Writing under a pseudonym

 

You know me as Claire Bell, but you won’t find my books by googling that name. In fact, you would find a number of authors and editors and have difficulty working out if any of them was me. 

I started using the pseudonymic surname ‘Belberg’ eight years ago in anticipation of being published. I set up my author email and started blogging to build an audience familiar with the name. I sent work out in that name if it was fiction or poetry suitable for mainstream audiences. I continued to use my everyday name for anything more personal or overtly Christian. I figured my secular audience would not appreciate getting a faceful of Christian language if they were hunting up some new mainstream work by me. (I realise some Christian writers would disagree with that decision, but that’s a different topic for discussion.) 

The other reason I chose to use a pen name was to add a small barrier to identity for the sake of my family. Since it’s pretty easy to work out the connection between the two names if anyone wanted to, that was probably a pointless line of reasoning. I would have had to work a lot harder to make it a real barrier. 

The name I chose was created to honour both my families – my birth family and the family I married into. I combined the two surnames after checking whether there were any other authors coming up on search engines with the name Belberg. Bingo! A unique name.

 The question I ask myself now: is it worth it? 

I like the name Belberg and its uniqueness. I don’t actually know if anyone has ever googled it but if they did, they would have found me on the first hit, either my blog or one of my novels. 

But promoting my work in the community that knows me gets a bit confusing. I find I have to keep telling people both names, or if they know me well enough, remind them that the book is under a pen name. It would be so much easier if they could just use the name they know. My Facebook identity is in my everyday name and I couldn’t face adding an author page and having another platform to keep up to date. Facebook, the blog and Goodreads are more than enough – and if you follow me on any of them, you’ll see how patchy my ‘keeping up’ is already!

Filling in forms associated with writing (e.g. lending rights, legal deposit, library distribution) can also be a little confusing. Do they want my author name or my legal name when they simply ask for name?

Having a pen name that is close to my everyday name encourages misspelling as one has a double ‘L’ and the other a single ‘L’. No one will be able to find me if they search the pen name with two Ls. Sigh. In fact, what comes up if you do search that is what a lot of people hear when I say ‘Belberg’ – bellbird. Pretty, but not me. It’s a pity when a piece of work is published under the misspelling, but that can happen with a legal name too. I once read dozens of comments to a Facebook post about this. In every English-speaking country, it seems, even simple names like Bell or Smith can get garbled. In my first transaction as a newly married woman giving my name to a salesperson, they spelled it as Belle. Having traded a commonly misspelled name for a simple one, I was flabbergasted and quite disappointed!

If I had a wide audience, I would probably be unequivocally content to use a pen name. For now it seems a bit of a nuisance and a mite pretentious. Maybe the day will come when it will pay off, when readers keenly search for more works by Claire Belberg and bypass all those Bells. Of course, if they're the readers of my devotionals or Christian poetry, they might still find it hard to pick me out of the crowd. I wonder if I should create another pseudonym for those…