Death of a pen name
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to bid farewell to Liam Brennan, beloved pen name of author Michael Coorlim. In his brief stint upon this Earth he published one book, fathered one Twitter account, and was involved with one Facebook page. He was killed not by neglect, but by obsolescence, and while the idea of a second identity is a cool one, it is, at this time, more trouble than it’s worth.
Requiescat in pace.
The birth of Liam Brennan
When I started out as an author, I created pen-names with wild abandon. Some were created for A/B testing of different marketing strategies, and others were created to capitalize on a tight authorial brand. At one point I had planned to keep and maintain as many as six genre-focused names, both out of a sense of optimism and necessity. As time went by, however, and I gained more self-publishing experience, I realized that my plan needed some adjustment.
By the time I’d finished Grief, I’d narrowed my plan down to two names. Michael Coorlim for lighter work, and Liam Brennan for darker works. I’d planned out at years of releases under each name, staggering them so that each would see a release somewhat regularly. I wasn’t terribly concerned with keeping the names separate, but I didn’t intentionally link them, either.
Why have my plans changed?
You don’t really need a pen-name
Back in the day conventional wisdom was that authors needed pen-names if they wanted to write in multiple genres. Publisher expectations aside, it was believed that readers weren’t interested in reading off-brand work from a given writer, somehow believing that each writer was only capable of writing one kind of story.
Self-publishing has displayed this to be largely untrue. As long as a book is accurately branded, readers will enter with reasonable expectations.
We, as writers, need to trust our readers. Unless you want to keep your actual identity secret for professional reasons, or to isolate writings in genres like Children’s Lit and Erotica, there’s no strong argument to maintain multiple author names, and a very good one against it.
Pen names are a lot of work
The key to success as a self-published author is productivity. Efficient creation of quality written material, published frequently enough that you constantly have a title on the Hot New Release charts. That’s a title out every month or so.
If you’ve got two pen names, that’s one release every few months under each name, at best. That’s two marketing platforms. Two twitter accounts. Two facebooks. Two blogs, possibly. Doubling your workload for questionable benefit.
So, regretfully, it is time to say farewell to Liam, and consign him to the ether to which all fictional characters go when their time has passed. The idea of authors with multiple pen-names has become archaic, a legacy of publishing concerns that can no longer exist in the modern marketing environment.
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