I get the “pen name” question more than any other question. Period. And that’s because I am very open about writing under different names and I have varied reasons for doing so. And weirdly enough, I have written under pen names since I started writing.
. . . .
The pulp era of popular fiction brought in thousands and thousands of pen names. There are entire books that have been done trying to track the pen names of the pulp writers, from Max Brand to Kenneth Robison to all the hundreds of pen names of Edward Stratemeyer and his “Syndicate” of writers. (You remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and so on.)
Many of today’s major writers wrote under pen names, sometimes many, many pen names over their careers. And almost always for different reasons. I don’t think Robert Silverberg can even count all his pen names.
. . . .
In fact, in the high peak of science fiction magazines, there were often only one or two writers per issue, even though the magazine showed six or seven authors.
. . . .
Again, there are thousands of reasons to use pen names, each depending on the author’s situation at the moment. But let me give you a few of the main ones that have lasted over history.
Top Reason: Writer is too “fast” for traditional publishing.
In other words, the writer has a work ethic and has trained himself to sit at a typewriter or computer for more hours per day. And by doing that, the writer will just produce more work than someone who spends two years writing a novel. Just nature of the beast.
In the pulp era, it was fine to write fast and hard and long under one name. The writers had other reasons to switch names back then that I will get to in a moment.
But with the advent of the influence of the university system and editors coming out of that university myth-filled system, the belief started to sink into the traditional publishing offices that writing more than one or two books per year was a bad thing (except in a few genres like romance). And besides, the big machines of modern traditional publishing just couldn’t keep up with a fast writer. In fact, fast writers just scare hell out of them.
So those of us who have a work ethic and can sit at a computer for a regular work day, we flat had to have more outlets. So instead of putting novels into drawers, we came up with pen names and started many writing careers, often with numbers of them going at once.
At one point, Kris and I were joking around at a conference and actually counted the career income streams coming into our home at that moment in time. We had nine writers’ incomes coming into the house. That was more than we had cats at that point.
Today we have about that many, maybe a few more, but some are not making much, at least not enough to live on. Luckily the pen-name writers don’t eat much.
The key is the same with all aspects of the publishing industry: Diversity and a lot of product. If you have three or four writer’s incomes hitting your house, it’s a ton better and safer than only one. And nine or ten incomes just makes things much easier.
The idea of multiple income streams from different names is not something most writers think of until they happen into it by overwhelming their own publisher and deciding to not slow down (meaning spend less time at the computer or playing Angry Birds) as their agent wants them to do.
However, now with indie publishing, fast writers have far, far more outlets and the idea of being a “fast” writer, meaning spending more hours writing, is once again becoming a good thing. At least outside of traditional publishing. Inside of traditional publishing being fast still scares hell out of people and they will do everything in their power to get you to spend less time being a writer and more time being an author.
. . . .
My wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes under some major names. Her name is known as a science fiction and fantasy writer. And her fantasy series, The Fey, is a dark, high fantasy with lots of blood and death. So when she came up with a light, warm, humorous fantasy series set here and now using fairy tales, she didn’t want to confuse her readers and make the readers that liked one kind of fantasy and not the other angry. So Kristine Grayson, the bestselling paranormal romance writer, was born for the funny fantasy books.
Then Kris came up with a dark mystery series set in the late 1960s that dealt with race and politics of the time. Again, not something her normal science fiction readers would enjoy, so multiple-Edgar-nominated Kris Nelscott was born. And now in romance this next year she has a wonderful science fiction romance series starting out of Sourcebooks under the name Kris DeLake. Pure space opera with a romance touch. But again the readers that love Recovering Apollo 8 or the gritty Diving into the Wreck series would not be very happy. Thus the new author is born.
You want a more major example than my wife? How about Evan Hunter, which was a pen name. Evan Hunter wrote a book called The Blackboard Jungle that won some major awards such as the Pulitzer Prize. But he was a writer, and wanted to write other stuff. He got an offer to write a new series for a paperback house that needed short novels fast. So he created a new name and wrote police procedural novels for decades under the name Ed McBain. Also, Evan Hunter, to help pay for a girlfriend or some such thing now lost in publishing lore, wrote soft-core erotica quickly, often finishing a book in a day or so, to help pay dating costs. Of course, those books were also under other names.
. . . .
Third Major Reason: You Have A Difficult Day Job
This reason is just obvious. You are an MD and you are writing medical thrillers. Really good plan to do that under a pen name to save legal problems with some patient believing you took their personal information and put it in your book, even though you didn’t.
And yes I know about Michael Crichton writing his way through medical school. Under pen names. He wrote under the names John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson and one of the books under one of those names won the Edgar Award for best novel. He wrote numbers of novels per year all the way through med school, all under pen names, and got his MD the year he wrote three novels. (Yeah, you don’t have enough time to write.) By the way, his real first name was John.
Another example: James Tiptree Jr. was a long-term spy in the Second World War and in the Cold War, a CIA agent, and an experimental psychologist, so she came up with a very hidden pen name to write under. Her real name was Alice Sheldon, but everyone swore Tiptree was a man for a very long time.
Some Other Smaller Reasons to Change Your Writing Name
– Sales Record Goes Bad.
In traditional publishing, your sales record is tracked by your name. You write a book and something goes wrong along the way, often through no fault of your own, and your sales numbers go down and you can’t sell another book under that name.
Smart writers change their name and keep writing. Authors, on the other hand, sit in bars at conventions and complain they can’t sell a book.
. . . .
– Future Divorce
Women, caution on using your husband’s name as your writing name. Writing careers often outlast marriages. Just saying…
. . . .
Indie writers who are in a great hurry are usually the ones that ask me about pen names. One of the truths of indie publishing is that if you have more products under one name, readers can find you easier and if they like a story they buy, they will buy more. And thus having more books and stories published leads to more sales. That is one fact most of us agree on about indie publishing.
But…. All those stories and books need to be in the same general area. If you write a vampire novel followed by a romance with rabbit-sex followed by a private detective novel, all under the same name, you are going to lose readers, not find more. So if you are moving across genres like that in your writing, you are going to need to realize that it’s going to take more time to build an audience. Because you are going to be building more than one career. Of course that takes more time. Duh.
That means as a beginning writer you are going to have to do what seems almost impossible to do. You are going to have to take the long view, meaning not just six months, but six years or more. (Please don’t scream at me. I’m being nice suggesting only six years. More than likely it’s ten years or more, just as it was in the old traditional-publishing-only days.)
I have no issue with a writer telling their readers they also write other kinds of novels under other names. I just told you about four of my wife’s names she writes in different genres. And sometimes readers will follow across genre lines. Give them the chance on a main web site under a main name.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases. 
