When I decided to write erotica, I approached a professor who was openly known for both his literary and erotic fiction. I had been dabbling in the genre for a while, and wanted to begin to submit stories around, but first I had to establish the answer to an important question: to pseudonym or not to pseudonym?

He gave me a few things to think about—What kind of jobs did I want in the future? Did I care if people knew I was writing erotica?—and reminded me of a cold, hard truth: Society is not always kind to women who talk openly about sex. He also, wisely, pointed out that you can always link your pseudonym to your real identity, but unlinking your erotic fiction published under your name from your other work is impossible once it’s out in the world. So, in the end, I decided to put a nom de plume to my prose.

There are so many reasons to write under a pen name. The name might fit the project better than your actual name (Lemony Snicket), might be a necessity given gender prejudice (George Eliot) or can help to combine more than one author into a manageable identity (Lewis Padgett). It may assist in experimenting with radically different genres (Anne Rice and her foray into BDSM fairy tales under the name A. N. Roquelaure), or help you to publish more books than might be acceptable in a given year (the ever-prolific Stephen King and his alter ego Richard Bachman).

So, should you be writing your smut under a pseudonym?

Pros

It can protect you.

If you’re worried that writing what you want to write might make future job prospects harder, or if you’re writing something (ah-hem) that you don’t want your family to read (ah-HEM), a pen name will make that process much easier.

It can help you work on your project.

Sometimes, writing under a different persona gets you in the right headspace for writing in a different genre. It may be hard to write a racy scene as your plain ol’ self, but slip into that sassy sex writer’s shoes and you’ll be steaming up the coffee shop.

It can help with your (ugh) branding.

“Branding” can be an ugly word that a lot of writers, myself included, sometimes shy away from. However, it can’t be denied that if you’re interested in doing work that is radically different in genre from your normal writing, having an erotica (or mystery, or thriller, or whatever) pen name might help with marketing in the long run.

It can be fun!

I took a real pleasure in selecting my erotica pen name. I experimented with a bunch of polysyllabic, old-fashioned first names (Miranda, Lucinda, Beatrice) and monosyllabic last names (Wilde, Stone); considered allusions, family names and puns; made lists of varying combinations and polled my friends; checked to see what domains were available—it was delightful. I enjoy doing readings under a pretend name. There’s something weirdly exciting and play-like when I receive emails addressed to her, and not me. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys occasionally pretending you’re someone else, this may be the route for you.

Cons

It may fracture your writerly identity too much for your own liking.

If you publish under another name, it may be stressful to keep up with submissions and publications under more than one name. You may not like having to manage a bunch of websites, or not enjoy receiving emails made out to someone other than you. Or maybe you’ll feel weird if one name takes off and the other doesn’t.

It’s not you.

It can be stressful to feel like you’re being swallowed by a pseudonym—I don’t know how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson or Samuel Clemens (Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain, respectively) felt about having their famous nom de plumes being immortalized in lieu of their birth names, but I would never want my non-erotic work, were it to live on past my lifetime in any way, to be known under a pseudonym.

So who are you gonna be?

Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has been featured or is forthcoming in The American Reader, VICE Magazine, Five Chapters, Indiana Review, Best Women’s Erotica 2012, The Hairpin, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.