Nii Ayikwei Parkes is Booktrust's second online writer in residence.

    • Nom de Plume

    Posted Monday December 14th 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    A few years ago I used to wonder why people had pen names, especially when it was no secret who they actually were. And now I’m about to have a book released under a pen name so I thought it would be interesting to share my reasons. The primary reason is that I write for both adults and children; while I may not have considered that a problem in the past, I have now spent a lot of time in bookshops (reading mainly, of course, because my budget can’t cover the extent of my consumption) and noticed how people order books (it’s not dissimilar to the way some revellers request songs from a DJ in a night club). I’ve overheard grandparents come in and say things like: ‘I want that book by so-and-so as a present for my grandchild’ – which is fine if you have a perceptive bookseller. But imagine if the grandchild in question was actually a child and you had a dozy bookseller who picked out the latest book you had written for adults and handed it over. Not a great result.

    So now I understand why someone who writes in two genres might want to make…

    Read the rest of the post Comments (0)