Visitors perusing this new web site may notice that the authors’ headshots look similar. I’ll admit it: they’re not imagining things.
At the moment, the authors at Contentnea Creek Books are all the same person. In fact, none of those pen names are my real name, although it’s not terribly difficult to figure that out. (It’s also no big secret, although I’m not going to post it here.)
For a long time, I resisted the idea of having more than one pen name. It felt too much like marketing and too little like writing. While I was aware that many well-known authors use different names for different genres — I knew that J.D. Robb and Nora Roberts were the same author long before I ever read the In Death books — I didn’t think I had yet earned the right to do so myself.
More than that, I believed the best way to build a writing career was to put everything under a single name. If readers enjoyed one book, surely I wanted them to find the next one, regardless of genre. I’d worry about splitting things up later.
Over time, however, I came to understand that pen names are not for writers. They’re for readers.
Readers are picky. They don’t want to have to wade through an author’s bibliography to find the stories they’re most interested in reading. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it doesn’t mean readers are lazy. It just means they want to make the best use of their own time, which is entirely fair.
Splitting my work into different pen names means that readers don’t have to do this with my work. Instead, they can use the author’s name as a signal:
- Jennie St. Thomas writes upmarket fiction, often (but not always) with elements of science fiction and/or women’s fiction.
- Rynn Hardesty writes science fiction romance for Contentnea Creek Books.
- Stephanie Swaine writes category romance for Contentnea Creek Books. Most of her work is set in North Carolina.
And then, of course, there’s Cat Lady Firebird, although I’m going to address her in a separate post.
Although there’s some overlap, the genres above carry different expectations. Jennie St. Thomas’s work tends to be more reflective and character-focused, often asking readers to wrestle with questions about identity, belonging, and the human condition. Rynn Hardesty’s stories blend science fiction and romance, while Stephanie Swaine’s focus on relationships, community, and happily-ever-afters, often against a distinctly North Carolinian backdrop.
None of these approaches is better than the others. They’re simply different kinds of stories written for different moods, interests, and audiences.
The next logical question, of course, is why “pretend” to be a press, when in reality this is simply a self-publishing imprint? Why not just give each author their own web site?
To answer that question: each of the authors does have their own domain name (which is linked above), although they all redirect back to pages here at Contentnea Creek Books. That means that, when I update my online presence, I can do it using one site and one WordPress instance. It also means that, should a friend or family member ever want to publish something, I can go ahead and do it for them.
For now, though, Contentnea Creek Books is simply a convenient home for all of my writing. Whether a story is published under Jennie St. Thomas, Rynn Hardesty, Stephanie Swaine, or Cat Lady Firebird, the goal is the same: to tell good stories and help readers find the ones they’ll enjoy most.
And yes, the headshots really are all the same person.