Quote:
Originally Posted by John Jarrold  And every publisher cares deeply what its major customers, the bookselling chains, want. If you don't sell them lotsa books, you go out of business. Commercial publishing is a business, first and foremost. |
Oh, I'm not saying that they don't keep an eye out for what the booksellers want. I am just saying that if, for example, they had two books by me but one of them was "by Havlen Jones" and one was "by John Smith", the bookseller wouldn't know that they were by the same author.
So, unless the bookseller is specifically telling them not to send them pseudonym'd books (which might very well be the case for all I know), I don't see where that would be a problem.
It sounds to me like it is more a case of what you mentioned before that -- publishers wanting to promote authors, not books -- and a pseudonym would obstruct them from promoting the author to the bookseller as well as the reading public. (Assume they promote authors -- not just books -- to booksellers as well as the public.)
Of course, I'm just deducting this through logic having no experience with that side of the industry, but I do know from experience that business is often not logical, so there very well could be something I am missing
Either way, I can see and understand that U.K. publishers are generally against crossing genres regardless of if the author uses a pseudonym. (I'm curious on if it is the same in the States.)