Fiction publishing: Is there an industry rule to avoid authors using same name?

[Gary_Robson]

[QUOTE=Phase42]
In fact, I believe Mr. Asimov remains, to this day, the only author with at least one book in every category of the Dewey Decimal System.
[/QUOTE]
That’s every major category. He didn’t carry it down to the fourth decimal place. That would take a lot more than the 500 books he wrote and/or edited.

[LurkMeister]

[QUOTE=Phase42]
In fact, I believe Mr. Asimov remains, to this day, the only author with at least one book in every category of the Dewey Decimal System.
[/QUOTE]

Not quite true, but a common belief. He doesn’t have one in the Philosophy category.
Cite

No, because that claim is not true, despite the fact that it is repeated in numerous lists of “amazing but true facts” that circulate on the Internet, and even shows up in the third edition of The New York Public Library Desk Reference. Asimov himself mentioned this a couple of times, but always by prefacing it with the clause “I have been told by a librarian that…”. The reason that the claim is not true is because not one of Asimov’s books was classified in the 100s category of Philosophy. Here are the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System:

* 000 - Generalities
* 100 - Philosophy
* 200 - Religion
* 300 - Social Sciences
* 400 - Languages
* 500 - Pure Sciences
* 600 - Applied Sciences & Technology
* 700 - Arts
* 800 - Literature
* 900 - History & Geography 

Although a great number of his books were classified in the 500s and the 600s, there are three other categories that were sparsely represented (for Asimov, that is):

* 200s - 7 titles
* 400s - 2 titles [Words From History and Words From the Myths]
* 700s - 3 titles [Visions of the Universe, Asimov's Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan, and Isaac Asimov Presents Superquiz] 

A more accurate statement is that Isaac Asimov is the only author who has so many well written books in so many different categories of library classification.

[Sleel]

Joel Rosenberg is an SF/F writer who has been around for a long time and has a pretty decent following. Joel C. Rosenberg didn’t use his middle initial at first. I notice that’s no longer the case.

[JThunder]

[QUOTE=FatBaldGuy]
There are several authors named Carolyn Keene. And they all write books about Nancy Drew.
[/QUOTE]
Heh.

Next you’ll be telling me that there’s more than one Franklin W. Dixon.

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Carolyn Keene and Steve Jackson are house names, which is a different thing altogether.
[/QUOTE]

I was about to be rather shocked and confused about this one. I’ve met Steve Jackson and chatted with him about his games for a good while. I’m sure I would have heard if there were two.

Then I caught:

The old Fighting Fantasy adventure game book series had 3 different authors called “Steve Jackson”. The books themselves never differentiated them.

Nevermind.