Along comes a new batch of titles by your favorite author!
Welcome to the pseudonym.
You may already know that Stephen King writes as Richard Bachman, and you were likely aware that JK Rowling writes as John Galbraith – but did you know that Agatha Christie wrote under the name Mary Westmacott?
Neither did I.
My favorite psuedonym story is from my friend Don, who informed me back in the mid 1980s that Barbara Michaels, whose slightly gothic novels I’d been devouring for some time, also wrote under the pen name Elizabeth Peters. If not for Don, I never would have met Amelia Peabody or her family.
I’m comforted by the fact that Phil Rickman, creator of my favorite exorcist in the Merrily Watkins series, also writes under the names Will Kingdom and Thom Madley; this means I’m nowhere near the end of his body of work.
Authors use pseudonyms for lots of different reasons, including anonymity (like E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Gray and its sequels -but now we all know her real name is Erika Leonard), preservation of brand, or in in the more distant past, to disguise one’s gender like the Bronte sisters and George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) did. Female authors were unlikely to be published in the 1800s.
Why not check on your favorite author? You mighth discover books you didn’t know they’d written.
Soon I’ll be adding author pages to this site; I will include a section on pseudonyms.