While doing some research for a blog entry I’m working on about connected groups, I found out something I didn’t know, i.e. that Linda Fallon of the Shades trilogy, which I absolutely loved, was Linda Winstead Jones and a whole host of other Lindas apparently.
This is truly weird timing, too, because I just got through reading The Moon Witch by her under the Winstead Jones AKA, the second in an apparent trilogy about three sisters, and had really mixed feelings about. It’s always so disconcerting to find something like this out. Not because it’s not a good thing for authors to do but more because it always makes me stop and wonder why or rather how the same author can create books under different AKA’s like this that hit me so completely differently. And I’m not simply talking about changes in sub-genre either.
Is there something purely psychological going on here on the reader side of things?
I suppose that explains why so many of the long time Harlequin/Silhouette authors have so many AKAs floating around.
The various pseudonyms probably came about because she wrote for different publishers and each wanted their own author identity. I know that up until a few years ago, Harlequin/Silhouette owned authors’ pseudonyms, so if you wrote as Jane Smith for Harl/Sil and you sold a book to say Kensington, you had to use a different name for your Kensington books. Now if you wrote under your own name, you were okay. Confusing, huh.
But I do believe it all stems from different publishers and different genres — to keep them separate.
You know, I’m really not sure myself what I mean by psychological. It’s just been nagging at me that I’d read a couple of other things by her and didn’t realize it until I found out those pen names were the same author. Then I was like, well, yeah, of course. I know authors disguise their “voice” to some extent when they change AKAs but I’m not sure how much they can change their writing personality, if that makes sense.
As to the Witch books, I know exactly what you mean. There was lot in the second book, especially the scenes with the emperor and his empress, that had me scratching my head over. My daughter and I are going to be UBS tomorrow so maybe I can find the first one and catch up.
Psychological how?
I’d call LWJ’s Witch books to be a true trilogy. There’s a definite arc going through each book and the second one doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve read the first one.