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You’ve just penned your first sci-fi, and you’d be thrilled to share it with the world if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re painfully introverted? You’ve written a memoir about a traumatic childhood that you know can help others, but you’re terrified that the fallout of publishing it will stretch well beyond your coping abilities? Your erotic stories are steaming hot and just begging for eager readers, but you don’t want your company’s board of directions to find out about your exciting but stigmatizing side gig?

In other words, you really want to publish an ebook, but you dread what might happen if you were to do so under your own name? 

You’re in good company. J.K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, Ann Rice, and Mark Twain are all pen names — and even through these authors didn’t rise to fame under them, the likes of Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, and Agatha Christie have all played around with pseudonyms, too. Just as publishing your manuscript digitally, in ebook form, is a perfectly valid choice in the 21st century, there are plenty of reasons to use a pseudonym. What are the pros and cons of publishing your ebook anonymously, and can you even do that?

Can you publish your ebook under a pen name?

Yes, you can! Although you can be traditionally published under a pseudonym, too, the process of self-publishing an ebook using a pen name is actually considerably easier. If you self-publish your ebook using the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, you’ll automatically be offered the chance to publish under a pen name. Your author account will likely still be in your true name, meaning you can get paid for your work — though, if privacy is your top priority, you may be able to go even further by establishing an anonymous LLC in your pen name to make it harder for serious diggers to find out who you are.

It’s also perfectly possible to copyright your work under a pseudonym. The US Copyright Office offers you the choice between copyrighting your book under your pen name and real name simultaneously or doing so solely under your pseudonym.

The advantages of publishing your ebook anonymously

If you write your ebook under a pen name, your work can speak for itself. Done right, your true identity will not color the lens through which your readers enjoy your work, and your ebook will not come back to haunt you in your “real life”. As a new, camera-shy, author, the low stakes of publishing your ebook anonymously may give you the confidence you need to actually get your work out there. If you’re tackling controversial topics, or if you’re afraid of hate comments, publishing your ebook under a pseudonym can protect you. 

What to consider before publishing your ebook anonymously

No matter how brilliant your manuscript is, your audience won’t magically show up — to get people to actually read your book, you have to learn how to market your ebook. Like it or not, your best marketing opportunity lies in allowing your target audience to connect with you as an author. By self-publishing your work under a pen name, you rob yourself of a great opportunity to promote your work. 

Anonymity is also surprisingly and increasingly unsustainable in today’s world. You’ll have to choose your pen name with care, so that nobody can connect it back to you, and make sure your manuscript isn’t accidentally littered with small details that offer glimpses into your true identity. Thanks to social media, you’ll also either want to have extremely trustworthy friends, or keep mum about the fact that you are self-publishing an ebook. It only takes one person to spill the beans!

The more successful your ebook becomes, the harder it will be to maintain your anonymity. If you’re not aiming for your manuscript to become profitable and you’re content sharing it on writers’ groups, it’s going to be fairly easy to keep your real name out of it — but if you self-publish a successful ebook, you may eventually want to take credit for your work or be faced with sleuthing experts who dox you. 

Should you publish an ebook under a pen name? That is, ultimately, a very personal question. Authors who would eventually like to be credited for their work should strongly consider publishing under their real name from the get-go, while those who fear that their personal life or professional reputation could be ruined if the fact that they anonymously published a book came out would be advised to seek legal counsel before proceeding. 

Many writers out there are also fans of fiction found in every other form, and every writer has a list of their favorite movies and TV shows – some writers even prefer to keep the TV running while they’re writing for the addition of background noise, while others prefer to fire up Netflix once they’re done writing for some relaxation.

But watching fiction isn’t all fun. There’s a lot writers can learn from three act fiction from movies and TV that can be applied to their own writing process to create a better story that’s easier to outline. 

Want your TV watching to turn into serious story research instead? Whip up some fresh juice with a blender and let’s talk about  how to turn your TV watching time into something that can help you write. 

Why Three Acts Work 

Three act storytelling is one of the most popular types. Here’s why. 

Act one introduces the setting, the scenes, the characters and the intrigue. It tells people why they should give a damn about the characters or the story. 

Act two introduces the intrigue, the storyline, the chase, the rest of the characters, the twists and the journey. This is the vital middle part of the story. 

Act three concludes your plot – though sometimes with a surprising twist or a cliffhanger. It brings the story together, and tells people why they have been giving a damn throughout the middle. Thus, give your ending some real punch.

Three acts are effective. It allows for tension, peaking, conclusion, twists and an end to the story (whether it’s the final end or only the end to one part in a series). 

Examples of Three Acts in Film

The popular three acts are seen in thousands of Blockbuster movies. The same way, it appears in thousands upon thousands of books and short stories. Almost no story begins without introducing (1) settings and (2) characters – and that’s act one of most stories and movies.

Die Hard, Toy Story, Star Wars, The Stand, Rocky, Rambo, The Hills Have Eyes, Cujo, The Shining, The Jungle Book, The Princess Bride, The Road. 

In fact, the list of movies that use the three acts – some in obvious ways and most not – is almost endless.

It works so well because it works. 

Even life can be seen as life in three acts if you were to think about it. First, there’s birth when you get introduced to the characters that will be in it – then there’s the middle part where your journey happens – and finally, there’s the conclusion.

Examples of Three Acts in Episodic Fiction 

Three act stories can be seen all over episodic fiction. 

This type of fiction generally has a presiding story arc (the characters and general setting remains the same), while each episode another “topic”, “story arc” or mystery that gets dealt with by the characters.

Fiction in episodes like these is a great way to illustrate the progression of a story arc, and you can practically  use this to see how your chapters and story can progress.

The Three Acts in Individual Chapters

The three acts (beginning, middle and end) apply to your story as a whole whether it’s 3, 000 words or closer to 300, 000. But it can also apply to your chapters individually – each chapter has a beginning, middle and end too. Realizing this can make outlining and writing chapters (and seeing them in perspective for the rest of your story) a lot easier for you as a writer. 

When outlining, use the “episodic” format and see each chapter as an episode in a larger part of the story.

For many writers, this is the revelation they need to get over writer’s block and back to serious writing. 

Chances are you have already completed this first step and chosen a fandom. Or rather, your fandom has chosen you. It has been my experience that story ideas come to you while you watch or read something, or not long after. Your brain finds a hole in the original story. That hole does not have to be any kind of flaw in the original, but rather just a gap you can fill with your own scenarios:

•A movie you love includes two of your favorite characters on a days-long road trip. But it does not show any of the fun little side stops and adventures you know had to have happened along the way.

•The network just canceled your favorite television show. But the show ended with a season-ending cliffhanger and no resolution in sight.

•You read a book and realized that you liked the secondary characters better than the main characters. You start wondering what might happen if the story followed those secondary characters instead. The basics of writing fanfiction are the same, regardless of the fandom or the type of story you want to tell.

The fandoms themselves, though, can differ substantially in scope. Fandoms can be large or small or somewhere in between. The size of the fandom usually has little to do with the popularity of the original source material. The original could be a 90-minute film measured in ratings. It could be a book or television series measured in sales or ratings, number of volumes or episodes. That original source could be a short story that appeared in one issue of a magazine. However, the most popular fandoms usually revolve around cosmic horror or science fiction.

Or it could be a 30-second television commercial or a graphic novel that only sold a dozen copies. Those of us who write fanfiction like what we like. And we will expand on that canon — the original source or official story — accordingly. With fanfiction, you can make anything happen.

Many fanfic writers also love the idea of fanfiction because they don’t have to worry about some of the more mundane aspects of publishing (although if you do run into query letter issues or have a need for software, Reedy and Squibler have great guides for those topics). In general though, fanfiction writers can dodge those issues and just post online. Less headache.

Television

Writing fanfiction for a television show can be both easier than for other types of fandom or it can be more challenging. Either way, the reasons are the same. There is usually so much more source material, or canon, available for a TV show it can sometimes be hard to narrow down a story idea. That can make the writing more difficult. In that same vein, because there is so much canon material, when you do come up with an idea, there is a greater possibility that no one in your fandom has

yet written a similar story. (Not that that would be a stopper. It is not at all unusual for similar inspiration to strike several fanfic writers. It isn’t the idea so much as what you do with it that counts.) A popular television fandom for fanworks of all kinds is Supernatural, an American production currently in its twelfth season.

Supernatural has 116,000 stories on one popular archive and more than 143,000 on another. (The count actually went up by about a thousand new fics while I was writing this book.) Even if many of these fics exist on both archives, which is not uncommon, that is still a large catalogue of works in just this one fandom.

Another prolific television fandom is Doctor Who, which has over fifty years’ worth of canon material to play with. This long-running British production has inspired audio plays, feature films, stage productions, and licensed novels.

There were at least two spinoff series, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and they both have their own fanfiction. On one archive alone, there are more than 72,500 fics listed. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ll find Firefly, an American television series from Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. Firefly fics span the timeline from before the series began to after the last episode ended. They cover the origins of the fictional universe, the back stories of the characters, interject scenes into episodes.

Firefly aired for only one brief, 13-episode season in 2002. In 2005, three years after the cancellation, a follow-up movie, Serenity, hit cinemas worldwide. That gave fans two more hours of new canon adventures to play with. Less than 15 hours of original material, and yet there are more than 13,000 fics written for it.

You might even remember Danger Man a more obscure TV show, but sure enough, there is fanfiction: https://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Danger-Man/

Movies

Movies can generally be considered to be “closed canon” in that there will not be anything new added to the original source. (This is also true for books or for television shows that have been canceled or otherwise have ended.)

Just because there won’t be any new source material added, though, does not make them any less rich a field in which to play when you write your fic. In some ways, because there is less to the official story, a movie fandom can be an even more fertile field to write in.

It will give you more possibilities that were never explored in canon.

But you also have movie series such as Star Wars or the Marvel and DC Comics movies. Movies like these are “open canon” in nature because the films are still in production. The canon story lines are more limited than those of a television series. It takes much longer for the next installment in the series to become available, months or even years, rather than showing up on a weekly basis.

These particular fandoms have a much wider scope than a standalone movie might because they include canon from comic books and novels.

The movie Titanic is an example of a closed canon fandom. There are a couple thousand fics written for the movie, most of which resurrect Jack, who dies in canon. (If you somehow missed seeing this film, my apologies for the spoiler.) Many of these fics explore what might have happened between him and Rose after that fateful voyage. Yet others take Jack and Rose and change their stories into something completely different. They look at ways they might have met without the Titanic. Or they show how their story might have evolved a hundred years later, in 2012 rather than 1912. Star Wars is an open canon consisting of movies, books, and cartoons.

It receives an injection of renewed enthusiasm every few months with the release of the newest film or novel or episode. It being an open canon gives the fandom a much larger presence on the various fanfiction archives than a closed fandom like Titanic. On one popular site, there are 2,600 Titanic fics versus 41,000 fics in the Star Wars fandom.

Even some indies have picked up some fanfiction to inject new creative flares to the storylines. Things like Bandidas for example.

Books

Of course, books are perhaps the richest area of all for the fanfiction writer.

There are literally millions of options to choose from. Unlike other fandoms, if you write fic for a book fandom, with lots of practice you can match your writing style to the original author’s. In the long run, it is probably best for you to develop your own writing style before you try to mimic another. Even so, it can be satisfying to post a story and have people tell you it is just like reading the original.

As you might suspect, perhaps the most popular book fandoms are Harry Potter and Twilight. Between these two fandoms, there are almost a million fics posted to one multifandom website alone. At one time, Harry Potter was thought (or perhaps feared is a better word) to be a closed canon with the end of the book series. Not only did the movies add new life to fannish enthusiasm, but the wizarding world of Harry Potter is expanding.

There is new canon material with the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. There will be yet more with the upcoming release of the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Just look at Percy Jackson. This is a book that has created one of the most popular fandoms. You can check out some stories from that fandom here: https://commaful.com/tags/percy%20jackson/

Other Types of Fandoms

While television, books, and movies account for the greater part of fanfics, they are not the only types of fandom we fans write for. Anything that sparks your imagination can be used for fanfiction.

You’ll sometimes see joking references made by people who consider themselves to be a fandom of one. The commercials of insurance companies like State Farm, Allstate, and Progressive have inspired fic. You’ll find stories on the internet based on individual songs and whole albums. Comics and graphic novels have important fandom contributions. Fans have written tens of thousands of fics for Homestuck, Batman, X-Men, and the Justice League.

There are almost a thousand fics written for the Calvin and Hobbes comic series, which ended in 1995. Anime and manga fandoms are no less attractive for fanfiction writers. Shingeki no Kyojin, also known as Attack on Titan, has more than 30,000 individual fics posted to just one fanfiction archive. Another favorite anime and manga title, Naruto, has over 400,000 works on yet another website.

Crossovers

If more than one of the above fandoms interests you, you can consider writing a fusion fic or crossover. A crossover is a single work of fanfiction that combines two or more different, usually unrelated fandoms. You might look at a character from fandom

A and think about how well they might fit in with the characters of fandom

B. Your fic could follow their adventures in that combined fandom. You could create a setting where the characters of many fandoms interact without needing much manipulation to get them there. Or you might find opportunities to combine two or more wildly different fandoms into one story. Crossovers force you to think about how they might logically work together in a coherent whole.

Of course, your crossover doesn’t have to make logical sense. It’s a common fannish convention to “hand wave” away such mundane concerns as logic in favor of character and story. The choice is yours. The important part is to have fun writing whatever fic you choose to write.