Author Names

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The Naming of Parts
by Puddin'

I've noticed quite a few stories with no titles and/or author names attached.

There may be a title vaguely associated with the story taken from the file name, but those two things are not necessarily the same thing, as you can see with this very blog.

Likewise, there may be a posting name associated with the story, but again, those things may have little or nothing to do with the author.

It's fairly important, if one wants at some point to assert a copyright to one's words, to have something like a real name or pseudonym that one can claim in the actual story display page.

Titles cannot be copyrighted, so a hundred authors can all write books called War and Peace and have no claim against each other.

Likewise, most names are not unique, so a hundred John Smiths can write a hundred novels, all named War and Peace, but you start to see the difficulty, which is why most writers come up with a name that is unique within their own particular genre, and there's a sort of tacit agreement not to tread on each other's toes in this regard.

If one becomes famous (even a little famous) in a particular genre, trademark law becomes an issue, so one might face problems if your real name was Anne Rice and you wanted to write Vampire or Witch novels, unless you happen to be the same Anne Rice who wrote The Vampire Lestat and made the name famous to begin with.

With really famous names, you probably don't want to use the name at all, even if you were given the name at birth, as many people named McDonald have discovered to their cost when they tried to open a restaurant named after themselves.

It's a reasonable precaution, then, to make sure that a reasonable story name and a reasonable author name are included on the page. Most authors are proud enough of their work that they insist upon it, but publishing with no name at all is an invitation to theft.

There are handy little buttons at the top of the story Body: entry box that make it easy to enter a title and an author, the [C] button (fourth from the right) and the [H] button (fifth from the right), which centre and emphasise selected text respectively.

They can be used sequentially on the same text or any single selection.

Right-Justified Title and Author

The Vampire Fred
by Edna Farkle

Centred Title and Author

The Vampire Edna
by Fred Farkle

By the way, when you look at the shelves in any real bookstore, you'll notice close to zero "author names" that look like 'Romeo472.' Part of trying to be a real author is looking like a human being, not a robot with a serial number attached to a model name. Mind you, there is a real book named Ralph-124C 41+, by Hugo Gernsback, but this describes the naming conventions of a dehumanising civilisation of the future, which Ralph himself eventually transcends. The book itself is written very badly, but it's simultaneously one of the most important works of Science Fiction ever written, a very pretty paradox.

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