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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was the reason authors often use pen names. Creating an entirely anonymous identity isn't easy but it is nice to screw up safely.

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What's interesting here is that the use of pen names is heavily policed in the publishing culture/industry. Some can use one, some can't, you will/will not get published if you follow the policy, and so on.

until the NYT outs you, see for example what happened with the slate star codex:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-...

He was known before

It took effort to find him, and it was possible. But he wasn't public about his identity prior to this, and in fact was making a deliberate effort to mask it.

just because someone with a lot of time on their hands could technically have found his real name does not conflict with the parent's point.

> But he wasn't public about his identity prior to this,

I don't understand how people make this claim when had given out most of his real name, his profession, his state, and the kind of work he did.

Finding SSC from his real name was easy, and finding his real name from SSC was easy.

Well. I said he was known. Not publicly known.

From his hand: “To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name.”

This is hardly a major attempt at anonymity.

Not that it matters but I’m very much in favour of remaining anonymous. I also am a fan of his writing.

> This is hardly a major attempt at anonymity.

Well, it's an attempt at pseudonymity, not anonymity.

And it's a pretty weak attempt at that, too.

Just need a bit of NLP to figure out identity from writing style, similar to how JK Rowling's pseudonymous identity was uncovered.

Perhaps we should use NLP to change the writing style but maintain the core idea. :)

Rowling's identity was uncovered when a family friend of her solicitors tweeted it out.

> The Harry Potter author released her first Robert Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, in April 2013 under the guise of a very British sounding man who was said to have previously served in the army. But her nom-de-plume was uncovered three months later after an indiscreet tweet divulging the true identity of Galbraith was sent by “@JudeCallegari”, a family friend of Christopher Gossage, a partner at Rowling’s solicitors.

Some people would suggest that the book was doing poorly, and needed a sales bump.

That's true if you're an established author and create a new itentity. If you've never published fiction though, there'd be no corpus to train on. What the article is saying is is that it's difficult for new artists to establish themselves, but in this case, I think psuedoanonymity is a good idea if you have any topics or ideas that you worry would cause a backlash.

It's pretty easy, actually. You make a website with whoisguard enabled, you sign your writing with a fake name, and you decline interview requests. Bonus points if you pretend to be a different gender, like JK Rowling did.

Often times the allure of being a pseudonymous person actually makes your work even more attractive.

How do you protect your intellectual property? As soon as there is any kind of legal battle your pseudonymity will be gone.

Banksy has managed to preserve his pseudonymity through a corporate structure.

Kinda. Like SSC, if you want to know his identity, you can find it out with a bit of effort.

Not really. There are two contradictory claims as to his identity, neither is confirmed, and what little evidence has been adduced can be explained in another way.

If you're bestselling enough for it to matter, probably a publisher would protect their property. Being pseudonymous doesn't necessarily mean that no one knows but that just a few people know who generally won't go blabbing to the newspapers. But if authorship of something becomes a widespread puzzle to solves, e.g. Primary Colors, it does tend to get out sooner or later.

Presumably there's some point at which fame makes it hard to conceal an identity that many are intensely curious about. But for the vast bulk of authors, pretty much no one is going to do even casual sleuthing to try to find you out.

Of course, that may limit some of your promotional opportunities but I don't know why it would be hard in general.

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