hmmm, interesting, Katie. Every example in the book has been made generic. I talk about types, not specifics. I certainly don't want to discourage someone from seeking counseling. The audience I am aiming for would be people who have questions about what they are doing. Can they save their marriage? Are they making foolish mistakes? The tone of the book is related to my desire to shake up the reader who may be hurting other people very seriously. If the reader doesn't identify with my descriptions, they can discard them.
But I am very interested in what you are saying. I lay out specific patterns that contribute to the failure of marriages in my essay, but of course there can be exceptions. Thank you for your comments.
In my experience the kind of people who buy self help books are usually
not the people who need the shake-up talk. Screaming "It's your fault"
might help, but as a patient, and somebody who's known a lot of patients (my parents are both counselors, albeit drug abuse and not marriage counselors) the people most likely to listen to "it's your fault" are the people who already have that tape running in their heads.
If nothing else, it kind of strikes me as lacking a heck of a lot of empathy. Yes, it's nice to get to say the kind of thing you're probably thinking during counseling sessions with idiots, but not in public, and not when your target audience are the desperate (and probably codependent) spouses.
The assholes? Yeah, they're not going to buy the book. They think they're perfect. That's why they're assholes.
As for the pen name...haven't used one yet (Mostly because I failed to understand you can put Prince Humperdink into the "Author" part of the KDP "publish a new book" form and nobody's going to give a damn. If I had ten minutes to do it over again, I'd use a pen name. Maybe.) (...it's still kind of nice to look up my books on Amazon and show my relatives that I have books with my name on them there) so using one now doesn't really appeal to me. If I chose to branch out into something like erotica (because we like to be paid...) or decided to do something that isn't my "brand"--which has kind of evolved into weird-ass sci-fi/fantasy--maybe. The other value in a pen-name would be dropping a name people already associate with bad product, but that's kind of like doing the geographic cure when you're an alcoholic. If a drunk asshole gets on a plane in New York, a drunk asshole gets off in Atlanta. If a writer sucks when her name is Sophie Tucker, she's going to suck when her name is Marla Singer. She just might get another three minutes worth of sales.
Why a writer would want to start over under a new name when the old name is already successful, I'll never know. It's hard enough getting an audience the
first time. (which is the other reason "going off-brand" isn't that appealing to me. I'm BARELY to the point where I can count on twenty sales a month. Why the bleep would I want to go back down to zero?)
I think the biggest question is (always excepting erotica, because people go insane when sex is involved) if you'd be ashamed of having it associated with your real name, why would you publish it at all?