She's known as JK Rowling rather than Joanne Rowling for exactly this reason. Her publishers thought her book wouldn't become popular if they were obviously written by a woman.

Ah, so that is why J.R.R. Tolkien and T.S. Eliot and H.R. Giger and Mr. T only used first letters. OK, you've got me there on Mr. T but for the rest, what utter silliness. It is not as if female authors/artists have not had success before J.K. Rowling entered the stage. If this is true - and to me this is a big 'if' as this thing about her publisher trying to hide the fact that she was a woman could well be part of a political message - that publisher had some seriously skewed idea of what makes people like (or buy) books.

You’re attempting to reason backwards. Rowling’s publishers abbreviated her name to hide she was a woman. This does not imply that everyone who uses an abbreviation for their first name when being published. So your attempted counter-examples are meaningless.

I suggest brushing up on basic logic to prevent these mistakes in the future.

...or maybe I did so to indicate that using abbreviated names is a common thing among authors, men and women alike?

In a market where authors like 'Suzanne Collins', 'Jean M. Auel' and 'Marion Zimmer Bradley' (who happen to be the first three somewhat recent female authors who popped up in my head) manage to sell millions of books without hiding the fact that they are women this 'explanation' sounds more than contrived. Women write books, this has been a thing since Hildegard von Bingen picked up her quill somewhere in the 1100's. The idea that people somehow shy away from female authors is preposterous - which is also why I suggested it may be a political statement.

I do wonder whether J.K. Rowling dressed up like a man and turned her voice to sound real low when she did readings from her books, when she appeared to receive the multitude of prizes she won for those books and for all those other occasions where she appeared in public.

Perhaps this article will show you what your interlocutor means: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/06/catherine-nich...

It is not a new phenomenon for women writers to be taken a shade less seriously than their male counterparts.

> If this is true - and to me this is a big 'if'

This is pretty easy to verify.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/10/world/amanpour-j-k-rowling-in... > my publisher, who published Harry Potter, they said to me, we think this is a book that will appeal to boys and girls. And I said, oh, great. And they said, so could we use your initials? > Because, basically they were trying to disguise my gender.

She doesn't actually have a middle name, the K was just arbitrarily added to make a better initialism

That is her inference, not verified fact.

Maybe the author thought that using initials sounded more mystical or authorative, more in keeping with the corpus of fantasy works.

> Maybe the author thought that using initials sounded more mystical or authorative

Unless she's lying, the author tells what she thought in the previous quotation

> they were trying to disguise my gender.

That‘s insane!

Doesn‘t change the fact that most people who know her name also know that she‘s a woman though.

I didn't know she was a woman the first time I read the first three books. Granted, this changed quickly.