Pen name, pseudonym, non de plume. What do famous authors do when they secretly want to write in a different genre without revealing who they really are? Well, they pull a J.K. Rowling and write under a different name, of course.
Rowling, who was famously exposed as the real person behind newbie crime novelist Robert Galbraith after publishing The Cuckoo’s Calling last year, has said she wanted to write under a different name to get a book published on its own merits and not simply because she was famous. That seems to have worked: The Silkworm, Galbraith’s second offering, has just been published and Rowling plans to write at least five more under her male name.
But, this isn’t the first time the millionaire author has used a pseudonym. As she explains on her website, she her name is really just Joanne Rowling (her friends and family call her ‘Jo’), the K is an addition.
When she wrote the first book in her Harry Potter series, her publishers suggested that she use gender-neutral initials to hide her femininity: they didn’t think a book written by a woman would appeal to young boys (shows how little they knew!). So she used the J from Joanne and K from Kathleen (her grandmother’s name) to create her first pseudonym, J.K. Rowling. She has never published under the name she was born with. And it turns out authors use this trick all the time. Mark Twain was a pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Lewis Carrol was really named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Actually, pseudonyms are quite common and go as far back as…
The Brontë Sisters
The famous trio of literary geniuses originally published as three brothers with the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell because, back then, men were more likely to be published than women and there was a distinct bias against women writers among literary critics of the time who thought writing was a man’s business. The Brontës are now considered three of the greatest authors of all time. Men 0, Brontës 1, or rather 3.
Stephen King
The master of modern story-telling began his literary career writing as Richard Bachman because back in the 1970s publishers didn’t want to publish more than one novel a year by the same author, so he wrote under another name to bypass that rule until he became so famous he could do whatever he wanted to. Overachiever much?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was, and still is, the reigning queen of English crime-fiction, having sold more books than anyone else ever (4 billion copies). Only the Bible and Shakespeare have been more widely published than Christie. But when she wasn’t writing crime fiction, she was writing romance novels under the non de plume Mary Westmacott to escape the pressures of fans’ expectations and to write the novels she actually wanted to write. The Mary Westmacott novels tended to be more literary and focused on the private inner-lives of women.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice did exactly what Christie did: to break free from the restrictions of her reputation as the master of gothic-horror-vampire fiction, she wrote romance novels under two pen names, Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure. But when we say romance, we actually mean erotic. The novels she wrote under these names were filled with very heavy BDSM action. In fact, these books are like the scary older brothers of Fifty Shades of Grey. We have to ask: has anyone checked that E.L. James isn’t another on of Anne Rice’s pseudonyms? Just curious.
Nora Roberts
Nora Roberts, the heavyweight champion of the American romance novel, masqueraded as best-selling science fiction author J.D. Robb for six years before finally admitting that she was the elusive Robb because people were starting to wonder why Robb was never available to appear in public. Again, Roberts admits that she used the pseudonym in order to get distance from fans and to challenge herself creatively. And to make more money, maybe?
