Author Pen Names

I'm curious why some authors write under a pen name

Hey Readers,

I’m back from vacation feeling somewhat rested, but wishing I had taken the remaining two days of the week off work to have a couple of days to recoup and get caught up on my writing. I only finished one book while I was gone, but I did make progress on two more. I’m late on this issue; I try to have it written and scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday release time, but I didn’t get this issue written before I left on vacation. I thought I’d have plenty of time to write this while in California. Silly me for thinking that I’d even think about this while enjoying my time off work and visiting relatives and friends.

I was scrolling Facebook the other day and stumbled across an author page where someone commented that she felt deceived that the author uses a pen name to write books. Her beef with this author was that it was a male author using a female pen name. The author responded immediately with an explanation why and many other commenters came to this author’s defense.

I’m not here to debate the merits of whether a male author should write under a female name or vice-versa, but this comment sent me down a rabbit hole to find other authors that write under a pen name and why they do it. If I were talented enough to write a book that others wanted to read, I’d shout it from the rooftops that I was the author. I’d want everyone to know my real name. I found several authors writing under pen names, and the reasons were as different as each of the authors and what they write.

The author I spoke of above is Wade Rouse writing as Viola Shipman. On his website, he writes that “my novels are a tribute to my grandmother, Viola Shipman” and that “I chose my grandmother’s name as a pen name because it was the smallest thank you that I could give to her—and all my elders—for all they gave to me.” What a wonderful gesture of love to his grandmother, and who cares that he writes books under a name other than his own, books that millions of readers enjoy reading.

In my rabbit hole research, it seems that several I’ve found are writing under a different name because they write different genres. If you have read any books written by Mary Kay Andrews, you have read books written by Kathy Trocheck. She started writing mysteries under her real name in 1992 and switched to Mary Kay Andrews when she changed her writing style to Southern Fiction. Jayne Ann Krentz writes contemporary romantic suspense under Krentz (married name), historical romantic suspense under Amanda Quick, and paranormal suspense under Jayne Castle, her birth name.

Author Elena Ferrante is a pen name, and supposedly the real author is only known to a select few, I’m assuming her family/publisher/editor. She says that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” The wildly popular Shopaholic book series author, Sophie Kinsella, wrote five books under her real name, Madeline Wickham, before the Shopaholic series. She says that she submitted her first Shopaholic book under Kinsella for fear of embarrassment. David Cornwell started publishing his espionage novels as John le Carre as a matter of national security; he served in the British intelligence and was not allowed to use his real name.

Some famous authors you might recognize have written under pen names such as Mark Twain/Samuel Clemmons, Dr. Seuss/Theodore Seuss Geisel, Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler, Richard Bachman/Stephen King, Mary Westmacott/Agatha Christie, and many others.

Things like this fascinate me, and I get lost on the little rabbit trails, which sometimes leads to other great finds. In fact, I stumbled on a couple of other newsletter topics while down the pen name rabbit hole. I can’t wait to tell you about those soon.

---

Do you ever get lost down rabbit holes and learn stuff you never knew you wanted to learn? Do you know of other authors that write using a pen name? I’d love to hear who those are; tell me in the comments below.