Right now, I’m a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy. I want to transition to being a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. But I also have a pen name (J.M. Wight) for more religious-themed books, since there are a lot of science fiction readers who have a serious ick with that.
As I set things up for this transition, I’ve been looking at the books I’ve already published and trying to decide what to do with them. The Gunslinger Trilogy is one series I’ve been looking at particularly hard. It’s kind of an edge case, because the religious themes become more pronounced as the series progresses. One of the more consistent themes in one-star reviews is that people don’t like the “Mormon” stuff in the later books, such as the part where the main character meets with the missionaries (and ultimately gets baptized), or the alien twist in the last book that’s pulled right out of the Books of Enoch/Jasher/Moses.
If I’d planned out the whole series before I wrote the first book, I probably would have published them under my J.M. Wight pen name for that reason. But the first book was a straight-up space opera, with minimal religious themes. It was only after I’d published the first book (under my main Joe Vasicek name) that I wrote the next two books and decided to throw in the more religious stuff. And while I was careful to write it in such a way that the books never come out and say whether all that religious stuff is actually true, the fact that it’s in there at all has turned off some readers who weren’t expecting it.
The trouble is that the first book has a lot of profanity in it, and religious readers tend to be just as icky about profanity as sci-fi readers are about the religious stuff. Even more so, in fact. So before I make the switch, I will probably have to make an extensive rewrite to tone down the swearing and make it more palatable for that audience.
It’s a fairly common mistake, especially among inexperience writers: you write the first book for a certain audience, but as the series progresses, the later books appeal to a different audience, betraying some of the expectations of the first audience. When taken to extremes, it’s the sort of thing that torpedoes careers and forces writers to reinvent themselves. So given that fact, I’m kind of surprised that these books have done as well as they have.
What do you think? Should I switch them to my J.M. Wight pen name, editing them to remove the profanity and lean into the audience that isn’t turned off by religious themes in their science fiction? Or should I keep them as they are?
I think you should do whichever feels right 🙂