08-2010, 10:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iphinome

You know, this has possibilities. Costumes and fake voices. Hires some friends and do a pre-scripted panel together. Have your conservative writer alter ego blast your liberal one with literary bludgeons. Writing under several pen names as a form of performance art.

Then go for an Ender's game type of ending. Mwahahahahahahaha

That way madness lies

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moejoe

...

A novel about writing and the romance of writing.

A pulp novel that is written by the character from the first novel.

A false memoir of the pulp writer and his creation.

At the minute I'm up to the part where Jon Wen is listening to the song of mermaids out in the water beyond the pier, and Benny Fortune is quizzing a deluded and psychotic Hollywood agent in the LA Recording studio of Mermaid Records.

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robin O'Neill

...

Am I glad to have gone digital? Do you really have to ask?

Cheers!

Robin

That's what I was thinking, the digital age removes many of the issues Lemurion raised about the need for different names for different genders. On the other hand, it makes it even easier to create as many alter egos as one wants.

This discussion reminded me of a brilliant novella by indie pulp writer Moxie Mezcal, Fake, about a journalist inventing a whole new person on whom he bases a series of sensational articles.

Sorry for being largely off-topic, I'll shut up now

DaringNovelist · 07-08-2010, 10:24 AM

I considered using a pseudonym for Wife of Freedom, because it's experimental and off-genre and non-commercial and just plain different than what I otherwise write. (Same for Adventure of Anna the Great, for that matter.)

I finally decided to go with my own name because it's about quirky characters and mixes in humor in a way that's common to what I do everywhere.

There is a down side to it. People who read my first two books and are turned off by the melodrama aspects may not give my mysteries a try. But I think time will shake that out. Soon I'll have more mystery than melodrama out there, and reviews and word of mouth make a difference. (I am a fan of a lot of authors who write several different kinds of books.)

And I'm working to "brand" my various series with different cover styles. I'm still working on the book descriptions.

07-08-2010, 12:05 AM	#1
Steven Lake Sci-Fi Author Posts: 1,157 Karma: 14743509 Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: Michigan Device: PC (Calibre)	Hypothetical Question: Alter Ego Writing Alright, here's a hypothetical question for you writers, and even the readers here to some degree. Let's say you're already an established writer, but you want to do a slightly different genre than you normally do. Case in point: Stephen King writes romance under a pen name. Not sure how many of you knew that, but he does. And to make it even more interesting, he's using a woman's name. Now that brings me to the point of my topic. If you wanted to write in a genre or write a series on a topic or subject outside of the normal field of writing you're known for, how would you best approach it? Most authors I've seen take on a pen name and hide behind it, using that to disguise who they really are. The book then goes on and either succeeds or fails without coming back to haunt the original writer. Or in the case of success, it wouldn't interfere with their primary writing focus. So with that in mind, should you do something like that, how would you handle publishing the book under the alter ego? How would you handle signings, publicity, sales, etc? One idea that was proffered to me was to use a stand in, someone who would be the visible face of your alter ego. So it would kinda be like ghost writing, except in this case it would be ghost personality. Anywho, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

07-08-2010, 02:28 AM	#4
Poppa1956 Evangelist Posts: 487 Karma: 344188 Join Date: May 2010 Location: Oregon, USA Device: Verizon Ellipsis Tablit w/Kindle and Nook apps.	Idunno. I do like to follow authors, restraining orders be damned! Any I've enjoyed books in many a genre. FWIW, I'm told Nora Roberts and JD Robb only need to buy one ticket to travel together. Last edited by Poppa1956; 07-08-2010 at 02:29 AM. Reason: Me, I have enough trouble remembering the one name I have.

07-08-2010, 05:11 AM	#7
Moejoe Banned Posts: 5,100 Karma: 72193 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: South of the Border Device: Coffin	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) Last edited by Moejoe; 07-08-2010 at 05:13 AM.

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07-08-2010, 01:15 AM	#2
jaxx6166 Wizard Posts: 1,222 Karma: 769316 Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Eternal summer Device: 350, iPad, PW	When I attended the Superstars Seminar, there was a whole panel discussing author brand and identification. The established rule seems to be one name, one genre. "You don't want to confuse your fans" or the publisher.

07-08-2010, 01:55 AM	#3
nomesque Snooty Bestselling Author Posts: 1,485 Karma: 1000000 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Ipswich, QLD, Australia Device: PRS-650	I'm a reader who follows an author, not necessarily a genre, so I get pretty irritated when authors do that. Hence, I don't and won't do it. Plus, I don't like people assuming I'm dumb, and I'd like to extend the same courtesy to my readers. They can just be bloody well confused, if they can't read the description and tags well enough to pick the genre of the book. Then again, people offended by genre-switching will probably get too offended to read more than one of my books anyhow.

07-08-2010, 02:58 AM	#5
banjobama Busy Read'n Posts: 980 Karma: 5039283 Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: Auburn, WA Device: Pocketbook Touch Lux 5	If I really loved an author's work, I'd read whatever he or she wrote, even if it was a different genre, at least to try it. However, I can't really think of any reason to disapprove of a writer using a pseudonym. I read a cheesy novel once where the main character was an erotica writer to pay the bills, and she used a fake name so that when the day came that she got a job with "real" writing, she wouldn't have this porn-type stigma attached to her name. I can totally understand this situation.

07-08-2010, 03:46 AM	#6
Iphinome Paladin of Eris Posts: 3,119 Karma: 20849349 Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: USAland Device: Kindle 10	You know, this has possibilities. Costumes and fake voices. Hires some friends and do a pre-scripted panel together. Have your conservative writer alter ego blast your liberal one with literary bludgeons. Writing under several pen names as a form of performance art. Then go for an Ender's game type of ending. Mwahahahahahahaha

07-08-2010, 07:52 AM	#8
Lemurion eReader Posts: 2,750 Karma: 4968470 Join Date: Aug 2007 Device: Note 5; PW3; Nook HD+; ChuWi Hi12; iPad	The most common reason comes down to economics. Different genres sell in different amounts, and romance sells more than any other genre, possibly more than all other genres combined. If Jane Shmoe writes SF under her own name, and then writes a romance, it's in her best interest not to release that romance under exactly the same name. She may want to release it as Jane Doe Shmoe, but not Jane Shmoe. The problem is order tracking. Bookstore chains base their orders of new books on how well that author's previous book sold. So if Jane Shmoe's first romance sold a hundred thousand copies, and the SF book she wrote next sold thirty thousand copies, her next romance will be ordered based on the thirty thousand sales of her SF novel, not the hundred thousand sales of her previous romance. She's just stuck her foot in her mouth and then shot herself in the foot. Unless your name is huge you want different names for different genres so the slower selling genre doesn't drag your more profitable genres down. It doesn't have to be much, often an initial or a middle name will do it, but you don't want the computers linking your romance novel's orders to your SF novel's sales. You really don't.

07-08-2010, 08:42 AM	#9
Steven Lake Sci-Fi Author Posts: 1,157 Karma: 14743509 Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: Michigan Device: PC (Calibre)	Good points Lemurion. One other possible reason for doing an alter ego is to avoid the perception of "book dumping" that might happen if you release new books into a particular genre faster than the normal acceptable release schedule. For sci-fi and fantasy, that's about 6 months. IE, you don't want to release a new book in that genre any sooner than once every 6 months. The preferred time frame is 9 months to a year. With Romance however, 1 book a month is the accepted minimum. And we're not talking about 1 book from each series. We're talking about one book, from you, period, regardless of the series. For poetry and other "artsy" type books it's one year if I remember correctly. That's only the ones I know, and reality may be slightly different. So if you wanted to release two sci-fi books every six months, then you'd need an alter ego (and a second series) in order to do that. 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, then the alter ego would not be required for that kind of situation. The other reasons for using one would still apply, but not with this one.

07-08-2010, 09:30 AM	#13
Robin O'Neill Connoisseur Posts: 53 Karma: 60900 Join Date: May 2010 Device: PC	Robin O'Neill is not my real name. I switched to a pen name for a number of reasons (length and confusion with my real name) but genre was one of them. Robin is a cookbook writer, I'm not. If you have no food writing credits, tradpub doesn't accept you as a food writer. I was a television writer for a while. I began to notice that if I used my name with the television credits on my resume, I was criticized for affectations television writers supposedly had. If I submitted the same project under Robin's name, a writer who has no television credits, no one ever complained that she sounded TV-ish. For years on my resume I left off my substantial TV credits because unfailingly they hurt instead of helped. Now I use it as a stick to poke them with ;-) Am I glad to have gone digital? Do you really have to ask? Cheers! Robin

07-08-2010, 10:24 AM	#15
DaringNovelist Addict Posts: 197 Karma: 1010202 Join Date: Mar 2010 Device: iPod Touch	I considered using a pseudonym for Wife of Freedom, because it's experimental and off-genre and non-commercial and just plain different than what I otherwise write. (Same for Adventure of Anna the Great, for that matter.) I finally decided to go with my own name because it's about quirky characters and mixes in humor in a way that's common to what I do everywhere. There is a down side to it. People who read my first two books and are turned off by the melodrama aspects may not give my mysteries a try. But I think time will shake that out. Soon I'll have more mystery than melodrama out there, and reviews and word of mouth make a difference. (I am a fan of a lot of authors who write several different kinds of books.) And I'm working to "brand" my various series with different cover styles. I'm still working on the book descriptions.