Spotted on romance writer Kayci Morgan’s blog:
What I enjoy most about self-publishing is experimenting. Figuring out
what works and what doesn’t. It’s like piecing together a big puzzle.
One of the things I attempted was to publish under a male pen name. I
did this with the two books below and they took off. Record sales.
Both books ended up in the top ten of Amazon’s best sellers list for
their genre.I can’t be sure if it was the name or the timing or some other factor.
But I was worried what if the stories were just that good, then my
real pen name would suffer from using the faux one. So I switched them
over to this name and sales plummeted within days of the name change.Like I said, nothing conclusive one way or the other because of other
untested factors but I might try this experiment again in the future.
I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Note that both books (Scott and Scamp and Games We Play) are gay male romance–would the results of the experiment have been different if they were heterosexual romance or lesbian romance? Sounds like we might need more data.
