To pen name or not to pen name, that is the question...

Hi everybody—I’ve got a pen name question and I’m interested in hearing y’all’s thoughts.

I really do want to use my real name (Joy Beyer) for my books/brand, but I have two reasons that I may not want to:

1: My last name is often mispronounced as “Bayer” instead of the correct pronunciation “Buyer”. (It’s German.) I don’t mind this, but it might become annoying if I’m known by a mispronunciation of my own name. I know that I could just roll with it and kind of adopt this as an alternate pronunciation of my name, but I don’t know.

2: I thought of this recently—I write in various YA genres/sub-genres and one of them includes dystopian. I wouldn’t say that I necessarily write “dark” stuff but some of my themes cover more serious topics. The thing is, my first name is Joy, but I don’t want people to immediately think of joyful, happy, and cheerful topics in my stories all the time. Of course, I always am sure to include hope and faith in my stories and stuff, but that’s not all that there is. I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. (Am I overthinking this?)

I’m planning on getting joybeyer.com as a domain, but before I did I wanted to ask you guys for some advice. Are these good enough reasons to use a pen name? It may make sense for me to use a pen name, but using my real name is a big deal to me too if I can get away with it.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts! 😊