What’s In A [Pen] Name?

As a journalist and later as a publicist, I wrote for several years under my own name. When I began writing romance, I decided to separate these professions by using a pen name for my fiction. Having the anonymity to write freely that a pen name provides was a special bonus not lost on me.

I read somewhere that a writer should select a pen name that has a personal meaning for her. Good idea. Let’s see: there were the names of the schools and universities I attended, the cities I’ve lived in, fictional characters I adore, historical figures I admire, family members who have gone to their eternal reward [Some went up, many went down, but who am I to judge?], and so on.

Nothing really clicked for me until I remembered that Harlequin Executive Editor Mary-Theresa Hussey got her nickname Matrice by blending her first and middle names. Why not? It worked for her; it could work for me. I smushed my first and middle names together and came up with Jolana. Yes! In fact, I liked it better than my real name. So, first name down, last name to go.

The last name gave me fits for a while. I tried every idea I listed in paragraph two. Again, nothing seemed to click. That is, until I watched an episode of Castle. The detectives had to decode a clue that was in the form of an anagram. The light bulb over my head flashed on. Use an anagram that has a personal meaning for me. It didn’t take long before I hit on the answer, thanks to my eight grandchildren. [I got married at the age of three.] I combined the first letter of each grandchild’s first name and scrambled the letters around until they created a name that appeared to be recognizable as a surname—Malkston.

That is precisely how I became Jolana Malkston, author.

Hold your applause; there’s more to come.

I was curious how other authors went about creating their pen names, so I asked a few.

Tracy Brogan (Crazy Little Thing) said: “I chose a pen name to create a little privacy for my kids. I’m not particularly careful about keeping my two identities separate, and I probably should be, but I’d won a couple contests under my real name and so it was already out there. Once I decided on a pen name, I got a new email and try to use that account for all business related interactions. And I never post family pictures on my Brogan Facebook pages or mention my kids names on that. I chose Brogan because it was my mother’s maiden name, and I love the Irish feel to it. Ironically, I gave up “Laird” to use it, which has a fabulous Scottish sound to it, so it was a trade-off.”

Patricia Kiyono (The Calico Heart) told me: “I have a lot of educational materials published under my own name, so when I started writing romance I wanted to keep the two types of writing separate. As far as choosing my pen name, I kept my own first name (I didn’t want the confusion of someone calling me by a different given name), and Kiyono is a different reading of the Japanese characters making up my maiden name.”

Tereasa Blue (Man of Her Dreams) has a humorous explanation: “The trouble started in kindergarten when my teacher taught me to spell my name. Instead of refrigerator status, my wiggly attempt landed in the trash. There is no ‘h’ in my name, and it has an extra ‘a’.  Except no one in the entire world spells it that way. And then I got married. Bellew, often becomes Bell-Ow. It’s spelled with an ‘e’ but pronounced like the color—Blue.

“A real phone conversation I had:

‘Mrs. Green? This is Mrs. Bellew, pronounced, Blue.’

‘Could you hold please, while I get Mr. Brown?’

“Seriously???

“Readers may give you a few seconds to hook them into buying your book, so why waste any? It was obvious; Teresa Blue was born.”

Mara Jacobs (The Worth Series) gave her account: “My pen name Mara Jacobs is derived from TaMARA (My full name, though my mother chose to put a silent Y in Tamyra – don’t ask!), and Jacobs is a family name a few generations back on my mother’s side. There are two main reasons I went with a pen name. 1) I’m still working a day job and have a professional presence under my real name.  I wanted to keep that “career” separate from my “writing career” for things like Google searches and social media. 2) And more importantly, so much of publishing now (particularly indie publishing) is about self-promotion. I just thought I’d feel more comfortable tooting Mara’s horn than Tammy’s, which has proven to be the case.”

Alyssa Alexander (The Smuggler Wore Silk) recalls that her decision to choose a pen name and the method of doing so was logical and unemotional. She analyzed, looked at phone books, baby name books, etc., until she found exactly what I she looking for. “I chose a pen name for two reasons: (1) I didn’t think my real name had a “ring” to it, and (2) I wanted to maintain some privacy. This was more about social media and the Internet than anything else. For purposes of Facebook, Twitter, etc., I want to be able to post pictures of my son for my family and friends–all of whom I know well–and to stay in touch via the Internet, and yet be able to keep that information private.

“As to how I chose Alyssa Alexander, someone much wiser than I once advised me it’s hard to answer to another first name at conferences and book signings. So I opted to stay with my real first name. Alexander I chose in part because of shelf space. It should be near the top/eye level and we read left to right, so Alexander should be a name they see early on in their hunt for books. I also thought about the number of syllables in conjunction with Alyssa and the alliteration of AA for purposes of a logo on promotional items.”

Katherine Ashe (How to be a Proper Lady) reveals: “I chose to use a pen name because I didn’t want my academic and author personae to mingle. At that time, in my university world I was still “in the closet” about my identity as a romance author. Now I’m “out”, but it’s still useful to have an alter ego. It helps separate the world of work—which can become all consuming—from my family and private life.

“My first name is my birth name. I chose my pen surname without any conscious awareness that it was the name of the hero of the first romantic epic I read and adored, M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions. It wasn’t until I wrote my third novel, which featured an Anglo-East Indian hero, that I realized where I’d found the name Ashe—spelled Ash in Kaye’s novel, which is set in India. Not only that, but the heroine of that same book of mine went by the nickname “Tavy” (for Octavia), a clear echo of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the cobra-battling mongoose from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and one of my favorite animal heroes from childhood. I hadn’t thought of that either until after my own India novel was published. The subconscious is truly a marvelous thing!”

Nancy Gideon (Prince of Shadows), who accumulated three during her lengthy career—Lauren Giddings, Dana Ransom and Rosalyn West—gets the last word on pen names. “I started out in the ‘80s. Publishers wanted exclusivity to their authors, hence boilerplate contracts and pen names. Since they couldn’t ‘own’ an author’s real name, they pushed writers to use pseudonyms that stayed with the publishing house.

“When I sold to Kensington/Zebra, with my first two books releasing the same month (!), they insisted on two pen names, one for my Regency romances and one for my historicals. I had all of half an hour to come up with Lauren Giddings, a name I liked and a common junk mail twist on my last name, and Dana Ransom. Dana was a family name; Ransom my mother’s maiden name. The name game surfaced again when I sold to Avon. Rosalyn West was a group effort between my editors and me to separate my new historicals from the ones I wrote for Zebra.

“I used my own name for the first time when writing a paranormal vampire series for Kensington and ImaJinn. I still use it for my current shape-shifter series (By Moonlight) with Pocket and for contemporaries.

“For an author using a pseudonym, the benefits range from getting more books out in a year and avoiding saturation if you’re prolific, to connecting different names to different genres (e.g. Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb), and to career rebuilding after a bad sales experience. The cons to using a pseudonym are the need to create separate social media platforms and the problem of getting readers to find you under a different name/brand. My solution is to put all my writing identities under one web site umbrella as Nancy Gideon, Romance By Any Other Name.”

And that’s what’s in a [pen] name. 🙂

Are you a writer, and do you use a pen name? I’d be interested to learn how and why you chose it, so be sure to leave a response.