I've even read in submission guidelines that editors don't want a pseudomyn that doesn't look, to them, like a person's name. Not finding stuff like that on fiction, as a rule, is no accident. There are lots of reasons writers use pseudonyms, for branding reasons (like Seanan's Mira Grant) or if someone thinks their day job reputation would be damaged if their science fiction or romance books were published under their real name. There was also a time when if an author's sales on the most recent book were bad, the publishing industry insisted on them using a new pseudonym under the belief that a "new" author might sell more books than the the same book would sell under the "old" author name. (I am dubious that that belief was well founded; I think it was based in an algorithm about how many books each bookstore should receive, and you couldn't sell a lot of books if the bookstores didn't receive copies to sell.)
I'm pretty sure Wyld Dandelyon is a little wild for a Pagan author too, not that I'm currently writing books for that market.
But, as you note here, bands thrive on weird names.
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Date: 2022-04-11 06:51 pm (UTC)I've even read in submission guidelines that editors don't want a pseudomyn that doesn't look, to them, like a person's name. Not finding stuff like that on fiction, as a rule, is no accident. There are lots of reasons writers use pseudonyms, for branding reasons (like Seanan's Mira Grant) or if someone thinks their day job reputation would be damaged if their science fiction or romance books were published under their real name. There was also a time when if an author's sales on the most recent book were bad, the publishing industry insisted on them using a new pseudonym under the belief that a "new" author might sell more books than the the same book would sell under the "old" author name. (I am dubious that that belief was well founded; I think it was based in an algorithm about how many books each bookstore should receive, and you couldn't sell a lot of books if the bookstores didn't receive copies to sell.)
I'm pretty sure Wyld Dandelyon is a little wild for a Pagan author too, not that I'm currently writing books for that market.
But, as you note here, bands thrive on weird names.