As for how I chose Tate Hallaway, it’s kind of a funny story. Originally, I thought it would be cool to be named after two museums, so I picked the Tate (London) and the Walker (in Minneapolis, MN) = Tate Walker. My publisher liked the sound of it, but thought the W would fall too far down on the shelf. Plus, they wanted readers to find me next to other vampire/romance/paranormal writers like Harris, Harrison, Hamilton, etc., so they wanted me to pick an “Ha” surname. I opened the St. Paul phone book found “Halloway,” but when I searched “Tate Halloway” I got a million hits — I changed the “o” to an “a” and got zero.

Thus Tate Hallaway (all “a”s) was born.

Lawrence Watt-Evans has written under various pseudonyms for decades. He’s currently using the Watt-Evans name for fantasy while publishing sci-fi under a different name.

A friend of mine is currently considering taking a pseudonym after lackluster sales of his first two books–his editor & publisher are still behind him, and want to publish his next series, but there’s a consensus that for whatever reason, his initial launch didn’t go well. Rather than carry the burden of low sales figures which will make it hard to generate orders for a new book, they’re considering relaunching him with a new identity.

Pseudonyms became common in the romance world for two reasons–first the two major category houses (Harlequin and Silhouette) used to require authors to write under a pseudonym which the company owned the rights to. When the author left the house, that name could be assigned to another author to write under. That clause was gradually phased out in the 1990s, and some authors fought and won the ability to take their pseudonyms with them to other publishers.

The second reason, as you mentioned, was related to the different genres of romance, using different names to manage reader expectations. Highly prolific authors were also encouraged to use pseudonyms, since there was a perception that having too many books published in a single year would be taken as a sign of hack-writing and turn readers off.

So far I’m still Patricia Bray. I was prepared to take a pseudonym when I made the move from Regency romances to epic fantasy, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary (the genre shift was so extreme it was as if I was an entirely different Patricia Bray). But if the day comes when I need to take a pseudonym, I have mine all picked out already

Diana — Marie is my middle name, and Brennan I put together out of my first and last name, Bryn + N.

By the way, Lyda, I’m really curious as to how you chose Tate Holloway, which is a terrifically cool pseudonym. And Bryn, well, I like Marie Brennan too–how did you arrive at that one? But I like Bryn a lot too, tough I bet I’d butcher the heck out of your last name.

It’s such an easy mistake to make, actually, that I’ve made sure to embed “Lydia Morehouse” in the keyword metadata of my web pages so that Google and other search engines will still find me, even though the name is misspelled.

I”ve kind of got used to being Alma Alexander now. if I ever had to change THAT, I’d be upset…

Many people know that Megan Lindholm is Robin Hobb, but for the most part SF/F writers tend to write under some version of their given name. Is that just my perception or is it true?

I could be mistaken but doesn’t Dawn Cook write under the more well-known pseudonym of Kim Harrison?

I was still depressed for months, however. I was really lucky to have a chance to re-invent myself. I will be forever grateful to the editor who took a chance on me, despite my apparent suckiness.