Greeting and salutations. It is I, Greyson.

I’m writing this because it’s tradition. It’s an agreement. I put out a new blog post the first of each month. I’ve been fighting tooth and nail just to stay afloat, but here I am.

When Anne Rice wanted to try her hand at erotica, she used the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure. Stephen King tried writing under the pen name Richard Bachman. When “she who shall not be named” tried to write a murder mystery, she used the nom de plume of Robert Galbraith. The point is, authors often use alternate names. I mean, even I write under a pen name, since my own legal name is taken.

Clevenger and I discussed this at great length. When we first started, we were looking at using a pen name for our combined co-written work, then using our individual names for solo books. In the end, we decided not to, as we would not be able to cross-promote our writing. We would end up with three different “debut” novels: My first solo, his first, and then our first joint book. We decide it would be best to write all of it under the same names.

I find myself running into the same issue with my solo writings, if for a slightly different reason. The authors I mentioned above all had different reasons for using alternate names. Anne Rice wanted to keep her naughty books away from her naughty Vampires. King wanted to see what would happen to his sales if they were separated from his name. And “Robert”? I have a funny feeling she wanted to get away from a reputation she was just starting to build. I hear about other Indie authors taking the “Roquelaure” route, especially when the cross genres between, say, spicy romance and children’s books.

My books are all over the place in terms of genre. Hell, even as to target audience. Initial drafts that are complete include epic fantasy, contemporary lit fic, and gothic horror urban fantasy. Add in my WIPs and I’m delving into dark fantasy, and dark romantasy. I have target audiences of general adult, YA, explicit 18+, and middlegrade children. What does this mean for my promotions and the name(s) I write under?

I’ve talked about this with Clevenger, both as friends, as co-authors, and as fellow LLC business officers. What I write is going to either get ignored or banned. I write gay stuff, and my characters do gay stuff. I cuss, and my characters cuss. LGBT+ representation is not just sprinkled, but dumped, into everything I’ve written. Even in the middlegrade fantasy where there is no sex, the 12 year old MC still mentions having “two uncles”, and at one point he gets nervous because in his head, he decides a new male friend is “kind of cute”. The 15 year old protag of the horror YA is a teen, intended for teens. He loses his virginity in an off-page, closed door scene. But it is discussed in a conversation later, because teens need to discuss these things in the right way, at the right time. And this goes all the way up to problematic dark romance.

The point is, I’ve debated using a different pen name for either the hard raunch, or for the kiddie books. But in all seriousness, considering it will be me and Clevenger promoting all of them, publishing all of them, and selling all of them at the same Con booth, what’s the point? People are going to see all these books sitting next to one another at our C2E2 booth year after year. They are all going to be pushed on the same Threads account, and listed for sale here on our website. I will do what I wish so many others would do, and leave it to parents to keep track of what their kids are reading. Meanwhile, the middlegrade book won’t be cross-promoted with the dark romance, and the erotica won’t have ads in the back for my YA series.

Hopefully this is enough for people. Don’t forget to love one another.

Greyson Black.