Nom de Plumes

I was a little startled to see this post:

Because why would that happen?

The post starts this way:

With the rise of AI authors, how do you prove you are a human author? Most authors prove their humanity with their names and photos. Your identity protects you from being called a bot writer. But what if you use a pen name? Will AI bring the age of pen names to an end? While pen names are going out of style, there are some reasons you still might consider using one. We will talk about seven reasons authors use pen names and if those reasons still make sense in an era where your verifiable humanity has become a marketing asset.

I’m baffled by this, actually. Is there anything — anything at all — that stops somebody from slapping a fake name and fake photo on AI-generated trash? How can a name and photo “prove” humanity? That makes no sense to me.

I think there are obvious reasons to use a pen name and in fact if I were starting over, way back in 2008, I would have said, “You know what, let’s go with initials and no first name. How about R K Neumeier or R H Neumeier or … what’s a good-looking, interesting letter? … How about R Z Neumeier, just to make people wonder what my middle name could be. (I don’t have a middle name, so that initial would in fact need to have been made up.)

You know how CJC threw an -h on her name to make it more interesting? Maybe R Z Neumeieh. (I’m kidding!) (But I’m kinda serious about the concept, though.)

But fine, what are the reasons this post mentions?

1) To stay anonymous and avoid consequences.

The author of post, Thomas Umstattd, means, the consequences of expressing unpopular opinions, eg, like Thomas Paine. He argues that anonymity is impossible so why bother. Personally, I think that seems odd. Perhaps someone only wants to stay anonymous for, say, ten years, and after that it doesn’t matter. I recall rather clearly how Janet Reid wrote A LOT about publishing and agents as “Miss Snark” for some years before she started writing the same kind of advice (but toned down) under her own name. There could easily be reasons to write anonymously. I’m not buying the uselessness of this reason.

2) To avoid reader bias.

Everyone knows that yes? Umstattd thinks readers aren’t very biased and wouldn’t care. I think he’s dead wrong about this, particularly for romance, but also across the board. I suspect he’s even more wrong about this in the “Own Voices” era, but I also think readers — including agents and editors — always have been and still are decidedly biased. I mean, remember that shocking article about the completely different responses to query letters for the same manuscript presented with a female vs a male name? Where’s that article? Oh, here. Ugh, that page is filled to the brim with obtrusive advertisements. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at.

I wanted to know more of how the Georges of the world live, so I sent more [queries under the male name]. Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.

This was some years ago, but I absolutely do not believe that subconscious bias has disappeared at all. It may have moved around a bit. Quick, what do YOU think the reaction would be if a black author wrote a historical fantasy about Scandinavian Vikings in the 9th Century and all the characters, including the slaves, were therefore white? Would agents even look at it? How about publishers? Do you think they would? Would you suggest the author bet on that?

I’m pretty certain that there is plenty of subconscious bias, and probably a fair bit of conscious bias as well, about who gets to tell certain kinds of stories. If I were a male author and I wanted to write Romance, I would absolutely choose a female pen name. If I wanted to write Westerns, political thrillers, or literary, I would choose a male pen name. I said a second ago that if I were starting over, I’d have gone with initials. This is why.

Umstattd says: To hide your sex, you will also need to avoid using a photo. With no photo and no name, you start to look like an AI author rather than a human author.

And I think, what are you even talking about? You HAVE a name. It’s YOUR PEN NAME. Don’t tell me you need a photo or people will think your books were written by AI. If people can possibly think your books were written by AI, you’re not much of a writer. But you could probably use a fake photo if you wanted. Heck, you could probably generate a fake photo with AI.

3) To simplify spelling.

I’m surprised Thomas Umstattd says this is not a good reason. He says that if you type variants into Google, he’ll pop up. That may be, but if you type variants into AMAZON, he won’t. I just tried, and you have to get it right. On the other hand, I agree that an unusual name can be an asset for name recognition.

I think the worst names — this might be just me — are homonym names: Stephen/Steven, Theresa/Teresa. I have never once typed “Stephen King” without checking the spelling because I can never remember which it is. I think you can find those authors without much trouble, but I really prefer to spell their names correctly every time, I have to check every time, and if you want your child to grow up to be an author, please give the baby a name that only has one common spelling so people do not have to check the spelling a thousand times because it gets annoying.

Or name her Makiia Lucier, because wow, that is a very neat name. It’s worth having to check which letter is double, the “a” or the “i.” I definitely have to check because the maackia is a tree — I have one, in fact, though it’s just a baby sapling — but because of this, doubling the “a” seems reasonable to me.

But I digress. Back to the linked article and the idea that pen names are passé.

4) To avoid confusion with another author whose name is similar.

5) To avoid confusion with an infamous person.

6) To avoid confusion with a celebrity.

Those are all the same reason: to avoid confusion with someone else with the same or a very similar name. Umstattd thinks this is unimportant, but let me just mention that I’m still ticked off because ten years ago I bought a book by Patrick Lee. I thought I was buying a book by Patrick Lee. I didn’t realize what had happened for some time and didn’t feel right about returning the book by The Other Patrick Lee when I eventually figured it out, because it had been on my Kindle for a while by then, but I’m still ticked off when I think about it. I believe at the time Amazon was having a problem where they combined author pages if the author names were the same. They seem to have sorted that out, and a good thing. Nevertheless, a pen name may well be good if an author happens to have the same name as someone else, especially another author.

Oh, I’m glad I wrote the above paragraph, because looks like The Correct Patrick Lee had another book come out in 2022. I missed it. It’s a YA thriller; it’s only $2.99, I’m picking it up immediately.

7) To keep also-boughts clean on Amazon.

Umstattd isn’t thinking of the same thing I instantly thought of. Umstattd thinks it’s important to keep your squeaky-clean sweet fairy romances separate from your fiery hot vampire erotica … he doesn’t put it quite that way, but that’s the point he’s making. He thinks that’s a good reason to use a pen name. I definitely agree, as does Ursula Vernon / T Kingfisher and Joel Dane / whoever he is when he’s writing MG.

Actually, Ursula Vernon really ought to be writing under three names, because it wouldn’t hurt anything to split off the horror from Paladin romances.

However, that’s not what I thought of first.

“Also-boughts” is the term for all the OTHER books that appear on ONE book’s product page. The term is derived from “people who bought this book ALSO BOUGHT this other book.”

This includes books by the same author, but it also includes … let me see … on RIHASI’s page, I also see books by Sherwood Smith, Victoria Goddard, Katherine Addison — HEY, she has another book up for preorder, did you know that? Thanks for showing me that, Amazon! I may or may not get it, depending on reviews, because I just don’t like Thera Celehar that much, but I’m glad to know the book exists. Lots of others, by authors I recognize and others I’ve never heard of. Oh, look, there’s AJ Demas’ most recent! That one, I’ll go ahead and pick up at once.

You know, for all the complaints about algorithms that show you stuff, Amazon’s algorithms do a good job of showing me appropriate titles.

But my point is, keeping the also-boughts clean is NOT just a matter of keeping your adult military SF from getting mixed in with your charming MG fantasy. It’s ALSO about keeping Amazon’s algorithms clear on what your book is and what readers would like it and what other product pages your book ought to go on. I expect that my books show up on Victoria Goddard’s product pages. Let me check. Yes, they do. That’s what ought to happen. Amazon’s algorithms ought to show both her readers and mine a certain subset of fantasy, a subset that does not include Joe Abercrombie’s books, and it’s important not to confuse the algorithms. That’s why you need to keep the also-boughts clear of unsuitable books that are unappealing to your readers.

Overall conclusion:

–Readers are not going to get confused and think your books are written by AI, are you insane? That can’t happen unless your books are dreadful.

–It’s perfectly simple to generate a fake picture if you really feel you have to put pictures of your pen name up on your website, though if you don’t, I doubt readers will notice or care about the lack of pictures.

–There are lots of reasons you might want to use a pen name and I don’t think there’s any reason whatsoever not to if that would be helpful in any way.

–Except if you want readers to find all your books because they’re in different genres, but not that different, and then probably you don’t want to use a pen name for either genre.

Maybe I’m missing something, but that’s how this looks to me.

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