MadTownMama (the pseudonym of a blogger named Susan, over at Mad Knitting) wrote yesterday, with this query: ""Do you mind (sometime) explaining all the pseudonyms you've written under? Why weren't you just Susan Wittig Albert for all those books you wrote? Just wondering!"
Writers use pseudonyms for lots of different reasons. There's a good article on the subject here and a much more general Wikipedia article here. In my case, there have been three reasons.
I began writing under the name Susan Blake because (small confession here) I was still working at a university and didn't want my colleagues to know that I was moonlighting as a writer of mass market young adult fiction. Carolyn Heilbrun did the same thing. She was an English prof at Columbia who wrote the Kate Fansler series (really good!) under the pen name of Amanda Cross, because she feared--with good reason--that she wouldn't get tenure if the senior profs knew what she was up to in her spare time. You can read the story here, then go read Death in a Tenured Position, Amanda Cross at her best. BTW, I really was Susan Blake once, when I was married to a man with that name. By the time I used his name as a pen name, we were divorced, and the use of that name to earn money was sort of like thumbing my nose at him. Maybe you know the feeling?
Second reason. The several young adult series I was writing in were created, for obvious marketing reasons, under one single name. Examples: Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon (the Hardy Boys), Francine Pascal (Sweet Valley Twins). All the writers--over the years, there were dozens of us in a single long-running series--wrote under that name. How else could Carolyn Keene write her first book in 1929 and still be alive and kicking? When you're hired to write a book in that series, you use that name. The various pseudonyms I've used belong to the series--I call them "series pseudonyms."
In the case of the Robin Paige mysteries, Bill and I were required to use a pseudonym because the publisher felt (most publishers do) that fiction written under two names doesn't sell very well. Readers might balk at the idea of a team-written book. That's less true now, probably, but it was certainly true when we sold the series in 1993. So we scratched our heads and came up with the bi-gendered name, Robin (masculine in Britain, feminine in the US).
Does that solve the Mystery of the Multiple Pseudonyms?
(Thanks, MadTownMama, for asking!)
