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I would not assume that the reason for using a pen name is the desire for anonymity. Sometimes it is about marketing. If your name is Rock Hardplace and you write sweet romances, you probably wan...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29425 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29425 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I would not assume that the reason for using a pen name is the desire for anonymity. Sometimes it is about marketing. If your name is Rock Hardplace and you write sweet romances, you probably want to use a pen name. Sometimes it is about disambiguation. If your name is Jonathan Kieth Rowling, you probably want to use a pen name. Sometimes it is about dividing your professional career from your fiction writing. If you are published in an obscure technical field, you may not want your technical books and your fiction jumbled together in people's Amazon search results, so you use a pen name for your fiction. None of these imply a desire for anonymity. On the other hand, an author who is using their real name may not want their picture shown on their book, for all sorts of reasons. In short, don't assume one data point from another imperfectly correlated data point. Collect the two data points separately.