Once upon a time there was a woman. She was a wife. She was a mother of a large brood of loud, crazy kids. And she was a writer.
One day, the woman decided she wanted to find some kind of work she could do from home. She loved reading romance novels, and she’d always been a pretty decent writer–if you take into account the award she won back in 5th grade. So she got on her computer and started writing a book.
Bored yet? You are? Okay, I’ll fast forward.
Before I–I mean, she–knew it, she was writing three different kinds of books, tailored to three very different markets. And so, she adopted not one, not two, but three distinct identities under which she published her books. There was Sydney, who wrote heart warming, funny, quirky romance novels; Tami, who wrote urban fantasy novels; and Tawny, who wrote deviant smut.
Now, Sydney/Tami/Tawny faced the challenge of marketing her names. Should she keep them distinct, avoiding cross-promoting of any kind? Or should she let the world know she was writing under three different pseudonyms? She took a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each option.
Keeping them separate:
Advantages
*No worries about readers being confused by differences in book content and/or voice
*Allows the new identity to start with a “clean slate”, meaning she would be completely new, fresh and exciting to reviewers, readers and book sellers.
*Allows each identity to focus on networking that is more specifically related to her books.
*Some publishers and/or agents might put pressure on an author to keep each identity separate, and failing to do so could undermine their efforts to promote the author’s work to booksellers and distributors.
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*Managing three different websites, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, blogs…ohmygod.
*The cost of building and maintaining those websites and blogs could be quite high.
*There is the lost opportunity of promoting books published by lesser known pseudonyms to the readers of the better known ones.
*The stress of playing three distinct roles in cyberspace is nothing to sneeze at.
Sydney/Tami/Tawny made a choice. In her case, the disadvantages of keeping them separate outweighed the advantages. Particularly, she was concerned about the time required to update blogs, facebook pages, Twitter accounts and websites. What advice would she give to writers considering taking a second or third penname? Let’s ask her…
1. Determine whether the new name is necessary. This is the biggie, IMO. The most important question to ask. If the author is writing erotica and YA, that’s a no-brainer. But sometimes, it’s not that cut and dried. To decide if you need to adopt a new pseudonym, you need to have a fairly firm grip on your readers’ expectations. This is, in a nutshell, your “branding”. What are your best selling books? What genre are they? What subgenre are they? Is there any specific content that appears in the books, content a reader would miss if it wasn’t there? On the flip side of that question: is there content a reader would find disturbing/unexpected (in a bad way) if it appeared in your book? In my case, I write a lot of BDSM and menage. My erotica readers expect to find those elements in my books. So if I write a book without it, or totally without sex, I feel it’s better to publish it under a different name. I don’t want to confused my readers.
2. Determine whether you MUST keep the identities separate. Is your publisher or agent telling you to take a new penname for some specific reason? If the answer to that question is yes, you’re probably going to have to keep them separate.
3. Create one main website to promote all of your identities. If there is no concrete reason why you must keep your multiple identities separate, I would suggest marketing them together for the reasons stated above. After all, your primary job as a writer is to write books, not waste precious hours blogging/Tweeting/Facebooking under multiple names.
Within the world of romance publishing, you can find many examples of well-known authors who have adopted second and/or third pseudonyms. Nora Robers and Jayne Ann Krentz instantly come to mind. Clearly, if they decided it was necessary, helpful, it is an option worth considering in some cases. But understand the challenges. Building a readership from scratch, building a platform and attracting followers takes a ton of time and a financial commitment.
Best of luck!