Pen Names - "Protection" when writing Erotica

guppie1813

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I'm curious if anyone has any advice about publishing Erotica under a pen name. Did it protect your identity? Did anyone get outed by a fan, or did you intentionally or unintentionally out yourself?
 

InkFinger

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A pen name is a prophylactic, but not a guarantee. I am told that the author normally outs themselves, intentionally or not. As such, this board, behind the firewall of ESYW is the extent of my Erotica publishing to date, though there is a large body of work to go public when it does not matter.
 

ChaseJxyz

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I've seen some pretty unsavory parts of the Internet, where people doxx others for the lulz. The targets of these trolls do a lot to change run from them, like make brand new social media accounts, getting new phone numbers, etc etc, but if someone wants to try hard enough...they're going to find it. There is always a paper trail, digital or otherwise. To the trolls, it's a challenge to find this new info.

Now onto you. You write porn under a pen name, cool. Who is going to care enough to find out who you really are? Are your coworkers randomly going to think "I bet guppie wrights smut, I'm going to scour the Internet to find proof of this" ? If anything, it'll be the other way around. "I am morally outraged by what G. Uppie wrote in their smut, because I find hand holding exceptionally reprehensible, so I will find out who they really are."

You can do things to make it harder to make these connections. One is to have multiple separate online identities, where you never reuse phone numbers, emails, or user names across identities. You have your regular person name/info, and then you have your smut name/info. It's really tiring to manage multiple identities, so you have to decide what the risk is/how motivated your future enemies will be and decide that way. There's people from my past that I do not want to be able to find/contact me, which is part of why I also legally changed my last name, but it also means that I can't ever make a new Facebook, because friending the same people will cause Facebook to realize [old me] and [new me] is the same person, and then recommend [new me] to [bad people], but that's something I'm okay with giving up. I'm okay with having separate personal and professional online identities, though I know there's going to be some merging once I'm published, but again that's something I'm willing to risk. You gotta figure out what your limits are.
 

veinglory

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I asked a friend on this forum to figure out my real name and it took her less than an hour. That said, it has never come up in an awkward work setting. i suppose it depends on whether the people who want to cause trouble for you are the kind of people who know how to dox someone. I am fortunate enough to have had non-idiot bosses from some time, so I did tell them about my erotica writing when starting a new job -- just in case someone did try to cause trouble.
 

guppie1813

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ChaseJxyz, you make a good point. Those who know me IRL would NEVER expect that I would be writing ANYTHING, much less dirty stories. As far as the other issue, I don't think my smut is anymore creative than anything else out there, so I doubt someone would single out my work and hunt me down.

I never thought about the Facebook connection. I did make separate email accounts, and I guess eventually my alter ego will need a social media presence. I'll have to make sure to remember to pretend that my real self and my smut self don't know each other. Since my real self has almost no social media presence, that shouldn't be too difficult.
 

guppie1813

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A pen name is a prophylactic, but not a guarantee.

So in other words, just like a condom. It is safER writing, but there is no such thing as completely SAFE writing unless you abstain!
 

ChaseJxyz

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I never thought about the Facebook connection. I did make separate email accounts, and I guess eventually my alter ego will need a social media presence. I'll have to make sure to remember to pretend that my real self and my smut self don't know each other. Since my real self has almost no social media presence, that shouldn't be too difficult.

Fair warning: Facebook uses way, way, WAY more than just your email to figure out who you actually are. There's the obvious things like using the same phone/computers, but also things you wouldn't think of like the Wi-Fi networks you and other people use. If you use your smut Facebook on your phone and take your phone with you to work, Facebook will know that [smut person] is at this building 40 hours/week, so they must work there, so other users who are in that building 40 hours/week must also work there, ergo, they must know you, so hey! Come be friends with each other! Facebook knows who your neighbors are and the people at your church or the animal shelter where you volunteer. If you EVER log into it on your phone, it knows that those two accounts are the same person, so there's that risk. So even if you the regular person doesn't have a Facebook, the smut writer might and that's the person who's going to be recommended to your coworkers.

Of course, you could make a very vague/weird Person Account (Jane Doe that has no identifiable info on it) and then run a Page for the smut writer....but if it ever gets big, or if you want to run ads, then Facebook will get mad at you and force you to use Your True And Honest Name TM for your Person Account.... The only winning move is to just not use Facebook (or Instagram or Whatsapp) at all and not have it on any of your devices.
 

guppie1813

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OMG, so between what veinglory discovered with the 'try and find me' experiment and what you are saying Chase, there is no hiding. I guess the one option is to publish and hope that my work just remains obscure and unnoticed...wait....shoot....

Maybe I'll just sit with Ink and wait until I retire.
 

Chris P

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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but pen names are about branding and marketing, not about remaining anonymous. When you see certain names on book covers, (Stephen King, Danielle Steele, Umberto Eco, Erma Bombeck) you have a pretty good idea of what you're in for as far as plot, style, setting, themes, etc. Many erotica (and other) authors use pen names for this reason--so the purchaser knows that this latest release by I. M. Hornee is gonna be gooooood. Not I. M. Hornee retelling the Gingerbread Man, her foray into cozy whodunnit, or analyzing the impact of eminent domain legislation on farm conservation efforts at the county level in South Dakota.

Or the other way around. Back in the late 90s, I would chuckle seeing Eddie Murphy's Raw video in the rental store, and wondered how many kids screamed "Mom! It's the Nutty Professor! Let's get it!" (If you haven't seen Raw, it is DEFINITELY NOT for kids).
 
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