A couple of months ago I sat down and started to write a novel. I’m getting close to finishing it, and I figure I may as well throw it on Amazon’s Kindle store. Maybe a dozen people will buy it and I can buy some new makeup. Maybe I’ll be the next Hugh Howey. Maybe something will happen somewhere in between…
Anyway. My husband I were talking last night about my pseudonym. I have a female name picked out that I like a lot. He thinks I’d be better off going with a gender-neutral name, though, meaning Initial Initial Lastname. He thinks that seeing a female author’s name will put men off of buying it.
My first thought was that that pisses me off. My second thought was that I already kind of love the female pseudonym and would hate to kill her off. My third thought is that my book probably appeals more to women than to men no matter what pseudonym I use–it has heavy sex and relationship stuff with a female first-person narrator, but it also has strong survival/homesteading/going native themes that might appeal to men. My fourth thought is that men don’t have to like it, they just need to buy it, and I ought to put on my big girl pants and use a gender-neutral pseudonym if it helps them do it.
If you love the female pseudonym you’ve picked out, I’d go with it if I were you. I am male, but back when we had cable TV I used to like watching the Pioneer Woman show.
Isn’t writing a novel doing something you love? I’d stay with that as a guideline. If you love it, I promise you other people will as well. My two bits worth.
When I see “initial initial surname,” I think, “Huh. Another woman trying to subtly disguise that fact in order to market to idiots.” It doesn’t make me less likely to buy the book, just sad for humanity.
It does sound like a book men wouldn’t be likely to buy anyway and the kind of man who would read it wouldn’t be put off by a female author. So I’d just go with the female name, since you really like it. I might feel differently if it was a book that men might otherwise read.
Of course there are other ways to be gender neutral without the initial initial bit. Lots of first names are either way.
Seems to me like there have been lots of female authors who sell well to both genders though. But sure, males who bought J. K. Rowling might not have if they had known her gender …
I’d go with the name you love for the little it is worth and think that is a small part of marketing it. Do you target a demographic and package your blurb accordingly? That is a different question I think.
Thanks, everybody. My instincts are also to stay with the female name. I think if I pitched this book to Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful wouldn’t fund it because it doesn’t appeal to half the market right off the bat. That oughta be my answer right there.
HOLY COW I LOVE IT. One of the top five things I’ve ever done for myself.
“heavy sex and relationship stuff with a female first-person narrator”? That will appeal primarily to women, I think (as will the strong survival/homesteading/going native themes). The female name is unlikely to make a difference in sales.
I doubt most men think, “Eew, girly name, icky girly themes, cannot buy, cannot read”, exactly, but they may think that escapist fiction by women is more likely to appeal to women.
I don’t know…I would guess that a lot of men who exclusively read something like military fiction might keep looking if they saw a book by an unknown female author. If I were an aspiring author of military fiction, I don’t think I’d put an obviously female name on it.
My book just got its first review, and I don’t recognize the name. Only eight copies have sold so I suspect it may have been you, Broomstick. If so, THANK YOU SO MUCH. It’s all about the reviews.
Thirty seconds after I saw the review, I saw that Diana Gabaldon responded to a tweet on my author account. I’m going to go scream into a pillow now…
Yeah, that’s a pretty good question and one I’m not completely clear on myself. My real name is pretty common. There are like a hundred people on Facebook with it. Nobody would have thought it was definitely me, unless they looked on the Amazon author’s page.
Part of it is that this is a romance novel. I wanted to be able to hide it from people like my father, my father-in-law, and my great aunt Phyllis. That particular motivation has gone out the window though–I’ve announced it on my personal Facebook page and blog after all. While it has “strong romantic elements” I also think it’s a damn good book and I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. My dad doesn’t read fiction anyway…
Another part is that I had already tied up the Twitter and Wordpress accounts with my real name. I wanted a shot at getting accounts to use exclusively for my author persona. As it turned out I got the Wordpress blog, but Gmail and Twitter were already taken so I went with something different anyway.
Lastly, some general sense that in case this thing went viral (let me stop and laugh at myself… whoo that was a good one), I’d like a layer between myself and the publicity. My pseudonym isn’t anybody’s real name. She can’t be looked up except as the social media that I control. I did copyright and publish the work under the partnership LLC that my husband and I have, maybe that would have provided the protection I was after, I don’t know. I’m not a clear thinker when it comes to legalities.
