Sunday, March 14, 2010

Should E.F. Blevins or EF (Beth) Blevins be my new penname?

Right away I'm going to tell you that this is a garbage post that you probably shouldn't read.

It is the first and probably only post I'm going to write specifically for an Internet search engine. I am trying to see if "E.F. Blevins" is a searchable term and how easily it is found, before I consider changing it to my penname.

As I wrote months ago, there are a lot of Beth Blevinses already floating around on the Internet. Since then, through a daily Google vanity search for "Beth Blevins" I've discovered many more, even after subtracting those I already knew about: Beth Blevins the doula, the realtor, the "gather the women" promoter. And still more pop up every day. There's a Beth Blevins who's in a graduate journalism program, using "Beth Blevins" as part of her byline. A Beth Blevins who writes diddits on movies (whatever that is). And then there are all the Facebook Beth Blevinses who come onto FB each week, and/or add new friends.

I'm OK with being EF Blevins or E.F. Blevins (despite the fact that someone told me it sounds too much like JK Rowling). I like not being so easily identified as one gender or another. I'm not so sure I like the way some people will pronounce it: "Eff Blevins!"

I suppose I could eventually be known as "the writer formerly known as Beth Blevins."

Oh, wait, I forgot to see if anyone else is going by E.F. Blevins. I'll know in a few minutes, after this is posted, and after I start to search for it.

2 comments:

Eric K. said...

E.F. Blevins has an oddly made-up sort of appeal.

Beth Blevins said...

OK, so I ran my Google search on "EF Blevins" this morning and discovered two things:

--EF Blevins is also the name of a horse breeder, and a few dead people.

--I forgot that I signed in as "EF Blevins" when I wrote a couple of reviews on Amazon.com a while back. The amazing thing is that two of those reviews--for Numi tea and a pair of sandals--are all over the Internet. Various companies selling those products are using the reviews I posted on Amazon in their product pages. I have tried to delete the reviews from Amazon before, but it looks like even if I manage to do that, they will still live on elsewhere.