What’s In a Name?
As I sit editing my first (I hope!) sales-worthy novel, I am faced with a quandary. It’s something I have to decide before I start sending queries to publishers. To pseudonym or not to pseudonym?
You see, I have a ridiculously common name. A quick Google search will give you plenty of people I share a name with. There is the Jennifer Davis who is a reporter for Faux News (BLECH). There is the Jennifer Davis who is a quite talented artist. Apparently there is also a Jennifer Davis who was recently arrested in Florida for marijuana possession. And, there is the Jennifer Davis who writes children’s books. The old guy at the local pet store also apparently went to the senior prom with a Jennifer Davis long before I was born.
Most of my published work before this has consisted of short stories in obscure genre magazines or academic papers in scholarly journals. I used my real name, most of the time. But much of being successful as a writer relies on treating your writing like a business, and part of that business is branding.
Can you really successfully create your own personal “brand” if there are already tons of people out there wearing identical generic logos? Especially if some of those people are in the same field in which you are attempting to succeed? This is a case when a name too common can be akin to anonymity, when the last thing you want is to be anonymous.
The obvious solution, of course, is to use a pseudonym. I even have one ready-made that is already heavily associated with me, the handle I have used on the internet for bordering on two decades. It’s a name that I answer to as readily as I answer to Jennifer. It’s my twitter handle, my forum name, even the name of the character I play most often in video games. It is as much my name as the name on my birth certificate at this point. Googling that name, in fact, will turn up links that are almost exclusively me.
But part of the dream of being a writer is seeing your name on that cover. Right now, I haven’t decided whether I’d rather that name be the name I was given, or the name I have chosen for myself. Perhaps some variation thereon would be better: J. L. Davis, or Jenny, or M. Dhommnail. I have heard that gender-neutral author names can help sell books in male-dominated genres. J. K. Rowling, I have heard, decided to use only her initials so that she wouldn’t put boys off.
Perhaps this is something I should wait to discuss with an agent, once I secure one. It is a puzzle, though, and one that will have to be solved.
Related articles
- Reader Question: What about using a pseudonym? (gointothestory.com)
- Artistic pseudonyms (ask.metafilter.com)
- Our digital afterlives – Deric’s version (mindblog.dericbownds.net)














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