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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46698
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Of the three best selling book series for boys of an elemenatry/middle school age, all three were written by authors who syled their name thus: [first name initial][second name initial] [full surname] (J.K. Rowling, K.A. Applegate, and R.L. Stein, in order of most success to least). Of those three, only Stein was a man. Both J.K. Rowling and K.A. Applegate feared that their works would not be read by their target audience (young boys) if their given names were on the cover as at the time they were releasing their novels, market research showed boys avoided books by women. In addition, Applegate (who frequently used ghost writers) could be argued to have masked two people as her husband Michael Applegate (himself writing a series for adults at the time) jointly wrote Animorphs at the time and hid his involvement so kids wouldn't look in the adult section for more books by their favorite author (he was acknowledge in the dedication section of the book along with the Ghostwriter of the book if there was one and in later books, the Applegates' newborn son.).

Both the writer of Nancy Drew (Caroline Keen) and the Hardy Boys (Franklin W. Dixon) are psuedonyms of non-existant writers to hide that both series were created by multiple people at a publishing company and that all books are ghostwritten. Writers hired to write for the company are contracted to assume the pseudonym for the time.

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