LonCon panel notes: What's in a name?
Aug. 21st, 2014 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettBrief - hands didn't like me much!
Aaaand that's me done, because I'm not posting my notes for What is I?, because I gave up in disgust and left early it was so bad.
What's in a name?
okay I am awful and my first reaction is "Seanan's hair is AWESOME" - blonde down through orange to purple, and I know it's shallow to note this but it is AWESOME and people are still filing into the room forever
Decidedly majority female panel hurraaaaaaaaaaaaah, including a trans lady! And two wheelchair users on the panel. Hurrah! And Robin Hobb, lots of names; and "I am Seanan McGuire, and I am Mira Grant" -- yes!!!
Why might someone take a pseudonym or be advised to?
Seanan: "mine was honestly initially a purely business decision" -- but also a branding decision. Seanan and Mira write very different things (urban fantasy, very little sex, very little violence; Mira writes hard SF -- and 90% of the people who tell her they'd never have picked up her books if they'd known she was an urban fantasy author... are men.
Robin: has written for newspapers (M Ogden), children's magazines (M Lindholme), has never felt any attachment to legal first name "Margaret"; eventually came up with Meg, so that byline stayed with the characters in that series; and then, eventually, branding - "a different flavour". "House names" for magazines.
Okay, so why not pseudonyms, and have you considered it?
Ben: "house names"; declined opportunity to write under his own name because he already had a fandom; so keeping his "serious" fandom separate from his teenage vampire Mayans? Again: signalling to the reader that this may be A Different Kind Of Book.
Catherine: why didn't choose pseudonym - wanting to see one's name in print! Stuff about Zuckerberg's bullshit "lack of integrity"! YES ISN'T IT NONSENSE.
Open pseudonym versus closed pseudonym.
Seanan - has she ever felt that having open pseudonyms provide barriers? She gets tired of being asked why she's Mira Grant! But doesn't have a problem, except people being a bit crap about having @mira_grant...
Robin: nope, haven't really had any confusion. "behave as you wish to be seen" - isn't really any privacy - Seanan starts sniggering when she says "don't use foul language"...
Ben: also works as a ghost writer - how does he feel about seeing his books under other names? ... mostly he's fine but is being /really snarky/ about it having started out asserting that he was fine.
Catherine: critical books different from writing novels! Aware of having two (small) audiences.
Moderator makes a poorly-thought-through comment about how we have to keep so many identities separate (home, professional), and acts like pseudonyms make that worse - but that's clearly wrong! CLEARLY WRONG. I have feelz.
Orbit never asked Seanan to have a male pseudonym! Where other publishers interested in Mira Grant... did. Ah! Mira is what her father's side of the family calls her! (And lots of it calls her "Jenny" because diminutive of "Seanan".) Small group of female zombie authors: 2x the research as male counterparts, and get told they're doing it wrong 5x as much - and lots of them have male pseuds. Anthologies: male names will almost always get prioritised on the front cover, even if a good gender diversity, because marketing departments. >:[
[Wow moderator continues trite and superificial and also talking a lot.]
Robin: asked, any particular thoughts on taking on a differently-gendered pseudonym? "Robin is of course an androgynous name" hrrgh, apparently because Farseer trilogy written from male first-person PoV. Short name, on cover in big letters, and went around bookshops - and the shelves at eye-height were the H. And all the resonances of "Robin". "Very carefully-constructed name - the experience of taking on a pseudonym was totally freeing"
[Seanan points out that Lemony Snicket *has* written romantic poetry and is... ignored. Hrrf.]
Ben: "It sounds... right?" ("Gestures are very important as well!")
Getting a fairly collaborative pseudonym-forming process... but still I grump at the idea that a group of four means that nobody ever gets pressured into the thing.
Now they're talking about pseudonyms they particular admire and... shrug. Seanan particularly likes James P Tiptree Jr :D Seanan picked hers at least in part because the same big letters = easier to sign! Seanan ascribes lots of the progress in this field to JPTJr's winning of Hugos etc etc. Seanan says: mystery is the one where you have one name per series, Harlequin you have one name throughout...
Seanan talking about pseudonyms of best-selling authors for writing QUILTBAG YA - because they think it's much more important to have the books out than it is to get the cookies, but their main brand/publisher isn't willing to take the risk.
Catherine: some writers are so prolific that they need to have different names or the market won't bear it!
Sometimes suggest people take a pseudonym if their early work was crap -- going out as a debut author again for the benefits, rather than taking the hit of doing it...
Author as brand, versus genre as brand, versus character as brand (e.g. Nancy Drew).
"Mira does research, Seanan just wants you dead."
Aaaand that's me done, because I'm not posting my notes for What is I?, because I gave up in disgust and left early it was so bad.
What's in a name?
okay I am awful and my first reaction is "Seanan's hair is AWESOME" - blonde down through orange to purple, and I know it's shallow to note this but it is AWESOME and people are still filing into the room forever
Decidedly majority female panel hurraaaaaaaaaaaaah, including a trans lady! And two wheelchair users on the panel. Hurrah! And Robin Hobb, lots of names; and "I am Seanan McGuire, and I am Mira Grant" -- yes!!!
Why might someone take a pseudonym or be advised to?
Seanan: "mine was honestly initially a purely business decision" -- but also a branding decision. Seanan and Mira write very different things (urban fantasy, very little sex, very little violence; Mira writes hard SF -- and 90% of the people who tell her they'd never have picked up her books if they'd known she was an urban fantasy author... are men.
Robin: has written for newspapers (M Ogden), children's magazines (M Lindholme), has never felt any attachment to legal first name "Margaret"; eventually came up with Meg, so that byline stayed with the characters in that series; and then, eventually, branding - "a different flavour". "House names" for magazines.
Okay, so why not pseudonyms, and have you considered it?
Ben: "house names"; declined opportunity to write under his own name because he already had a fandom; so keeping his "serious" fandom separate from his teenage vampire Mayans? Again: signalling to the reader that this may be A Different Kind Of Book.
Catherine: why didn't choose pseudonym - wanting to see one's name in print! Stuff about Zuckerberg's bullshit "lack of integrity"! YES ISN'T IT NONSENSE.
Open pseudonym versus closed pseudonym.
Seanan - has she ever felt that having open pseudonyms provide barriers? She gets tired of being asked why she's Mira Grant! But doesn't have a problem, except people being a bit crap about having @mira_grant...
Robin: nope, haven't really had any confusion. "behave as you wish to be seen" - isn't really any privacy - Seanan starts sniggering when she says "don't use foul language"...
Ben: also works as a ghost writer - how does he feel about seeing his books under other names? ... mostly he's fine but is being /really snarky/ about it having started out asserting that he was fine.
Catherine: critical books different from writing novels! Aware of having two (small) audiences.
Moderator makes a poorly-thought-through comment about how we have to keep so many identities separate (home, professional), and acts like pseudonyms make that worse - but that's clearly wrong! CLEARLY WRONG. I have feelz.
Orbit never asked Seanan to have a male pseudonym! Where other publishers interested in Mira Grant... did. Ah! Mira is what her father's side of the family calls her! (And lots of it calls her "Jenny" because diminutive of "Seanan".) Small group of female zombie authors: 2x the research as male counterparts, and get told they're doing it wrong 5x as much - and lots of them have male pseuds. Anthologies: male names will almost always get prioritised on the front cover, even if a good gender diversity, because marketing departments. >:[
[Wow moderator continues trite and superificial and also talking a lot.]
Robin: asked, any particular thoughts on taking on a differently-gendered pseudonym? "Robin is of course an androgynous name" hrrgh, apparently because Farseer trilogy written from male first-person PoV. Short name, on cover in big letters, and went around bookshops - and the shelves at eye-height were the H. And all the resonances of "Robin". "Very carefully-constructed name - the experience of taking on a pseudonym was totally freeing"
[Seanan points out that Lemony Snicket *has* written romantic poetry and is... ignored. Hrrf.]
Ben: "It sounds... right?" ("Gestures are very important as well!")
Getting a fairly collaborative pseudonym-forming process... but still I grump at the idea that a group of four means that nobody ever gets pressured into the thing.
Now they're talking about pseudonyms they particular admire and... shrug. Seanan particularly likes James P Tiptree Jr :D Seanan picked hers at least in part because the same big letters = easier to sign! Seanan ascribes lots of the progress in this field to JPTJr's winning of Hugos etc etc. Seanan says: mystery is the one where you have one name per series, Harlequin you have one name throughout...
Seanan talking about pseudonyms of best-selling authors for writing QUILTBAG YA - because they think it's much more important to have the books out than it is to get the cookies, but their main brand/publisher isn't willing to take the risk.
Catherine: some writers are so prolific that they need to have different names or the market won't bear it!
Sometimes suggest people take a pseudonym if their early work was crap -- going out as a debut author again for the benefits, rather than taking the hit of doing it...
Author as brand, versus genre as brand, versus character as brand (e.g. Nancy Drew).
"Mira does research, Seanan just wants you dead."
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-21 11:38 pm (UTC)Did she say bestsellers actually use pseudonyms for their QUILTBAG YA, or that's an idea? Would we ever know if they did??
I write nonfiction under my own name and am fairly public about it -- e.g. Twitter, .com address, LinkedIn all use my real name -- and it does feel sometimes as though I can't use my own identity elsewhere because it's a brand. I'm careful about what political views I share online under my real name, for example, because some of them might complicate my paid work.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-21 11:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-22 08:46 am (UTC)(S)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-22 06:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-22 11:51 am (UTC)