: Re: Real-world issues with using an alias It's not so much that I dislike my real name, but I have a few issues that make me uncomfortable with using it. This is mainly due to the fact that

@Kaufman555

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Both J.K. Rowling and K.A. Applegate are examples of people who used simple pseudonyms to write for a target audience (middle school boys) who wouldn't initially pick up their books if they realized the author was a woman, which their given names strongly hinted at. Both women wrote the two most successful series for their target audience, and were aided in part by the reader not realizing they were written by women until after they were hooked (though I did buck the trend with Animorphs as my first book featured a female protagonist, but I picked it because the animal on the cover was an alligator, which was cool, more than anything).

Other writers do it to focus on a more memorable and marketable name, like Stanley Lieber, aka Stan "The Man" Lee, who's pen name is cool in that "Lee" not only is the first syllable of his last name, but also the last syllable of his first name. At the time, he was also playing down his ethnic Jewish name Lieber as he feared it might hurt his sales to mostly Christian Americans.

A fictional example I always loved, but in the show "Arthur" an in universe psuedonym was given to a writer of a popular series of horror anthology (ala the "Goosebumps" series) to the writer E. A. DePoe, which is both an allusion to the trend of women writers to mask their name while writing for boys, aligned with a male writer who authored the real world equivelent (R. L. Stein) and subtly payed homage to Edgar Allen Poe, an influential horror Author in American Literature.

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