Susie asked M.R. Carey:

Hi, probably someone asked you this already, but I was just curious: why do you write your initials instead of Mike? I understand why a woman would need to do this, but why would a man? Is it because this book is different from your previous works and the publishers thought that would work against you?

M.R. Carey Hi Susie. Yeah, it's that. GIRL represented a big jump in tone and approach for me, and publishers always see that as a sort of crisis-in-waiting in terms of persuading bookstores to order in the book. Authors with much higher profiles than mine have run foul of that problem. So twice now I've switched names in order to advertise the different between a new project and older works. The first time was when I was (briefly) Adam Blake. And the second time is now, for GIRL and the two books that will follow it.

It hadn't occurred to me that using initials made my gender ambiguous, but of course it does. That wasn't a factor in the decision. In fact, the initials thing blew up in our faces a little bit. My real middle initial is J, and the first proofs went out with M.J.Carey as the author. Then we discovered the other M.J.Carey who writes bondage erotica...

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