Mark this as the first time I’ve written an entire blog post about a single letter.
MFA Thesis Novel is coming out in April, and I’ve got lots of decisions to make regarding how to market it now that the developmental edit is finally done. Those decisions not only include what marketing steps I’m going to take as the author (in-person readings, Goodreads promotions, getting reviews, etc.), but how the book is presented, like the back cover copy and a shorter version of my author bio.
One of those aspects, believe it or not, is the name that goes on the cover.
Why Your Author Name Matters
I get a lot of my author marketing info from the super-informative but very Dad-jokey podcast Novel Marketing, whose entire back catalog is online and available for free. They talk a lot about ways independently and traditionally published authors can effectively market their books using limited resources, and one thing they often come back to is author names.
An author name is something that readers are going to remember you and your book by. It’s also the thing that most authors use for their website address, and the thing that readers are going to Google when they want to look you up. Most writers use their real names, but some use pen names to build a platform around a completely different name—think about Samuel Clemens writing as Mark Twain, or any number of romance authors who use pen names to separate their writing and personal lives. Or, consider J.K. Rowling’s publishers using her initials to disguise her gender since they questioned whether readers would want to read fantasy novels written by a woman.
I don’t have any of these problems, but I do have a different problem: Ian Rogers is kind of a common name worldwide.
Especially in Britain and Commonwealth nations, Ian Rogers’s are everywhere: besides the skateboarder turned businessman Ian Rogers who takes the top tier of the Google results, there’s the chess champion Ian Rogers, the cricket player Ian Rogers, and the British lawyer Ian Rogers, all of whom are more famous than me and whose names are all more likely to come up in a Google search.
Most importantly, though, there’s Ian Rogers the award-winning Canadian writer of dark fiction and supernatural noir, who followed me back on Twitter and whose short story collection “Every House is Haunted” is being made into a Netflix movie by Sam Raimi. If you Google “Ian Rogers writer,” that’s who comes up, and that’s bad for a new writer like me who’s trying to get his name out there.
What I Decided to Do
I’ve used Ian M. Rogers ever since high school, when my parents and I took the “Middle Initial” line on the registration form literally and never gave the school my actual middle name. I liked the look of Ian M. Rogers on the attendance lists while all the other students had these long sets of three names spelled out. On the contrary, I’d never liked my middle name (“Michael”), since it was hard to spell when I was kid. It’s also several letters longer than my first name, and draws undue attention away from the “Ian” on those rare occasions when I spell it all out.
The M started serving me well in signing up for email addresses, since the variants of Ian Rogers without the M were already taken. I really started using it in earnest when I came to Japan, where the name on my resident card and all my paperwork was literally ロジャースイアンエム, or Rogers, Ian M. I liked the sound of it, and it felt distinctive.
Now flash forward to today, when I’m trying to plan a writing career and dealing with the aforementioned name problem. Using Ian M. Rogers just seemed like a natural choice: it’s already my name on a lot of things, people know me by it already, using I.M. Rogers sounds just plain weird to me, and I really don’t want to start over with a pen name I’m not fully invested in.
It’ll also be a million times easier to start using Ian M. Rogers now than it will be to change it in five years if I realize things aren’t working out. As a start, I asked Vine Leaves Press to add the M. to their author list, used it when I published my literary article on Joseph Heller last summer, and surreptitiously changed it on this blog earlier this week.
Final Thoughts
I think a lot of writers with less common names than mine don’t need to worry about this, but it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. Nor is the middle initial solution something that’ll work for everyone: the Novel Marketing podcast guys actually advise AGAINST using middle initials because they’re easy for readers to forget or to leave out. Still, though, it’s the path I want to take for now, so here’s hoping it gets me more Google hits ;-)