Why did I change my name from Warneke to Douglass?
I had no intention of using a pseudonym when I was first accepted by HarperCollins Publishers in Australia, but they asked me (for ‘asked’, read ‘insisted’) to change my surname because a book by Warneke would go on the lowest shelves in bookshops. Only dwarves who fell over ever bought books by “W’s”. They asked me to pick a surname between D and M (go check the bookshops and see what percentage of authors are ‘strangely’ in the D-M bracket!) because this was the surname range most likely to be on the eye-level shelves. So I picked ‘Douglass’ because, had I been a boy, that would have been my name. (I added the extra ‘s’ to feminise it, but Douglass with the double ss is a fairly common name anyway.) So, if you think about it, ‘Douglass’ isn’t a pseudonym at all.
