Last week I read a submission note at Velum where the author explained that they’d tried to submit their novel for publishing before, but were told that without their identity and personal brand, the book was just another collection of paper on the agent’s desk.

I chewed on that for a minute.

Doesn’t feel like going out on much of a limb to say that most writers today probably spend an inordinate amount of time actually writing their personality to sell a book. Authors’ entire trajectories have been made on TikTok. Look at Colleen Hoover, who’s on movie adaptation #39393 soon with Anne Hathaway starring. It sets a standard for everyone else that’s hard to mirror. The publishable comparative advantage is social capital, which is a necessary evil in the publishing pipeline. The writing has to be so undeniable that the conversation about building a profile goes away.

But the reality is that most writing isn’t that undeniable. Most writing is just good, and good doesn’t cut through anymore without a face attached to it.

Anonymous and Reclusive Authors Who Became Literary Legends

Withholding creates myth and fame on its own. When I think about authors who have remained relatively reclusive, like Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, I think of the painstaking lengths they’ve gone to keep their lives away from the spotlight. Franz Kafka wanted his executor to burn his work after death. Emily Dickinson famously shared only a fraction of her work with friends during her lifetime. Cormac McCarthy gave his first interview ever with Oprah after winning the Pulitzer, where he appeared to be more uncomfortable than anyone has ever been since interviews have been given. Fernando Pessoa used his vague identity to multiply fictional personas as an exploratory avenue. Reclusivity is on the same end of the spectrum as anonymity, lore-making in its essence.

In the same way we’re chuffed by a great vintage find or a unique piece of art discovered in a junk shop, there’s delight in finding something less known, something less available to the general public. In most cases that makes the stuff you found cooler. Why is it, then, that we demand something so different of our authors, that we require them to engage in public persona-building in order to hold our attention?

Anonymity Frees Writers from Censorship

Elena Ferrante has talked many times about how removing her name freed her to write without self-censorship, without the audience’s gaze dictating her pen strokes. It gave her the ability to write about experiences that felt too vulnerable to claim in public. It’s one of the reasons I think her work is so genius because it’s so raw and at times so unflattering, almost disturbing! The Lost Daughter and The Days of Abandonment live rent-free in my brain for this reason.

Anonymity isn’t always generative. It can be adaptive, too. It gives writers protection from a system that requires performance in the first place. Everyone from Substack’s literati loves Middlemarch. Mary Ann Evans published it under a male pen name because the literary world of her time would not have received it the same way from a woman. The anonymity allowed Evans to make the writing real.

For some writers, though, anonymity was never much of a choice in the first place. Charles W. Chesnutt submitted his first short story to The Atlantic Monthly in 1887 without disclosing that he was Black, and it was celebrated before anyone knew who made it. When his identity became known, the reception cooled.

Anonymity protected Ferrante's interior life from the audience. It protected Evans from a literary world that would have dismissed her on the basis of her gender. For Chesnutt, it was the only way to get a racist gatekeeping system to evaluate his work honestly. Same mechanism, three entirely different systems to survive.

Why Anonymous Publishing Produces More Authentic Literature

Anonymity doesn’t necessarily produce better work, but I believe it creates a writing environment in which an author can avoid distortions like reputation management, audience expectation, and market forces driving what’s deemed good and what isn’t. The writer gets to write because the writing demands to be real and exist.

Publishing now may be working against the mystique that makes certain writers endure. The work can last when it isn’t written for an algorithm. Anonymity just may be the answer.

For eight years, my job was to make brands feel human online. Somewhere in there, I forgot how to feel human offline.

After graduating with a lit degree at the tail end of the '08 recession, my dream of working in publishing proved itself fanciful fast. I took the common alternative path for most lit majors and ended up in marketing, which meant about eight years of being the resident 'You're young, why don't you do our Instagram?' person. In the fall of 2019, I turned in my notice on all of it. I was thrilled to hand back the keys to all those accounts and consider this phase of professional life done.

A new job always brings on the urge to start fresh — to shed a layer that no longer feels right. I’d dabbled in micro-influencing for plus size fashion, a genre of creator content that took hold in a major way during the body positivity movement’s heyday (RIP pre-zempie body positivity but that’s another post). By January 2020, I’d deleted my Facebook, deactivated Instagram, and deleted Twitter (later reinstated for work, tough to be in PR without seeing reporters’ updates there, I don’t make the rules).

The relief was immediate. From what, exactly, I still can’t fully tell you. Just a pervasive sense that being so totally online was hurting me. The constant performance, the internet’s gaze following me around like a creepy portrait, seeping into my daily choices. I wanted to understand what would be truer about life without it, how my instincts would find their sharpness again. If I was selecting clothes, food, art, and even friends based on how they shaped up my grid, was anything about my life real or meaningful anymore?

Elena Ferrante made me do it.

That shift put me in a state of constant examination about identity, about how we arrive at values and action and a life that reflects our truest selves when we’re constantly plugged into something that keeps us from developing any sense of self at all.

Around the same time, I picked up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series and went on to read her full canon during the first months of lockdown. When I got to Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, something clicked hard. Even the title — the frantumaglia, a shattered, jumbled mass of fragments — described the chaos and disquiet that Ferrante says inspires her to write. I too felt jumbled. The further I got away from living according to the public gaze, the more that disquiet spoke to me.

Ferrante’s anonymity became a common dinner table topic for my husband Mo and me. As childless, yuppie work-from-home assholes with too much time on our hands, most of our dinners turned into two-hour examinations of something we’d read or thought about that day. After years of touring North America as a stand-up comic, Mo was planning to use pandemic time at home to write and transition to off-stage creative projects, and he was considering doing all of it anonymously. We were clearly arriving at a similar conclusion: the internet’s arbitration of how art should be surfaced and consumed was poisonous, both to the artist and the consumer.

That’s when the question found me: Was anyone treating anonymity as a way to mitigate the specific pains the internet has brought to authors and modern publishing?

Pen names and work by unknown writers have always been part of literary history — the word “anonymous” was first used specifically to indicate literature published without an author’s name. Zora Neale Hurston, the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley all wrote anonymously or pseudonymously at some point. Would writers like Harper Lee or J.D. Salinger have published at all in the modern era? I wasn’t sure.

FFS, just launch this already.

These questions and ideas lived in my head for the next five years. During that time, Mo and I had two babies. I got more entrenched in my 9-to-5, which involves juggling multiple time zones and more demands than I can summarize here. Mo’s podcast, which he still hosts anonymously, is closing in on its 75th episode. I had a lot of conversations with friends I trust about feeling crazy for still wanting to start a publishing house for anonymous authors.

But I also made friends with entrepreneurs and business owners in Atlanta who are successfully growing their life passions into actual beloved brands while also being attentive parents and partners. Their example and counsel has been formative. And Substack happened! This platform is the only corner of social media that makes me feel genuinely excited about pursuing a project like this. This crowd loves books, small publishers, and people pursuing something they feel minor insanity about.

After our second baby was born in July, the itch I’d felt for so long finally got a boost of creative juice. In this postpartum era, I’ve wanted nothing more than to finally do the thing that had been buzzing around in my brain, to create something meaningful and purposeful in this world. So I spent my maternity leave researching, writing stuff down, talking to people about it, and finally moving forward.

No name. No noise. Just art.

Velum Books is a publishing house built for authors who, for any reason, want to be seen for their work and not a manufactured following.

We’ve been accepting submissions for a few weeks and have already seen over a dozen works of fiction come through. I’ve seen so many writers here on Substack talk about their frustrations with the publishing world and the pressure to be an author-as-brand, but I’m still kind of shocked every time a submission lands in my inbox. Holy shit, it’s happening.

I’ll be posting here with updates on what I’m building at Velum, lessons I’m learning, and the ideas and writers inspiring the project. If you know someone who might think this is cool — or better yet, someone who wants to put their work out with a press that protects their identity — I’d be so grateful if you pointed them our way.

Thanks for being here. Much more soon.

— KA

Velum Books accepts submissions of anonymous and pseudonymous fiction. Learn more and submit at velumbooks.com.