Death of a (pen)Name

To sum up: the whole “market to a specific niche using a specific brand” never worked well for me.

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

---

I've made a big change recently about my “author brand.” It’s been a long time coming, and doing so in a round about way, but the tl;dr of it is: KimBoo York.

Way back in 2010, when I got my first book contract from my original publisher, I was still in graduate school. The plan was not a good one, but the goal never changed: get my master’s, then get a real grown-up job with an office and business cards and benefits so that I could write on the side.

(Isn’t it funny that throughout all the years of my life, “the plan” has always been “do [something] to make money so I can write stories on the side”? Yeah, hilarious.)

I was already having my doubts about how successful I was going to be at that, even during my first semester of grad school. However, I have a long history of ignoring my instincts and doing what other people tell me is the right thing to do, predictably going back to my youth as a people pleasing, or specifically mother pleasing, child.

So, I ignored all my doubts and buckled down to make good grades. (Side note: absolutely nobody cares about what grades you make when you're in graduate school, unless you're going for a doctorate, which FYI I totally was not planning to. Old type A habits die hard.)

I'd written a novel on the encouragement of some friends of mine in fandom, a gay male romance which was about 80,000 words long. While I was familiar with self publishing, and had even self-published my own memoir, Grieving Futures, I was still caught up with the idea of being a “real author” published by a “real publisher.” Anyway, I really did not have the time to invest in all the various chores that even today self publishing requires.

Instead, I picked a pen name to use with my publisher and forged ahead.

There are multiple reasons why I did this, including the desire to have a brand tied to a specific niche and the fact that once I graduated (if not before) I would be on the hunt for legitimate job in an academic (read: moribund, traditional) environment. I figured that at some point in the next couple of years having a romance novel that was queer and included explicit sex scenes would be frowned upon by anybody who might stumble across it via social media or a reference letting it slip. My career as a romance author needed to stay a secret.

You might think that sounds ridiculous and overly cautious, but I know of at least two people who had jobs in higher education who encountered a lot of difficulty when it came out that they were romance authors. It did not go as badly for them as people who were secondary education teachers, who generally lost their jobs immediately, but bad enough.

I figured keeping my identity on the down low, as well as focusing on a specific brand within a specific niche, was the way to go. I mean, everyone who knew anything about the publishing world at that time agreed with me. It was (and is) standard advice.

The pen name I used, Cooper West, was an homage to my great grandmother's maiden name, Cooper, and Mae West (for obvious reasons). I still like it as a name, honestly.

Alas, the whole “marketing to a specific niche using a specific brand” never worked well for me. There are a lot of reasons for that, and perhaps I could have tried harder than I did to be successful at it, but between trying to finish graduate school while suffering from whooping cough and then being on the job hunt while suffering through the long-term recovery from whooping cough threw me off from the very beginning. In desperation and out of sheer exhaustion, I shelved my author career “temporarily” to focus on graduating and job hunting, just as I finished up my next novel for my publisher.

I’d get back to it, I thought.

Someday.

I finally got a brand new shiny professional job with the office and the business cards and the benefits, but I did not even really want it because it was in the wrong field. I got the job by default (another long story) and while I needed it financially, I knew taking that job would result in a career shift I had not planned on and did not want.

As you can tell, everything was going exactly to plan while also going off the rails.

(I think Exactly to Plan, Off the Rails will be the title of my biography tbh)

Then in the midst of all that, I got the first four figure check for my second book, The Protector.

I was super excited about it, but also super conflicted. I was making more in a couple of months off of that one book than I was making at my mid-level salaried position in higher education. Had I made the wrong choice to prioritize the job over my author career?

Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, so who is to say? Me. I am “who is to say” and I say that I did make the wrong choice, and I’ve been angry at myself about it for ten years.

Meanwhile…that was then, this is now.

Specifically, this is 2023, thirteen years after the creation of that pen name. So, so much has changed in my life and in the publishing industry. I am back to taking a hard look at the kind of life I want to live and the kind of career I want to have as an author, outside of what everybody tells me how I should do it.

The advice for pen names hasn't really changed, and if you have a very specific niche, it's not a bad idea to have a pen name for it. It helps make for easy branding and marketing, and for writers who always write in, for instance, dark billionaire heterosexual romance, it was and is a very efficient and effective approach.

But that's not me.

Which brings me around to the question: what is me?

It's a funny question, because what is me can be so many different things…that's my whole problem as an author, in fact. Or I should say, it has been my whole problem with my branding and marketing as an author.

I've always known that I wanted to write across multiple genres — even in my gay romance “niche” I wrote all over the board, including contemporary and supernatural. Then there is my MMF polyamorous romance epic, Wolves of Harmony Heights, which is a veritable feast of genres: paranormal, urban fantasy, werewolf shifter, MMF romance, and mystery thriller.

You can see how good I am at niching down, can't you?

I also love writing about technology and the history of text technology (the history of the book) and holistic productivity and also personal memoir-style essays. I have been told over and over and over again that being so broad of topics and genres is no way to make a career as an author!!!

To be fair, that has been very true for a very long time. People who cross genres and categories are the exceptions to the rule. They exist, but we know about them because they are always pointed out as “that author who does more than one thing.” Even then, it's often the case that those authors didn't really start branching out to write in other genres or categories until they had already established themselves as successful and respected authors in a specific genre.

But it's a brave new world, isn't it?

At least, I think it is, and that is what all this yammering and going on about niches and pen names has led to: I'm taking back my identity.

I am not erasing the pen name Cooper West, but I am folding it under my name.

Advances in technology and the opportunity of social platforms like Ream and Substack make this possible, but a big part of it for me is proving to be about the mindset shift.

Interestingly, this was helped a lot when I took the Author Ecosystem test.

Now, this personality test might not work for everybody, but for me, the result it gave me was something that shook the very foundations of my perceptions of self as author.

It identified me as the forest archetype, which to put it simply means that I am a writer who needs to build a community around my writing by putting as much of myself into my stories as possible, no matter the genre or category. I prefer writing about a wide variety of topics and in a wide variety of genres, so trying to niche down works against my talents and skill sets because when I do try I end up watering down my voice in order to “fit the niche.”

I am a writer who attracts readers to me and my writing style. As explained on the forest archetype page: “When they focus on their superpower of building interconnectivity between all their work and finding people who grok their own slant on the world, they thrive.”

That is to say, creating a marketing plan that doesn't include me as a person and my unique voice as a storyteller, will end up being counterproductive.

So that's the last ten years of my marketing failures explained in one sentence!

Moreso, it made me realize that after thirteen years of trying to do the one thing over and over it is time for me to acknowledge and accept the fact that the plan was never going to work for me. The definition of insanity is…yada yada, yada.

When I landed in the Subscriptions for Authors Facebook group, and specifically, when I decided to launch a Ream account for my fiction, I had not had this realization yet about my branding and identity. It was months and months away.

At the time, I set up my Ream page with the idea of having different tiers (membership levels) based on my pen names. (At this point, I have three. Why do I have three? Another story for another time, but reference “the definition of insanity is…yada yada, yada.”)

But it never felt right, even when I bundled them under my shiny new House of York imprint, which is the publishing arm of my company, York Enterprises. (Yes, it's all about me. I'm a Leo. I have delusions of grandeur, don’t @ me, etc. etc.)

Did I really want to maintain three pen names, plus my own actual name, and all the extra work that entails? To what end? If I could not “put a ring on it” then what was the point of constraining myself to small niches?

I've been reading posts on Facebook from a lot of other authors who are having similar dilemmas as they set up their own subscription platforms, on Ream or Patreon. Some of them have decided to keep with their pen names, and just set up different accounts for those pen names. As I pointed out earlier, it's a really good decision for a lot of authors who are specializing in specific niches.

Can't be me.

I realized that the question became one of either keeping the pen names or folding everything under my actual name.

It was an important decision that I held onto for weeks before I even mentioned it to my friend,

Gina Hogan Edwards

, who has been on this journey with me in creating our own subscription platforms. By that point, I was leaning toward a course of action, but I value her input and if she told me I was going in the wrong direction, I would have reconsidered my options far more carefully.

She agreed with me: I’m not good at niching down, and if I could be good at it, I would have done it already. She also pointed out that my superpower really is my ability to build interconnectivity, not just in my work but across genres and audiences.

For better or for worse, I’m a “forest” author and I need to focus on my strengths instead of fighting my instincts so much.

Yesterday I changed my tiers on Ream so that they are not based on my old pen names anymore. I am going to focus on folding everything under my name, or at least the “House of York” imprint idea, which is more a shout out to my parents than anything else. Nonetheless, I’ll be slapping my name over all my work from here on out. Hiding never did me a bit of good, to be honest.

It's a big change, y'all, and a little scary. But I think it’s time.

---