The Name Game

Years ago I wrote a blog post on the nature of names and how we like to think we are unique as people, but searching our name on Google or any other search engine reveals how many people out there have the same name as us; sometimes their lives often resemble our own, because people's lives in general aren't as unique as we like to think.

When I first started writing fiction I needed a name to publish it under, my actual legal name wasn't an option at the time for a number of reasons, mainly that the nature of the content I wanted to write about would have conflicted with my career at the time. The name I chose was S J Doran, short for Steven James Doran, the rationale being that Steven was the name my parents were going to call me before I was born, which they eventually decided against, whilst James Doran was the name of my grandfather, whose side of the family I believe is where most of my creativity stems from. The diplomacy and sometimes a tendency to engage in confrontation stems from the other side of the family.

The first book I self-published through Amazon KDP in 2011 was called Forgotten Dreams, it was available for about a year then taken down, I made a few minor edits for legal reasons and I changed which Amazon account I used to publish it for financial reasons, relaunching it in 2012. I went on to publish a total of 8 books, of which 6 were published under the name S J Doran, my Tarot book was published under Caesar Devine another pen name, again chosen for practical reasons as the content departed significantly from what I had already put out. The last book was a textbook teaching people how to program in Java which I published under my legal name, something I was comfortable doing as it related to my offline career.

My journey through self-publishing has been an interesting one. Writing my first book was an uphill struggle, something I wasn't sure I would actually manage to do, but nonetheless I persevered because it was something I wanted to say I had done. I felt the same about each of the other books I wrote, with the exception of the textbook, that was an oddity as it started out life as a website which I eventually shutdown then repurposed the content to write the book.

I became aware a while ago of another author publishing on Amazon under the name SJ Doran, their content was unrelated and unconnected to my published works. There was pretty much zero overlap in terms of the subject matter, their settings, themes, and their style of writing were all a world apart from my own. Despite the difference though I became increasingly very aware that there was a growing confusion between the two, particularly when it came to SEO and automated summaries like those that Google's AI driven results not generate, textually the names are too close for an AI to figure out they're not the same author.

I had already been wrestling with my conscience when it comes to support of Amazon as a company for some time, the company being a source of income for me personally, yet my explicit opposition to their political positions. The current political climate has amplified that cognitive dissonance. I had already been considering removing my titles from Amazon, the discovery of another author who arguably is putting more effort into their presence on the site than I was, tipped the scales in the final decision to pull the titles entirely.

All titles I published under S J Doran are now removed from the site, and the Author Central page has been scrubbed, although not deleted as oddly Amazon doesn't let you delete it. I've also removed the links I could find on this blog so they won't lead to error pages.

My Tarot book is still available and will remain so for the foreseeable future, I don't make enough money from it for it to weigh on my conscience and I still think more people will benefit from it than would if I pulled it too. I'm actively looking for alternatives to KDP where I could upload the book to make it available and abandon Amazon KDP entirely, but this isn't a major priority for me - as much as I would like to boycott Amazon entirely, I am pragmatic. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a 33% market share, that means 1 in 3 websites online are hosted on AWS servers, as much as you may want to boycott Amazon.com to avoid funding the company, the effort is token at best, fruitless at worst, this blog for one is hosted on Blogger, owned by Google, who use AWS extensively so you're probably using Amazon infrastructure to read this post, which just highlights how insidious tech companies have become.

On a more personal and sombre note I don't want to dwell on my personal life too much right now as it's difficult to talk about, but I would like to say this being March of 2025, so far 3 members of my family have died this year; 1 each month and that has not been easy to navigate mentally. I'm revaluating a lot of my life right now and letting go of things from my past, some people and things I have had to let go of, not by choice. It was this soul-searching that lead me to make this decision. In many ways I am trying to establish an identity for myself that I feel comfortable with going forward, not one defined by the life I have lived up until this point, because so much of it is now lost it feels so cumbersome to try and hold onto it.

If I let myself be defined entirely by my past and present which are both fleeting, there is no lasting sense of self. I need a future and a vision that I want to work towards, an identity that transcends the ephemeral. As part of my 52 goals for the year I have been watching old movies considered seminal, I aspire to create something that leaves behind a lasting legacy of that nature, something that will live on when I die. What I have created so far has had an impact, that much I know, but not the kind that persists, what I have created amounts to ripples in a body of water, I want to leave behind something more.