“What’s in a name?” Juliet pondered in her famous speech in Shakespeare’s play. I’ve been asking myself a similar question: what’s in an author name? My author name?
A bit of background: as a writer, I’ve spent a lot of time studying up on ways to make my books stand out in the marketplace. I need an eye-catching cover. A compelling title. The right keywords and search categories. And of course, a captivating and well-written story, edited for grammar and spelling, and free of typos. But it never occurred to me that publishing under my own name could be problematic.
Two Louise Spilsbury Authors
You see, there’s another author out there by the name of Louise Spilsbury. If you run a Kindle search on Louise Spilsbury, her books show up too. She’s been writing a lot longer than I have, and has a lot more books to her name, so my solitary book Survivor gets lost amidst her list of titles.
Other than sharing a name, we’re not in direct competition.
She writes children’s books. I write science fiction.
She’s in the U.K. I’m in Canada.
But here we are, joined by a name that causes confusion among readers who are looking for one of us and end up finding the other. This was driven home to me the other day when I sent an inquiry to a book promoter about how to fill out the application form on his site. He responded that he’d looked at my books, and as shorter children’s books with a higher price point, he didn’t think my new book would be a good fit for his services.
New author name for a unique identity: L.M. Spilsbury
It feels like I’m fighting an uphill battle in establishing a unique identity for myself as an author. So I’ve had a good long look at this particular moment in my writing career. It’s been my plan to take Survivor down in the next couple of weeks in order to give my Modified Humans series a fresh start. I’ll be publishing Immunity Cage, which is the Survivor back story, on October 3. I’m re-writing Survivor under a new title, Immunity Bond, and will publish it in the early part of next year. With Survivor-by-Louise-Spilsbury gone, my author name of Louise Spilsbury doesn’t need to follow these new books into the marketplace. So what if I change my author name to L.M. Spilsbury? There is no L.M. Spilsbury in the Kindle store, or Kobo, or Nook. I become unique.
But what does this mean for my louisespilsbury.com website? And my AuthorLouiseSpilsbury Facebook page? And my authorlouisespilsbury Instagram handle? In today’s interconnected world, nothing is simple. Fortunately I have a website guru who says he can handle these things for me. So stay tuned. L.M. Spilsbury has a lot of stories cooking, and she’s looking forward to meeting you out there on your e-book readers.