My name, when it appears on the cover of a book, contains my middle initial. The ‘A’ is there purely so readers don’t confuse me with the other Keith Pearsons cluttering up the internet, one of whom, I’m reliably informed, plays bluegrass banjo. I have nothing against banjos. I just want to avoid being accidentally hired to play at a folk festival.
So I’ve paddled at the very shallow end of the pen-name pool. A single letter. Other authors have waded in considerably deeper, inventing entire people, complete with fake biographies and imaginary former careers. The obvious question is why. Why would anyone who has slaved over a book then publish it under a name nobody can trace back to them?
The reasons turn out to be older, stranger, and more practical than you’d expect.
Reason one: being a woman who wanted to be read properly
Rewind to 1846. Three sisters in a Yorkshire parsonage pooled their poems into a slim volume and published it under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë kept their own initials but buried their gender, and Charlotte later spelled out precisely why: “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” Their first book in print, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, barely sold at all. Undeterred, they went on to publish Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights under the very same invented names.
A decade later, Mary Ann Evans reached the same conclusion and picked a blunter disguise. Weary of what she witheringly called “silly novels by lady novelists,” she borrowed the first name of her partner, George Henry Lewes, added “Eliot” because she liked how it sat in the mouth, and became George Eliot. Adam Bede followed in 1859 and sailed through eight printings. Nobody accused George of writing anything lightweight.
The logic here reads bleak but simple. A Victorian reader would judge a book differently depending on the plumbing of the person who wrote it, so it was a smart move to hide the pipework.
Reason two: the clean slate
Fast forward to April 2013. A crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling appeared from a debut author named Robert Galbraith, described on the jacket as an ex-military policeman who’d moved into the security industry. Reviews glowed. Sales did not. The book shifted around 1,500 hardbacks and sat there quietly, the way most debut novels do.
Then, in July, the Sunday Times followed an anonymous tip on Twitter and unmasked Robert Galbraith as J.K. Rowling. Within days the novel rocketed to the top of the charts. Rowling admitted she’d “hoped to keep this secret a little longer,” and described writing without the weight of her own name as “a liberating experience.”
You can see the appeal. When you happen to be the most famous novelist on the planet, every sentence you publish arrives dragging a caravan of expectation behind it. A pen name lets you set all that down and find out whether the work stands up on its own two legs. For a few glorious months, it did. Then a bloke on the internet ruined everything, as blokes on the internet so often do.
Reason three: writing far too much for one name to carry
Some authors adopt a second identity not to hide, but because they’re simply too prolific for a single byline. Publishers have long believed a reader will only stomach one book a year from a given name; produce more, the thinking runs, and you flood your own market.
Stephen King ran headlong into this in the late 1970s. Bursting with more books than his publisher wanted to release under “Stephen King,” he conjured up Richard Bachman, stitching the name together from crime writer Richard Stark and the rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Bachman published several novels before a sharp-eyed bookshop clerk named Steve Brown noticed the styles matched, dug up the paperwork at the Library of Congress, and blew the whole thing wide open in 1985.
Nora Roberts took the tidier route. By the mid-1990s she’d written so fast that her publisher had a backlog of her romance novels stacked up like planes over Heathrow. So she launched a futuristic detective series under the name J.D. Robb: the initials borrowed from her sons Jason and Dan, the surname carved from her own. The In Death books still land at a steady two hardbacks a year. The woman is, essentially, a small publishing industry on her own.
The dull but important legal bits
A pen name is perfectly legal. You can write, publish and hold the copyright to your work under an invented name, and the royalties still flow to the actual human doing the actual typing. What a pseudonym won’t do is spirit you away from the taxman’s ledger; the money belongs to you, and so does the demand.
Things turn murkier with what the trade calls “house names.” Some pen names belong to no single writer at all, but to a publisher, with a rotating cast of authors all producing books under one invented person. Picture a pub landlord keeping the same name over the door while the staff quietly change every few years. Sign up to one of those, and the name on your cover may never truly be yours. Being an indie author, I answer to no such committee, which is also, incidentally, why I choose my own titles.
What the name is really hiding
Strip away the practicalities and every pen name performs the same quiet trick: it separates the person from the work. The Brontës wanted their words weighed without the prejudice. Rowling wanted to know whether she could still do it as a nobody. Underneath all of it sits a very human wish to be seen for what you create, rather than who you happen to be.
I never travelled that far. I kept my own name, banjo confusion and all, because after a decade my name and my books have quietly grown into the same thing. But I understand the urge completely. There’s a version of me who published his first novel as “R. J. Fanshawe” and told everyone he used to fly helicopters. He’d have had a lovely time of it, right up until the afternoon somebody asked him to actually fly one.
If the notion of a person hiding a truer self behind a name appeals to you, my own novels are stuffed with it. In Who Sent Clement?, a bookshop owner’s tidy life is upended by a foul-mouthed stranger in double denim who claims he died back in 1975 and declines to explain much further. Wrong’un hands a middling politician a late father whose respectable name concealed a thoroughly disreputable secret. And Waiting in The Sky follows Simon Armstrong, a young man calmly convinced he’s an alien awaiting extraction, which proves to be the strangest cover story of the lot. Three books, three people who are not remotely who they appear to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it legal for an author to use a pen name?
Yes. Using a pen name, or pseudonym, is entirely legal. An author can write, publish and hold the copyright to their work under an invented name, and still collect the royalties. The one thing a pen name cannot do is hide the income from the tax authorities, since the money legally belongs to the real person behind it.
Why did the Brontë sisters write under male-sounding names?
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846 to sidestep the prejudice Victorian readers and critics held against female writers. Charlotte explained that they feared “authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,” so the ambiguous Bell names let their work be judged on its merits.
Who is Robert Galbraith?
Robert Galbraith is a pen name used by J.K. Rowling for her crime fiction, beginning with The Cuckoo’s Calling in 2013. Rowling wanted to publish detective novels without the expectation attached to her own name. Her identity stayed secret only a few months before the Sunday Times revealed it following an anonymous tip.
Why do some very successful authors still use pen names?
Prolific writers often adopt a second name because publishers believe readers will only buy one book a year under a single byline. Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman and Nora Roberts writes her In Death crime series as J.D. Robb, both partly so they could release more books than one name could comfortably carry.
Does Keith A Pearson write under a pen name?
No. Keith A Pearson publishes everything under his own name through his imprint, Inchgate Publishing. The middle initial simply distinguishes him from other people called Keith Pearson, rather than concealing his identity.