Pen Name Generator

What the pen name generator does

You are writing something and you do not want your own name on it. Or you want a better one. Or you have a second genre and the first one will not let you in.

This gives you pen names. Pull a batch and see which one you can imagine on a cover.

Before you do, there is a number worth knowing. It is from 2015, it is about the exact thing you are doing right now, and it is worse than you think.

How to use it

Ask for plenty, since you are hunting rather than picking. Tap Generate for a new set, then Copy to take them somewhere you can say them aloud.

The same book, eight and a half times better

In 2015 a writer called Catherine Nichols had a novel and no luck. She sent her cover letter and her opening pages to fifty literary agents.

Two of them asked to read the book.

Two, out of fifty. Which is the sort of number that makes a person stop writing, and it very nearly did.

So she made an email address, and she invented a man. She called him George. And she sent out the same cover letter and the same opening pages, unchanged, not a word touched, to fifty agents.

Within a day George had five replies. Three wanted the manuscript. It was a Saturday.

By the end, George had been asked for the book seventeen times out of fifty.

Nichols wrote it up for Jezebel, and her own summary of the arithmetic is the best sentence anybody has written about pen names: he is eight and a half times better than her at writing the same book.

And then there is the detail that is somehow worse than the numbers.

She overlapped a few, sending the same pages to the same agent as both people. One agent sent Catherine a form rejection. That same agent asked to read George's book, and then asked if he could pass it up to a more senior colleague.

Even the rejections changed. George got warm ones. Thoughtful ones. Generous critiques from people who had bothered.

And the vocabulary flipped completely. Catherine's writing was lyrical. Her characters were feisty. George's writing was clever, and well-constructed, and exciting.

Same book. Same sentences. Same characters. Different name at the top.

Her line about it is the one that stays with you: the novel was not the problem. She was.

So that is what a name is. It is not a label on the work. It is a filter that runs before anybody reads a word, and it decides what they are going to see when they do.

The letter that made Charlotte Brontë disappear

This is not new, obviously. It is just that we usually tell the old version as though it were a costume drama.

In 1837 a twenty year old sent some of her poetry to Robert Southey, who was the Poet Laureate, hoping for an opinion.

He gave her one. Literature, he told her, cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.

The twenty year old was Charlotte Brontë.

Read the sentence again, because there are two arguments crammed into it and the second one is the nasty one. Cannot, and ought not. It is not merely that she will not be allowed. It is that she should not want to be.

She did not stop. She published as Currer Bell.

Emily became Ellis Bell. Anne became Acton Bell. Three sisters, one invented surname, and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall arrived in the world with nobody's real name on them.

And here is what makes it sting rather than just being history. The reason has changed and the behaviour has not.

In 1837 a woman hid her name because women were not supposed to be writing novels at all. Now nobody says that. Now a woman's name vanishes because of what an industry assumes her book will be like before it is opened, which is precisely what happened to Catherine Nichols on a Saturday in 2015, and precisely what happened when a publisher looked at Joanne Rowling's manuscript and worried that boys would not read a book by a woman.

She had no middle name. So they borrowed a letter off her grandmother Kathleen, and Joanne became J.K.

One hundred and sixty years between Southey's letter and that decision. The stated reason is completely different. The instruction is identical: take your name off it.

They hid, but they would not vanish

Now look closely at what the Brontës actually chose, because this is my favourite thing in the whole subject and almost nobody notices it.

Charlotte Brontë became Currer Bell.

Emily Brontë became Ellis Bell.

Anne Brontë became Acton Bell.

They kept their initials. All three of them. Both initials.

They were hiding from a country that had told them, in writing, from the Poet Laureate, that they had no business doing this. And they built their disguises so that their own letters were still in them.

And the names themselves are doing something careful. Currer, Ellis and Acton are not men's names. They are not women's names either. They are surnames borrowed as first names, which is a trick that lets a name refuse to answer the question. Charlotte was explicit that this was deliberate: they did not want to declare themselves women, and they did not want to lie and claim to be men either.

So they built three names that simply decline to say. Which is exactly what J.K. does, and exactly what J.D. Robb does, and exactly what A.M. Barnard did for Louisa May Alcott.

Not a disguise. A refusal to answer.

There is something in that worth carrying around. Every one of those writers was being told that the wrong name would stop the book existing, and not one of them accepted the whole terms. They gave up the name and kept the letters.

Taking a pen name apart

Look at what these are made of. Aurora Nightshade. Jasper Frost. Isabella Wren. Atticus Shadow. Olivia Quill.

Every one of them is the same construction: an ordinary human first name, and a surname that is not a surname at all.

Nightshade is a plant. Frost is weather. Wren is a bird. Shadow is not even a thing. Quill is a tool nobody has used in two centuries.

And that split is doing all the work.

The first name has to be real, because it is the handshake. Aurora, Jasper, Isabella, Leo, Olivia. Those are people. You can picture somebody being called that at breakfast. If both halves are invented, the whole thing stops being a person and starts being a brand, and a reader can feel it.

The surname is where the promise lives. It is not identifying a family. It is telling you what kind of book this is. Nightshade and Shadow and Midnight are saying: something is going to go wrong in here. Wren and Rivers are saying: this will be quiet and probably sad. Quill is saying: I am aware this is a book.

So a good pen name is two things stapled together on purpose. A person you could meet, and a genre you can smell.

Which is why the ones that fail usually fail the same way. Two invented halves and it is a brand. Two ordinary halves and it does nothing at all. You need one foot in each.

A pen name is not a disguise, it is a second person

The word pseudonym makes it sound like hiding. Mostly, now, it is not.

Nobody is fooled about J.K. Rowling. Nora Roberts writing detective novels as J.D. Robb is not a secret, it is printed on the cover of the books. Elena Ferrante's anonymity is the least anonymous thing in publishing.

So what is it for, if everybody knows?

It is a second address. Not a mask over the writer, a different door for the reader.

A name gathers expectations the way a coat gathers rain. Write six romances and your name means romance now. That is a gift right up until the day you want to write a murder, at which point your own name is the biggest obstacle between the book and anybody reading it properly. Not because people dislike you. Because they will pick it up already knowing what it is, and they will be wrong, and they will blame the book.

Rowling put it in exactly those terms about Galbraith. As Galbraith the work could be read as what it was. As Rowling it would arrive carrying everything else she had ever done.

So the modern pen name is not a lie about who wrote it. It is a signal about which shelf to stand in front of, and which set of expectations to bring, and honestly it is closer to punctuation than to deception.

Which also means the decision is not really about your privacy. It is about whether your existing name is helping or interfering. Two completely different questions, and only one of them has anything to do with hiding.

What is in this list

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

The set was put together by hand, piece by piece, built on the split described above: a real first name that a person could actually have, and a surname doing the atmospheric work. Press Generate and it picks at random, never repeating inside the same batch.

This all runs locally in your browser, with nothing transmitted.

Before you commit to one

Say it out loud in the sentence you will hear it in. Not on its own. In context. "Her new book is by Jasper Frost." If you flinch, that is information. You are going to hear that sentence for the rest of your career, assuming things go well.

Search it before you love it. Somebody has it. There is probably an author, a musician, or a person with a very strong opinion about something, already living at that name. You do not want to inherit their search results, and you especially do not want a reader who cannot find you because a louder person is standing there.

Check the shelf. Alphabetical order is real and physical and it is still how a bookshop works. Your surname decides which shelf, at what height, next to whom. This sounds petty and it is not.

Do not overpromise the genre. A surname that screams gothic horror is wonderful on a gothic horror and a millstone on the literary novel you write in eight years. The names that last are a shade more neutral than the ones that thrill you today.

Work out what you are actually solving. If it is privacy, a pen name is a soft wall and not a hard one, and you should read up on how the money and the contracts work before relying on it. If it is that your name carries the wrong expectations, then the pen name is the right tool and this is exactly what it is for.

And keep something of yours in it if you can. The Brontës did. There is no practical reason for it and it is the best decision any of them made.

Questions people ask

Is using a pen name legal?

Publishing under a name that is not the one on your passport is ordinary and always has been. It is contracts, payment and copyright registration where the details start to matter, and that is a question for somebody who does this for a living. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice.

Do pen names stay secret?

Assume not. Rowling's Galbraith lasted a matter of months. If the book does anything at all, people will look, and a pen name is not built to survive being looked at. If secrecy is the actual requirement, the pen name is the smallest part of the problem.

Do I need one for a second genre?

Not need, but it is the single most common good reason. A name that means one kind of book gets in the way of a different kind of book. That is not a slight on your readers, it is just how expectations work, and a second name gives them a fair chance at the new thing.

Why do so many writers use initials?

Because initials decline to answer the question. That is the whole mechanism, and it is unbroken from Currer Bell to J.K. Rowling. You are not claiming to be a man. You are simply not telling them, and letting the book go first.

Should the surname be a real surname?

It does not have to be, and most good pen names are not. Frost, Wren, Nightshade and Quill are not families, they are moods. The rule that actually matters is that the first name should be a real person's name, because that is the half doing the introducing.

References

1. Nichols, C. (2015). Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name. Jezebel, 4 August 2015. https://www.jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-novel-out-und-1720637627
2. Sexism in publishing: My novel wasn't the problem, it was me, Catherine. The Guardian, 6 August 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/06/catherine-nichols-female-author-male-pseudonym
3. The evolution of female pen-names from Currer Bell to J.K. Rowling. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-evolution-of-female-pen-names-from-currer-bell-to-j-k-rowling-46864
4. Female author submits novel under man's name. The Christian Science Monitor, 6 August 2015. https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0806/Female-author-submits-novel-under-man-s-name.-You-will-totally-believe-what-happens-next