Why do authors use a pseudonym?
Stephen King uses Richard Bachman in The Regulators for example. Someone told me that there is no Richard Bachman, it's just a name made up by King. What's the purpose of this? Especially if we all know that 'Richard Bachman' is actually King? And why would King write the foreward thing in the beginning of The Regulators talking about how Richard Bachman's wife found the manuscript for The Regulators in their attic? What is all this craziness?
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When Stephen King wrote The Regulators, it was fairly common practice for an author to only publish one book a year, because it was believed by publishers that readers wouldn't buy more than one book by the same author a year. So he wrote under a different penname to avoid that issue. When he first started using a penname, no one knew it was him until similarities were noticed in the styles of writing. After the truth was discovered, there was a bit of a joke that 'Richard Bachman' had died of 'cancer of the pseudonym', which led to the foreword.
Nowadays there are a lot of reasons why someone might use a penname. Authors who write in multiple genres sometimes have different names for each genre, to prevent readers from confusing the books. It could also be that a group of authors collaborating on a single book or a series might write under a single name. Or maybe they feel their name isn't 'sellable', so they came up with a more attractive or memorable name. Another reason could be their real name is too similar to somebody already very famous, so they had to change it to avoid confusion there. And a final reason that I can think of could be that the author might use the name of the lead character as their penname, so that it's written as a fictional autobiography.
Most authors who use them now do it as an affectation. They're the same childish authors who think that if they have the perfect name for a character, their book will sell. Most are teenagers who hated their name and thought the reason they weren't popular was their Mommy named them funny.
Others think that a pseudonym will sell better, although most such people are asshats who choose silly names. You find this in the romance genre or children's books. J.K. Rowling prats about how she disguised her gender, when the real reason she did it was to sound like J.R.R. Tolkien. C.L Moore and Andre Norton were forced to hide their gender, Rowling just used it as a marketing tool.
A few use them because they have a professional reputation. I know a professor of history who writes bodice rippers under a pseudonym and she gets laughed at by every new class of undergrads for doing it.
Last, a lot of the old pulp writers did this because magazines would only buy one story from a particular author per issue. In the same way, many authors had a different name for each genre they sold, as if they were a brand name. They used one name for horror fiction, another for scifi, and a third for confessionals. They didn't want the audience confused as to the product they were buying. This need has pretty much died off these days, in part because the magazines are long gone, as the short fiction market. About the only time you see this sort of thing these days is a few children's authors, who write borderline porn as well.
Look at King. He did this for a handful of books, mostly because they were outside his normal brand and because he was so coked up he was dumping several books a year on the market. Even then, he "revealed" his pseudonym, because the books being sold under it simply didn't sell the way his prime "brand" did.
There are many reasons for using a pseudonym. One if you switch genres you don't want someone picking up that book thinking it is the genre you switched from , that will cost you fans. Another and older one is that the market can only handle one book at a time for a name author and the pseudonym is an attempt to promote one of your books over another.
There are fewer reasons to do it today than there used to be. For writers who pumped out many novels a year, traditional publishers wouldn't accept that rate, as they seemed to think the public perception was that writing should take longer and quick novels under one name would not sell as well, so the only way to sell everything was to publish under several different names. The perception is beginning to shift to one where readers want the next novel by their favorite authors as fast as they can come out, so the reasons for a pseudonym are left to things like genre, where a thriller writer who also writes romance wants different names for those to maintain what readers expect to see from a given author name.
There are a lot of reasons. The one I heard specifically about King is that he wanted to prove to himself that people were reading his books and reviewing them because they were good, not because they had a big STEPHEN KING written on the front of them. People do tend to buy by author name when they've come to trust the author.
The forward? Well, it's another mask and a distancing device. You've got this guy, who is writing as Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman, pretending to have a wife who found this stuff written by someone else. Believe it or not, you write differently when you are pretending to be someone else. Sometimes you write much differently.
I suspect he was sick of being Stephen King, and had to go through all of this to get this story out.
There is another reason for using pen names, especially if you write horror or dark fantasy. There are a few fans who are mentally unbalanced, and believe the book is non-fiction, not fiction. And they can make the writer's life a nightmare. So, it's nice to have a life. I've talked with one writer who had a stalker. She said she can't put pictures of her house up on the internet, and has to keep her address a top secret. So, that sort of thing is a good reason for using a pen name.
There are fewer reasons to do it today than there used to be. For writers who pumped out many novels a year, traditional publishers wouldn't accept that rate, as they seemed to think the public perception was that writing should take longer and quick novels under one name would not sell as well, so the only way to sell everything was to publish under several different names. The perception is beginning to shift to one where readers want the next novel by their favorite authors as fast as they can come out, so the reasons for a pseudonym are left to things like genre, where a thriller writer who also writes romance wants different names for those to maintain what readers expect to see from a given author name.
For many reasons, they prefer to be anonymous so they won't be pestered by celeb chasers if they become a Well known famous author.
I think it just adds effect to the story. Makes it sound cooler. Sort of like Cressida Cowell in her How to Train Your Dragon series, stating that the books were originally written by Hiccup (the main character) and then she translated them into English.
I think mainly just to make it cooler and add more life to the book.
Eric Blair apparently chose "George Orwell" because it gave him the prime eye level shelf space as per the system used by UK bookshops at the time! Another heavyweight writer who used a pen name was Kimitake Hiraoka AKA Yukio Mishima. I think in his case he started out using a pen name because he still had a "day job" as a civil servant. Ergo-different writers, different reasons...
To see if the books will still sale with out their name on it. Then there Ben Mezrich who has a tough time getting a True Story right!