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Authors who vanished from the face of the planet


Darth Richard II

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I would guess it was a pseudonym for business rather than personal reasons. Booksellers order copies of new titles based on the sales of an author's previous work, so pseudonyms are sometimes used to get away from the cycle of low sales and low orders associated with the author's earlier books. If the stuff published under Volsky's real name sold too poorly, or if the publisher thought the new series had a chance to do significantly better, they might have asked for the change. That was what happened with Sarah Monette. Tor picked her up after Ace dropped her, but on the condition that she use a pseudonym for her new work, which is why The Goblin Emperor says Katherine Addison on the cover even though Monette has always been open about being the author.

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Thanks Brendan. I can't imagine poor sales being the reason behind the name change. Illusion was a big seller at the time, and was nominated for several awards. Ms. Volsky was hot in the 1990s. She moved from Ace to Bantam, and then remained with Bantam... then disappeared, only to reappear 11 years later, still writing for Bantam, but under a pseudonym. But not a pseudonym they make female authors take to hide the fact that they're female (like P.A. Volsky or something).

My god, those romance covers! :/

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  • 5 months later...
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I just discovered that Yoji Kondo, who wrote as "Eric Kotani", died at about this same time last year.

https://locusmag.com/2017/10/yoji-kondo-aka-eric-kotani-1933-2017/

His science-based writing collaborations with John Maddox Roberts were published by Baen, of all places, but between the excellence of the ideas in the work and the craftmanship of the writing, his books all stood well out from some of the rest of the offerings from that publisher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoji_Kondo

As a dedicated consumer of the tacky-covers-hiding-neat-stories Baen products in the 1980s, his books always stood well out from the mainstream of shelf offerings at the local bookstore.

http://www.sfwa.org/members/kotani/

 

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