Tag: anonymous authors

Pen Names—Necessary Evil or Ticket to Crazyville?

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

[As someone who technically uses two pen names for one book, I bought my tickets to Crazyville a long-ass time ago. In fact, I’m probably the mayor of it. But I also had hopes that pinning the extra word “Anonymous” to the cover would let the readership automatically know what craziness they dealt with. For this series, the contrived anonymity of it all is half the fun. — The Author, from Crazyville].

Author Kristen Lamb's avatarKristen Lamb's Blog

Image via Flickr Creative Commons courtesy of gaelx Image via Flickr Creative Commons courtesy of gaelx

Today we are going to talk about a somewhat touchy subject. The pen name. Before anyone gets in a fluff, understand two things. First, I’m on your side. Secondly, this is only a decision you can make. My goal here is to make sure you guys are making educated business decisions. Thus, I won’t stop anyone from having a pen name, but about 95% of the time? It’s unnecessary.

In my opinion? Pen names are more hassle than they are worth and they’re a fast way to land in Crazyville. Pen names used to offer benefits, but most of those benefits have evaporated because the world is digital and connected. In fact, pen names can actually hurt book sales and stall a platform and brand.

Let’s look at some of the advantages pen names used to offer that no longer exist.

I…

View original post 2,283 more words

Today’s Featured Authors: B.L.A. and G.B. Gabbler

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

Today’s Featured Authors: B.L.A. and G.B. Gabbler.

An excerpt from THE AUTOMATION can be found on Susan Leigh Noble’s Blog today. Click the link to read!

On Authors and Anonymity:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

Ms. Ferrante has always said she wants readers to focus on her work, not on her. “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books are signed,” she wrote. “Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage.”

Read the rest here.

[Can we start a club called Authors Anonymous? Would totally be Vice President.]

OMEGAVenusMiloPrint3

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

Woolf: “The attempt to conciliate, or more naturally to outrage, public opinion is equally a waste of energy and sin against art.”

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

“Even so late as the mid-Victorian days George Eliot was accused of ‘coarseness and immorality’ in her attempt ‘to familiarize the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence.’

The effect of those repressions is still clearly to be traced in women’s work, and the effect is wholly to the bad. The problem of art is sufficiently difficult in itself without having to respect the ignorance of young women’s minds or to consider whether the public will think that the standard of moral purity displayed in your work is such as they have a right to expect from your sex. The attempt to conciliate, or more naturally to outrage, public opinion is equally a waste of energy and sin against art. It may have been not only with a view to obtaining impartial criticism that George Eliot and Miss Brontë adopted male pseudonyms but in order to free their own consciousness as they wrote from the tyranny of what was expected from their sex. No more than men, however, could they free themselves from a more fundamental tyranny – the tyranny of sex itself. The effort to free themselves, or rather to enjoy what appears, perhaps erroneously, to be the comparative freedom of the male sex from that tyranny, is another influence which has told disastrously upon the writing of women.”

-Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]