Decisions, Decisions

[wyld_dandelyon]

So, right now I'm told Bandcamp is the way to go, for self-publishing music. And I now am developing the skills to record myself, so I went to look at setting up an account, which I was told is totally simple.

And the first page, almost the first line, asked for my band name.

And I stopped and stared at that. I'd always figured I'd go with my name if I managed to do a solo album, but lately I've been following the rising career of a musician named Deirdre Murphy in Ireland. And you know, that would probably be OK, she's going for a much more mainstream music career than I'd be planning, but for some things, disambiguation is a good thing.

And it also occurs to me that I've been using the name Wyld Dandelyon for a very long time now, and that it wouldn't make a bad band name, especially for a filker (since filkers use the dandelion as our symbol). Never mind that I didn't create it to be a band name.

Well, I don't have to decide today.

People's thoughts, opinions, relevant experience, and ideas about what I should keep in mind as I decide, are all welcome at this point.

Comments

[tigertoy]

Just speaking for myself, hopefully not offensively -- "Wyld Dandelyon" as a band name feels unusual in an intriguing way, but "Wyld Dandelyon" as a writer feels too weird, a little off-putting. I'm trying to explain to myself why it feels that way and not getting very far. Maybe it's that I'm expecting band names to be made up, but except for furry writers, the name on the cover is supposed to be the writer's real name. If I met a total stranger in real life and their nametag said "Wyld Dandelyon" that would kick me out of my comfort zone.

[wyld_dandelyon]

Yes, exactly!

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.