Pen Names used to be a trend in the past. Authors and other personalities used to take on anonymous names for providing a story or conspiracy to/of the society. While the idea looked fascinating and mysterious, it never came to terms as to why they needed this practice.
These days written works are all about credibility and knowing the detailed author biography. Writers want to get accredited for their work as soon as possible. While in the previous times, authors were much more dedicated to detail, they weren’t hasty to get paid and used their pen name instead of real ones. The reason why the authors did, and need to continue to use pseudonyms is the following.
Smooth Ride to Becoming an Author
Novice authors need assurance to publish their content, and they can be scared of the fact that the whole world can perceive their thoughts and ideas put into a book. To vanquish these feelings, they can create imaginary names to publish entire books or test out pieces of them to release the writing in their name later.
With the advent of technology, there are many places to channel for testing out writings. By providing your story to a John Doe site, you can lessen the attention and critiques that will have been directed at you otherwise.
Evade Discrimination
Many races, colors, ages, gender choices in our society are subject to discrimination. No matter how much awareness is placed on such controversial people, there still seems to be public who critique these individuals coming out and doing things. For instance, women faced judgment for portraying science fiction or destructive characters, unlike their made-up image by society. And for that, they choose to use masculine pseudonyms for different purposes to avoid unnecessary attention.
Even if there isn’t much of a trouble for a woman to publish other ideas than homely in the modern age, there can be a threat for individuals like bisexual and LGBT.
Practice Privacy
Placing anything on the internet is like providing people to discriminate about your past and personality. When you go online and provide information to the users, you will get attention, and your privacy will start to get invaded.
Although authors these days care more about fame than getting the idea across, you can hide yours. If you have a personality of an introvert or simply don’t like it when people get to know you and talk about you, you can use a pseudonym to write your book as many authors of the past did.
Start Over
Authors are respected beings of society, and due to this high status, their actions are to be upright and diligent. So if anything intriguing about a writer gets out, and the word spreads, they could lose their status and fans who buy their books. As a subsequent strategy, an author can vouch for a penname and come back with a clean slate. With it, they can gather devotion and love for their work once again without revealing their true identity.
Make it Easy
Readers like to buy books and boast of writers that have catchy and nice-sounding names. Most famous authors like Mark Twain and Stan Lee have easy to pronounce, and memorable names, which make for a big part of their success, and most of them are pen names that they use after selecting some attractive parts of their own name or getting a completely new one. This practice was widely used in the past due to names being large and difficult to adjust to books. But today it can be done as a marketing technique to get books more exposure and fame.
