Dean Koontz

This is an afterword about pen names that I found in a Dean Koontz book, and I thought it was really funny (am I the only one?). So no, I didn't write it, but I wish I did. Here it is:

I orginally published The Door to December under a pen name.
Novelists write under pen names for many reasons.
Perhaps you write bestselling novels about bricklayers and associated masonry trades, and after producing fifteen or twenty such tales, you wish to write a book about some of the intrepid, multitalented, four hundred pound men who are both Sumo wrestlers and FBI agents. With the quite reasonable expectation that the established audience for your bricklaying adventures might be displeased by such a sudden shift in your subject matter, you might concoct a pen name for this new work.
Or perhaps under your real and true name, you have contracted with Publisher A for several books, to be delivered at the rate of one per year, but because of weak moral character or because you're keeping company with the wrong crowd, you have gotten into a twenty four can a day Diet Pepsi habit, and the resultant surfeit of nervous energy requires that you either enter a Twelve Step program or write a second book each year. To you, in your caffeine buzz, a Twelve Step program seems lik a dreary, plodding business, but no one is offering either a Three Step program or a Twelve Running Steps program; besides, this treatment requires an outlay of funds, whereas writing a second book produces additional income. Because Publisher A's contract gives it the exclusive use of your name, you must publish your second book under a pen name. Consequently, you make a deal with Publisher Q or Publisher Z (either has a more exotic and more thrilling name than does bland old Publisher A), and the world now knows you by your real and true identity, John Smith, and also by your pen name, Obadiah Furk.
In less enlightened days, a female novelist, writing in a genre with a laregely male readership, often chose to disguise her gender under a pen name. Likewise, men writing romance novels often hid behind women's names. The danger here, obviously, is that ego and alter ego might become confused, whereupon you could discover one day that you have acquired an entirely different wardrobe from the one you owned the previous year and that some of the most treasured parts of your anatomy have been left on a surgeon's table.
Writers of literary fiction have occasionally used pen names for work that people might actually enjoy reading. They believe that the existence of a satisfied audience is absolute proof that a work of fiction is utterly worthless, and while they wish to have the income produced by popular fiction, they are loath to be identified as the author of it. Until the late 1940's, the distinction between literary and popular fiction was so blurry as to be nearly nonexistent. Many authors wrote both literary and popular novels under their real names and suffer no diminuation of their authorial repuations. One fine example was John P. Marquand, who won the Pulitzer Prize and critical acclaim for his literary fiction while at the same time producing a series of detective novels featuring a character named Mr. Moto. This couldn't happen in our time. For one thing, having died many years ago, Mr. Marquand can't be expected to meet contractual deadlines, to review copyedited manuscripts, or to make himself available for long publicity tours. Furthermore, since the end of World War II, the US academic community has assumed an increasingly elitist viewpoint bordering on contempt for the masses, which is expressed in numerous ways, including the assiduous segregation of fiction into approved and condemned genres. This has the expected effect of making the most passionate genre writers into the best chroniclers of the common man and woman, a job once held by literary writers-and the unanticipated effect of turning most literary writers into creative cowards afraid to operate outside of the narrow boundaries drawn by the elites.
Some writers use pen names because they are on the "to abduct" list of evil extraterrestrials and they feel the need to hide out to avoid unwanted procotological exams aboard the mother ship.
Some writers resort to pen names after waking in a strange city to discover that they suffer from permanent amnesia, that they are carrying no ID, that their fingerprints have been burned off with multiple applications of acid, and that they have recently undergone plastic surgery that will make it impossible for family and friends to recognize them from a photograph in the Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am? feature carried in every major newspaper. they sense in their bones that they were writers in their former lives, but being unable to recall a byline, they must reinvent themselves. Some will choose simple names related to the genres in which they wish to write: Joe Mystery, Bob Sci-Fi, Barbara Romance. Others will be creative: Mickey Mysterioso, Robert Rocketblast, Britney Heather Slinkythighs. Still others will choose hopelessly improper names like Luke Phlegm and Kathleen Gastroenteritis, and their careers will flounder.
(Then there's an explanation of why this book was going under a pen name, Richard Paige, but its boring so I'm skipping it)
These days, when people ask me whatever happened to Richard paige, I always tell them the (metaphorical) truth: I bludgeoned him with a blunt instrument purchased at a Kmart blunt-instrument sale, fed him into a wood chipper in my backyard, and stole his small but lucrative literary estate.
(There's some more boring stuff, and then the concluding paragraph)
Those of you who have been my constant readers (moi) will know that I always write about the power of family, love, faith, hope. As I have written elsewhere and more than once: none of us can ever save himself' we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light. I try to live by this philosophy, and except for that one episode with the wood chipper, I think maybe I've done so more successfully than not.