My name is Anne Faye and I am happy to be a new contributing member to the Catholic Writers Guild Blog. I’ll be writing about Catholic fiction on the 1st Saturday of each month.

Today, we’ll explore whether or not one should use a pen name. This is a subject I know a little bit about as “Anne Faye” is a pseudonym. My alter-ego has been professionally writing Catholic non-fiction for over seven years.

Three years ago, I tried my hand at fiction for the first time since college. I took the plunge and wrote a novel during National Novel Writing Month. When I decided to self-publish Through the Open Window a year later, it made sense for me to use a pen name.

Why? It allowed me to step into this new venture with relatively little risk to my professional reputation. This was a whole new world for me. Would anyone like what I had written? Would it be reviewed as “the worse book ever?” I hoped not, but if it totally tanked, I wanted to be able to still show my face in the morning.

Thankfully, the book was well-received, awarded the Catholic Writers Guild Seal of Approval, and was even featured in serial form on CatholicMom.com. Yet, having a pen name let me take a chance on a project I might have otherwise passed on. I have a second novel in the editing phase and hope to publish it sometime in the coming year.

By the same token, if you are an established writer in one genre and you want to experiment in another, a pen name may prove helpful.

A pen name also allows you privacy. You can choose who you want to know about your “secret identity.”

What are the drawbacks? If, like me, both of your identities are writers, it means that you need to do double the marketing / social networking, etc. Also, you can’t capitalize on your current reputation. If you are going to keep your identity secret and therefore reap the benefits of having a pseudonym, you can’t publicly announce who you are to everyone on your Faceback page.

Do you use a pen name? What have you found to be the benefits and/or drawbacks of that practice?

I’ll look forward to blogging here again next month. In the meantime, please visit my blog at http://www.annefaye.blogspot.com/

Anne Faye writes from Western Massachusetts and is the author of The Rose Ring and Through the Open Window, and blogs at http://www.annefaye.blogspot.com/. You can follow her on Twitter at @AnneMFaye

Pen Name
By Uncategorized2 Comments on To Pen Name or Not to Pen Name

2 Replies to “To Pen Name or Not to Pen Name”

  1. Great post. I use a pen name, to protect my family's privacy. Also, I found it helps me to stay detached from both praise and criticism of my work. I also have all the same problems you mention in the post, Anne.

  2. I write under a pen name. I write about my dating life and find it is better to protect the privacy of those guilty parties. Under my given name I help small business owners with writing for their business.

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