renaissance poisson

I suspect that influences the choice of name, but not usually the decision to take a new one, based on the comments I've read from various authors. A lot of them (including going back some time, such as Megan Lindholm to Robin Hobb) are from one female name to another: Sarah Monette writing as Katherine Addison, Lyda Morehouse writing as Tate Hallaway, etc.

In those cases, I've seen the reason to choose the new names attributed to the bookstore purchasing death spiral. They preorder 20,000 books, 17,000 sell, therefore they will only preorder 17,000 for the next book by the same author name, 13,000 sell, now they'll only preorder 13,000, etc. Apparently the software is so blindly applied that the bookstores (or, more likely, the distributors) never turn this behavior off, and so stupid that just changing the author's name resets it. It would be hard to believe if I hadn't heard it uniformly from so many authors.

That being said, I do think it's quite interesting that publishers seem to tell female authors to do this sort of thing all the time, but it seems much rarer for male authors. I can think of a few cases (more recent than the widespread use of house names and multiple pseudonyms in the 1950s and 1960s to keep from having more than one story by the same "author" in a magazine issue, that is) where male authors have adopted a pseudonym. Charles de Lint wrote dark fantasy under a different name, for example, and a few male authors use a pseudonym when cowriting. But examples do not readily come to mind, whereas for female authors I can list many more examples just off the top of my head. (Doris Egan and Jane Emerson, Seanan McGuire and Mira Grant although I think that was for branding purposes, Dorothy Heydt and Katherine Blake, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Kristine Grayson...)