Dear Homonymous Fellow Authors... from your namesake, Katherine Roberts

Katherine Roberts (author of this blog) How often do you Google yourself to check how famous you are? If you have a unique name, no problem. You'll most likely appear on the first page of search results, even if you've only ever written a specialist non-fiction paper on the relative distance of Jupiter's moons from Earth when the planets are aligned once every 30 million years... hooray, instant fame! And easier to find means easier to sell, something you might want to consider when inventing your best-selling pseudonym in our digital age. Having a common name like mine, on the other hand, can be both a blessing and a curse. If your name is a variation of a more famous author's, you might get lucky... a Jane Rowlings title, for example, will probably be shelved beside the latest Harry Potter in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. With an online search, however, it will likely be buried beneath a hundred or so pages of JK Rowling's more popular results, and I suspect your