Put down a name that's different from yours as the author.
No idea why someone down voted this comment. It's pretty much all there is to it. Where ever you're publishing / monetising can have your real name for financial and legal aspects. But the name you put as the author of the stories / books can be whatever you like (probably not the same as someone else who publishes in your field....)
So I should stop publishing as Steven Kyng?
Yes. That implies you are on the same level as Stephen King.
You should publish as Steven Emperor ;)
Steven God so nobody can claim to be better.
Stephen King's pseudonym is Richard Bachman
The term you're looking for is pseudonym. An alter ego has a different personality.
Pseudonyms are fairly common.
If you go with traditional publishing, your agent can help you get going.
If you self publish, it can be trickier, but the major outlets are fine with a pen name for public use and inky using your real info for the back end. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc, they all are easy to deal with in that regard.
But if you're trying to do all of your own distribution and payment, you'd likely want to talk to a good cpa or attorney about how to set things up so you don't fuck up taxes and whatnot, while still being publicly unnamed under your real ID.
Fwiw, unless you're also pretty good at marketing, monetizing isn't easy. It's one thing to have your stuff out there, and another entirely to have people know it exists, and then spend money on it.
You can put a different name than what's yours as the author, but unfortunately if someone is dedicated if you're writing style is still similar it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might be able to connect the dot eventually. Unlikely unless you got super huge, but not impossible
Just give yourself a pseudonym when you publish. Make it a pun or something so it stands out, like Anita Fagina.
Similarly, I was reading about a music artist and it said on their bio that nobody knows who they are or their real name... They have concerts and make millions from sales, surely someone somewhere has to put their name down to send money to them?
Before you tell me about crypto, that's not how the real world works
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!