Episode 24 – To Pen Name or Not To Pen Name

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We talk geography and that Dave will soon be moving to a much better place in the US.

Alan talks about research and the beauty of not needing any with pure speculative fiction.

Here’s the link to the Joanna Penn interview Dave mentioned that he did.

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2011/08/10/writing-thrillers-david-wood/

We talk about The Game anthology, which is out now.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Game-ebook/dp/B005F9YFHU/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

And here’s the cool cover:

We go on to discuss the use (or not) of a pen name. Dave writes in multiple genres and is wondering whether he should keep his fantasy name, David Debord, along with his thrillers under his real name, David Wood.

We also discuss the nature of author branding and how much it can help or hinder an author’s career.

We discuss the nature of book stores and libraries and their need to have books in the right place, which is not an issue now with online stores.

This leads to a discussion of book covers making genre and style clear.

We discuss how sometimes publishers insist on an author changing their name to avoid sales downturns with new books from midlisters.

This leads us to talk about new publishing options which might allow unclassifiable books to be published where they might never have been published before.