Call Me By My Name

Before you publish your book, you must consider everything very carefully: your book title, your genre, even your name. Remember the agent I had for my first novel? She told me I should use a different last name because mine was hard to pronounce.

That was the start of how my last name became a thing for me. Over the years, I have contemplated using a pen name. Catanzarite is not easy, though it’s spoken exactly as it is spelled, Ca-tan-za-rite, like the semiprecious stone Tanzanite. People see its length and the Z stuck in the middle, and a jolt of fear travels through their brain. Early in my marriage, I realized that this long Italian name might cause some trouble. As I set up our first apartment and spelled the name for the electric company, water utility, and so on, I started to wish for something short and sweet like Smith.

For a little while, I used the pen name Kim Benedict. Benedict is my father’s name, and I like how it sounds as a last name. I submitted a few stories to literary magazines using Kim Benedict, and two of them were accepted.

Soon after that, a woman in my local writer’s group asked me why I was using a pen name, and when I told her Catanzarite was just too difficult, she said taking a pen name was going to cause more confusion than it was worth. “If you get a book published, no one will know it’s you,” she pointed out. “And, besides, I like your name. It’s memorable.”

I stopped using the pen name after that: I like my name too, and I wanted to be known as me, not someone else.

Times have changed, and the names of the authors who are being published today have become more worldly. There are plenty of interesting, hard-to-pronounce first and last names on the shelves. Unique names. Some of them from faraway lands. And those writers are doing just fine, even if people do stumble over the syllables a bit. Besides, as a self-publisher, I’ll be selling e-books on the internet, so I don’t need salespeople to be able to pronounce my name while they try to convince bookstores to put my novel on their shelves. I’m an independent author, and digital sales are more important to me because of that.

Have you thought about your name and how it will look on the cover of your book? Have you considered using a pen name because you worry your real name is too long, or hard to say, or maybe too plain? If you’re determined to create a pen name for whatever reason, consider the following:

Your genre. Study the books in your genre and create accordingly. Crime novels, for example, are often written by people who use initials in place of a first name. Fantasy writers sometimes follow J.R.R. Tolkien’s lead and use multiple initials. Anything goes for writers of literary fiction. Let the genre act as a guide, but of course there are always exceptions to the rule.

Availability. You’ll need to research the name you choose to make sure another writer doesn’t already use it.

Domain. Your pen name will also be your website domain name, so check to see if it’s available as well.

This is one of those hard decisions that has to be made early on, one only you can make. You’re the self-publisher, so whatever you say goes. Make sure it’s a choice you can stick with.

Please feel free to share this post with your friends and followers: www.authorkimcatanzarite.com/blog/call-me-by-my-name-11-2020.

My next blog post will discuss genre and why it’s so important to label your book properly.