: Re: Why do writers use pseudonyms? It's common enough -- recently I was looking for Seanan McGuire's newer book only to find it was published as "Mira Grant". Why would an author do this?

@Gonzalez219

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Besides "personal privacy" there is "professional privacy", an author that holds a sensitive full time job, in public, may not want to publish under their real name because the content of their fiction may have some impact on their professional life.

Their fiction may, for example, contain explicit blow-by-blow sex scenes, or portray homosexuality or drug use in a positive sense, or implicitly endorse crime (like Mr. Robot does hacking) or murder as solutions to problems.

Especially in the current social climate, we cannot trust people to distinguish fiction from the author's real views, or indeed the fiction may contain the author's real views, which they do not espouse in public because they would embarrass their institution, company, or office, and in many high level positions that can be a termination offense. For an elected official, it can be fodder for their lying opposition.

Examples are professors, anybody elected to any public office (even City Council, Sheriff or City Manager), medical doctors, lawyers, mental health professionals, CEOs of various companies, even people elected to private office; like The Quilting Club presidency or a local Credit Union Board of Directors.

This may not be a strategy to take to the national level, but some of us are self-aware enough to know we aren't going to be running for Congress or President or even Mayor, so nobody is going to hire private investigators to do a deep dig on our finances.

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