As you can see, the pen name that I have attached to this blog, my Facebook page and Twitter account is Syl E. Knight - which is the name I want to use to publish my fantasy, sci fi and horror stories. But what about my non-genre literary work or my YA stories? I don't know that I want to publish those stories/books under the same pen name. (This, of course, assumes I do eventually get published.) I know many authors do use different names for different genres, or at least they used to do so.
In the old days of publishing, the author could choose a name, publish under that name and the agent, publicist or publisher would handle getting his/her name out there. But publishing today seems to be a different world. Authors appear to be responsible for getting name recognition via Twitter, Google+, Facebook, blogs, web pages, and whatever other methods there are that I haven't thought of.
So do other authors have separate Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for each pen name? That seems like it would be a lot of work maintaining that many accounts and that much information.
So I am unsure whether I should just tie the one set of web presence things (Twitter, blog, Facebook) to all of the names or set them up individually for each name or just say, the heck with it and just publish under one name.
I must admit that, being basically lazy, I am leaning towards the last choice.
I decided that I would use just the one name - Syl E. Knight unless and until some publisher tells me that I need to use a second name. I have two reasons for this, one is for clarity - no one (my readers, me, anyone else who is interested) has more than one name to keep track of. The second reason is my aforementioned basic laziness.
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