I have an interesting problem and an easy solution.

This article tells me that one thing I need to be conscious of is branding. When someone picks up a book by R. K. Clark – what are they expecting? Fantasy with a twist of wry humor? Convention breaking romance, be it raunchy and bloody or sweet and kind? Societal commentary? Splatterpunk? I can tell you right now, people who read and like my sweet romance novel are not going to be lining up for my splatterpunk novels. R. K. Clark has to stand for something, darn it.

So, here’s the solution: pseudonyms. Amazon makes it ridiculously easy to write under different names, and I won’t be the first author to do that. The subreddit r/eroticauthors has people who write under several pseudonyms. I can do that.

Ladies and gentlemen – meet what will hopefully not turn into a bad rip-off of The Dark Half:

• Kellas Donovan – hard smoking, harder drinking horror writer. Prefers splatterpunk with bleak endings.
• K. R. Malbeouf – a sweet writer who likes romance, earned happy endings and clean prose.
• Richard Cook – determined to highlight the ills of the world through the power of literary fiction.

I might be going overboard on something like this, but I see it as a chance for more people to get to my work. No sense in alienating fans because they can’t handle gore or romance, right? I also see it as a chance of increasing my revenue by having alternative streams and find out which one really pays. Sure, I have to have a regular writing income stream first, and my last post outlined how I am getting that going (update: cracked 10K words!). As long as I stay the course, I’ll be fine. I can turn two of the novels I finished into series – Valentina having a logical conclusion to support a limited series, and Romance with Advantage having a large enough cast to support a long running series.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean a warm bucket of spit unless I get back to writing. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have a novel to finish.