Nom de Plume or Not? When (and How) to Use an Author Pseudonym
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Using a pen name, pseudonym, or nom de plume when publishing a book is a practice that has been around for nearly as long as books have been published. From Jane Austen publishing her first books simply as “A Lady” or Mary Ann Evans escaping prejudice against women writing “great literature” by publishing as George Eliot — a pseudonym can help a book land with its intended readers.
While there’s nothing wrong with publishing under your legal name, there are many cases where it might be more prudent to use a pen name instead. From separating your creative life from your professional reputation to shielding identities in a tell-all memoir, there are many aspects to consider when building your author brand.
Let’s dig into the cases where using a pseudonym might be a good idea, what you need to do to establish one, how much privacy you should maintain, and what impact it might have on ownership.
Why Use a Pseudonym?
There are three main reasons to choose a nom de plume as your publishing credit, rather than your legal name: branding, perception, and personal preference.
Branding
Branding is all about optics. Certain genres, like hard-boiled detective thrillers or saccharine romances, tend toward having author names that “fit” the genre. For instance, Dr. Seuss is easier for kids to remember than Theodor Seuss Geisel. The same holds true for most of the genre fiction categories.
Historically, the publishing industry encouraged authors with non-English names — which might be difficult for English speakers to pronounce or spell — to simplify their publishing credit. While this has been changing in recent years, it’s still common to see initials for writers of colour, like P.H. Low or R.F. Kuang. Don’t let this pressure you, however, as proudly displaying your full name can signal heritage and authenticity, especially if you’re writing works infused with your lived experience; just be prepared for some online venues to display accented characters inconsistently, depending on fonts and coding differences between platforms.
So, how do you come up with an effective pen name?
You can base your pseudonym on your legal name by shortening a longer name or making use of a middle name. For example, Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel writes romance under the simpler Danielle Steel.
You can also create a fictional persona, where the “identity” of the author belongs to the world in which the story is set. Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler) went so far as to have fictionalized About the Author blurbs that sustained the persona with tongue-in-cheek humour and references to his role as a “biographer” for the fictional Series of Unfortunate Events.
Perception
Another reason to opt for a pen name is to separate the content you write from your non-author life — or to separate your different readerships. A grade school teacher may want to keep their erotica catalogue distinct from their professional identity. Similarly, a hard scifi writer might want to separate that identity from their cozy fantasy work to prevent readers from being disappointed by a departure in subject matter or tone.
You might also want to avoid scrutiny. If you are writing an explosive memoir recounting painful, scandalous, or salacious details, you may need to protect the identities of the people you are describing to avoid backlash from family or lawsuits. The issue here, if you use your legal name, is that simply changing the subjects’ names may be insufficient to protect them, especially when descriptors like “father-in-law,” “eldest son,” or “boss” can still identify individuals if they know who you are. By using a pen name and changing key identifying details, you avoid the risk of potentially breaching the privacy of the people you discuss.
It’s also, unfortunately, still a reality that certain genres are dominated by writers of specific gender identities, and readers can be unwelcoming to writers trying to break in with a name that “doesn’t belong.” For this reason, male romantasy authors may work under a female-sounding name; conversely, female espionage writers might use an initialism or male name. Consider the New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts, who decided to branch out from romance and became the bestselling author of crime-thrillers J.D. Robb — as well as the alternate women’s fiction pen names of Jill March and Sarah Hardesty.
Personal Preference
Of course, you may just not like your legal name — or find it doesn’t fit nicely on the jacket of your book. Like rock stars, actors, and children’s entertainers, you might just want something catchy, glamorous, or cute that’s easy to sign and search for online.
When your book is an extension of your business, you may be tempted to use your company or course name as a pseudonym. While this may create cohesion on the surface level, it is less personal, and doesn’t create the same connection with readers as having a true “author name.” Consider how your pen name will work in the context of interviews, About the Author blurbs, or in award credits. How would the host of an event introduce you? If you use an initialism, do you want to be introduced as “E.R.” or as “Elizabeth”?
If you’re inventing a name, be sure to check online to make sure you’re not duplicating an existing well-known author. While author names cannot be copyrighted, having a name too similar to another author’s could result in confusion or difficulty being found when you promote your books. Especially if the existing author writes in a similar genre, you’ll want to differentiate yourself and your author voice.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you want to be invisible, you can choose to publish under the “Anonymous” handle. This can shield you from public scrutiny, but it may affect your copyright (more on that later). You may also need to keep your social media presence separate from your personal accounts and potentially set them to private. Consider the challenges of marketing when you’re trying to remain unnoticed.
Privacy and Pen Names
When you create a pseudonym, you are essentially creating a writer persona. What are the characteristics of this new identity? How prominent will this persona be in your work? What degree of separation is necessary between your actual legal identity and this new persona?
The answer to these questions will shape how you create your author presence online and how you set up your book business. If you are using the pen name specifically for branding purposes and don’t mind if readers know the true face behind the name, you may not need to create separate digital identities. You can still sign contracts and agreements under your legal name, and just record the author name (where necessary) as your nom de plume.
If you want to keep the two identities distinctly separate, you will need to create separate social media accounts, a dedicated website for your books (registered to your business identity), and potentially file a “doing business as” or a written transfer from your legal name to your business. This will ensure that today’s savvy Internet sleuths don’t quickly uncover the connection between the pseudonym and the legal identity behind it.
When posting on your pen name accounts, you’ll want to be careful not to reveal any identifying factors that might betray your privacy, such as the names/professions of family members, city of residence, place of work, candid photos, etc. You may want to curate your professional author photos, either having a distinctive style used in the photos, an artistic flair that obscures your identity (consider the mysterious Lemony Snicket author photos), or even an illustrated portrait (for humour or children’s books) rather than a photograph. You may even opt to not use an author photo at all. In this case, consider how to handle promotions opportunities that require you to be present on camera or in person.
What can you post about instead? Focus on topics related to your book: your writing process, your research, related news items or discoveries, non-identifying interests shared by you and your readers (or characters!), what you’re reading, and so on. It can help, as you get started, to create a list of safe topics you will engage with as that account. This can prevent you from accidentally liking a bunch of non-related posts that might reveal your identity or skew your algorithm in the wrong direction.
Ownership Concerns
So, what impact does using a pen name have on your ownership of your work?
By default, your legal name will still be used for things like collecting royalties and filing for copyright. After all, the nom de plume is not a legal citizen of your country — you are.
Note: the following information is specific to filing for copyright with the US Copyright Office, as it has the furthest reaching authority on intellectual property rights ownership.
When filing for copyright, you’ll be able to fill out two fields: the claimant and the author name. For most people, these will both be your legal name. If you’re not concerned with maintaining strict privacy, you can simply fill out your legal name as the claimant and your pen name as the author name. Anyone can look up a book title to see who holds the copyright; your legal name and address will be displayed on the public record.
Note that if you have commissioned illustrations for your book, a written transfer cannot be made out to a pseudonym; the US Copyright Office requires the rights to be transferred to a legal entity, so your illustrator would need to transfer rights to you directly.
If you want to keep your identity shielded, you would have to provide a written transfer agreement from your legal name to the entity that you want to hold the copyright. This can be a pseudonym if you’ve established it as a legal entity or to a business name of your choice. Keep in mind that this will mean this entity is listed in the public records as the holder of your copyright, and is also responsible for any challenges or disputes. Make sure that you feel confident about this arrangement by consulting an intellectual property lawyer before filing.
So, there you have it! There are a plethora of reasons you might choose a pseudonym, pen name, or nom de plume instead of your legal name. Since the author name on a title is the foundation for your writing career, consider it carefully before you publish. Readers these days are as curious and conscientious of the author as they are about the books they read, so put your best persona forward!
Astra Crompton (she/they) is an eclectic writer, editor, and illustrator with over twenty-five years of publishing experience. Her work has been published in anthologies, table-top RPG books, magazines, and in several novels. They have also successfully completed NaNoWriMo six times and counting. Astra is currently the Editing & Illustrations Coordinator at FriesenPress, where they manage, coordinate, and vet FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.
