When I was getting my MFA, professors and advisors seemed to look down on the idea of writing under a pen name. Without a good reason, a pen name could do more harm than good. And this makes sense. Why give away your personal brand to a name that isn’t yours? Why build from scratch when you have your entire life to build from with your actual name?
I published my debut collection of short stories in 2020. Not the best timing with COVID lockdowns and no book events to be found. But it was an incredible moment when my publisher sent me advanced copies of the book and when sales started coming in. The book and, maybe more importantly long term, the author were virtually invisible online. Unless you were going directly to the book on Amazon or some other bookstore, you weren’t going to find it on Google by searching my name.
Why? My name is common, but not as common as others. Unfortunately (for me and my author SEO potential) I share the name with a famous NFL player. Who do you think wins the SEO battle between a newish author and an established football player?
For a few years, I didn’t worry about it. It didn’t seem to matter much until I started thinking about completing my debut novel and looking for representation. Your job as a writer is not just to write. Your job is to also build an audience. It’s also to sell. You have to apply what I call horizontal focus and do everything. If you get an agent and have the backing of a large publisher, they are going to help with marketing, but you put yourself in a better position if you can do some of the marketing lift yourself. With that in mind, my name started to matter a little more.
Whether it’s ego or some sort of narcissistic desire to see my last name in print, I didn’t want to generate a completely new pen name. I just wanted to distance myself from the NFL player if people Googled my name. Fortunately, I have been reading J. Todd Scott for a number of years and even got to meet him at a writer’s meet-up in Dallas once. His name inspired me. I could keep all the elements of my name without being confused with the football player.
My pen name, if you can even call it that, would be J. Edward Hunter.
It works for a number of reasons. First, it sounds literary. Thanks, Dad, for passing that middle name down. Second, my parents and my friends always called me J in high school and many still do now. And third, none of it is made up. It’s my name in a different format.
Oh, and as a bonus, the domain was available.
As authors, we have to walk the line between creativity and promotion. And part of the promotional aspect of the work is to make sure we’re thinking about everything from our social profiles to our names. Pen names don’t always make sense, and if you can write under your own name, you should. But don’t be afraid to play around with it a bit if it’ll help you market yourself.
Marketing isn’t a dirty word. It’s a necessity. So, play the name game if you need to.
"Jack Cameron" started as the name I used online to distinguish my online and offline friends. But over the years Jack has stuck and John has slowly faded. I've kind of become my pen name. These days pretty much everyone calls me Jack.