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Question from Samantha Johnson
Book Title The Beginner’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening
How do you stand out when your name fits in? When your name is something super-common, it’s next to impossible to find unique domain addresses, and Google Alerts are ineffective because there are so many other people out there with the same name. 🙂 And then there’s the Goodreads issue, when other authors with the same name have books that end up in your list (and sometimes they are NOT books you want to have associated with your name–ugh!). My brother and I have co-authored several non-fiction books and we’d love to hear some marketing tips for people with names like Johnson.
Thanks for asking this question. As part of my role with Author Media I end up naming a lot of authors.
Talking Points:
- Become the Most Famous Person for your name
- Aggressive SEO
- Lots of Blogging
- Lots of Magazine articles
- Pay for PR that sort of thing.
- Pivot to a Unique Name You Don’t Have to Fight Over
- Hollywood Method: Change Your Entire Name
- Marilyn Monroe Used to be Norma Mortenson
- Whoopi Goldberg was born Caryn Johnson
- John Wayne was born Marion Morrison
- Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach
- Change Your Last Name
- Natalie Portman was born Natalie Hershlag
- Author Ben Wolf Used to be Ben Erlichman
- Nicolas Cage Used to be Nicolas Coppola
- Switch to a Nickname
- Carlos Ray Norris became Chuck Norris
- Swap in Your Middle Name
- Walter Bruce Willis Swapped in His Middle Name to become Bruce Willis
- Add a middle name
- Edgar Allan Poe
- James Scott Bell
- Orson Scott Card
- Turn your first names into initials
- C.S. Lewis,
- J.R.R. Tolkien,
- J.K. Rowling,
- Add a Suffix (Not Generally Recommended)
- Thomas Umstattd Jr. (I’ve worked a deal with my dad that he goes by Tom G. Umstattd)
- Add a middle initial (Not Recommended)
- James L. Rubart (People tend to leave out the middle initial)
- Pick a Pen Name (Not Recommended)
- This used to work before the days of social media. Now it just causes confusion and keeps you from personally promoting your book in the most effective ways.
- Hollywood Method: Change Your Entire Name
- GoodReads
- Suggest a Change by clicking “edit details” most sites have a fix this method.
Links:
Sponsor:
MyBookTable – Do you ever wish you had a robot to promote your book for you while you slept? Well the folks over at Author Media built one and it is called MyBookTable and it helps boost your book sales without you have to lift a finder. Find out more at MyBookTable.com
I’d like to leave a comment about pen names. I’m an editor for an independent publisher. We represent several hundred romance authors, most of whom write with a pen name. We haven’t had a major problem with pen names and social media, although Facebook can make it challenging.
We do not like pen names that use initials, or a middle name. Pen names with initials is more common in Science Fiction, but it’s just not popular in romance. Nora Roberts writes as J.D. Robb when she writes mystery/suspense, but she uses the softer, more feminine “Nora” with romance. Another problem with initials is that there are so many variations. JRR Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J. R. R. Tolkien would be three different people at Amazon – so for a beginning author, it can cut their sales rank by as much as a half. If someone does use initials in their pen name, they must be diligent to write it exactly the same way every time! (With dots, or with spaces, or with both dots and spaces.)
The problem with three pen names (using a middle name) is that the book covers on Amazon are just so small. The longer your name, the smaller it has to appear on the cover. If you have three names, that leaves very little room for any cover art. So we tend to promote shorter names for our authors. Nora Roberts is better then Lennore Robertson (a made-up name, not the author’s real name.)
A newer trend- at least in romance – is to spell out initials! So J. L. Thorne becomes Jayelle Thorne. A.C. Masterson becomes Acey Masterson. This has the dual advantage of being easily recognizable by Amazon, and being unique.
I hope this helps inspire your followers!