This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
When I started to build my author profile and self-published my first book
it started off slowly and over time things grew. Yet now I’m starting all over again
with a new pseudonym. A whole new author profile to build, and a new fan base to
(hopefully) build.
As most of you are probably now aware, after getting my publishing deal a few weeks ago, I’m going to be published traditionally under Anna Bell. But, I’m also going to continue to self-publish books, in particular my ‘Millie and the American’ series under the pseudonym Annabel Scott.
In the last year I’ve been realising just how many authors write under different names. Sometimes they’re a closely guarded secret – like, ahem, Robert Galbraith, or Scarlett Bailey who it was announced last year was in fact Rowan Coleman. Whilst others are very out in the open – Madeline Wickham books proudly state that they’re written by Sophie Kinsella. So it’s not like this is unheard of in the publishing world.
But now staring at the two names I’m finding it all a bit daunting. Just who is Annabel Scott? What’s she like? Is she like me? What will we she tweet about? Her fiction has a slightly younger target audience – almost fitting the new genre description of ‘new adult’. Does that mean that she needs to appeal to a younger audience in her blogs and tweets? Not that it should be too hard as I still think that I’m in my early twenties, despite being early thirties.
Not to mention it’s so hard going back to having a number of twitter followers that I can count on my fingers and toes! At the moment with only a few people who follow my tweets I’m having quite a lot of one-way conversations! If anyone wants to follow her – she’s @writerannabel.
Talking to myself aside, I’ve also got the little thing of self-publishing a book. The first Annabel Scott book launch is today with ‘Millie and the American University’ – a prequel to ‘Millie and the American Wedding’. I’m much more nervous launching this book than I have been with any of my others. I’ve sold over 30,000 copies of the first Millie, and yet with a brand new name, I’m worried that those readers might not find this one. What if Annabel Scott’s books fail to gain momentum and end up spiraling out to the upper echelons of the Amazon chart?
I’ve been asked a few times by fellow indie authors about what I did to get the first Millie book riding high in the charts (it spent about a year in the top 10 humour charts on Kindle) and I’ve had to tell them honestly that I don’t know. Yes, I blog. I send out review copies to reviewers, but that’s about it. I don’t do launch parties and I don’t tweet links to my books other than around my launch day. If there is a secret to being successful – then I don’t know what it is! Which makes it even more daunting and scary that this might fail.
Do any of you write under different pseudonyms? Do your pseudonyms take on different personalities? How do you cope being different people?