Joined: 10/20/2011
Posts: 350
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I've been debating about using a pen name myself. I think I'll most likely be publishing in multiple genres (fingers crossed) and I think having a pen name would help. So I will be using my real name for one and have come up with another one for my romances.
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Joined: 4/22/2012
Posts: 175
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I'm using a pen name for a couple of reasons. One is because, like many others who posted early on in this thread, I write erotic romance and also have a day job working with children, and if I get published, I don't want people (parents) seeing/reading it and maybe getting freaked out (for no reason). The second is that I don't feel like my actual name is romance-y enough; I wanted something with a little more pop.
My pen name is actually my "stripper" name, which I thought appropriate for erotica (and yet it still sounds like a normal name): First name is the name of my first childhood pet (Nicky was a loving and loyal hamster...who was male, so I femmed it up a little on my husband's advice), and my last name is the name of the street where I grew up. 
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Joined: 5/28/2012
Posts: 43
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I use an alias and a picture of my cat on this site, my blog, Twitter, and a couple of other places. (Well, same alias but different cat pictures.) But I don't plan to use a pen name if I should happen to get published. Here's why:
*I'm literally the only person in the country with my first name, last name combination (according to Google, anyway). No confusion, there.
*Despite the fact that my name is rare, it's easy to pronounce.
*My real name is gender neutral. While I personally don't consider an author's gender/sex when choosing a book to read, some people do (possibly unconsciously).
*I already own www.myfirstnamemylastname.com and have the associated Twitter account.
*I don't write anything that could be fodder for conservative neighbors, employers, etc. Sure, there are sex scenes, but I prefer to leave most of what happens to the readers' imagination, since I am not writing erotica.
I guess I lucked out in this department. (However, growing up was a pain as I constantly got called names on the playground -- my first name was pronounced identically to the surname of a prominent public figure.)
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