Ask FreelanceSwitch: Pseudonyms and Secondary Services

Credit: Siew Yi Liang on Flickr

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, we look at names and secondary services, in two questions from the same person. Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

I’m currently a college student in a graphic design program at school frantically working out potential career paths and trajectories for after graduation. I have a couple of questions about the usage of names and pseudonyms in freelancing, and about how freelancers manage selling and working on skills in two seemingly unrelated fields.

NAMES/PSEUDS
1) Is working under a pseudonym essentially the same as working under a business name, in terms of doing the paperwork and how things look on contracts and such? I’ve seen things that cover what to do when registering and using a business/corporate name, but not as much (or maybe I’m looking in the wrong places!) on actually using a different personal name, something that your clients would actually call you in real life. Is there any functional difference between “My name is [real name] and I run Indie Design Co.”, and “My name is Seu Do Nym (but secretly I’m actually [real name]!) and I run Indie Design Co.”?

2) If you work under two different names (your real name and a pseudonym), are you allowed to use work you did under one name as part of your portfolio for the other name? In my case, I imagine that I’m likely to do a lot more illustration under my pseudonym (my pseudonym would probably fall under the umbrella of “personal project”, and would primarily be musical, with illustration/graphic design and fiction writing eventually to be added), but I’d still like to be able to include it as part of my portfolio under my real name. Would I be able to do that and just say “Here is work that I’ve done under this other name”? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen things like this before, but I figured I’d run it by you folks just to be sure.

MONETIZING UNRELATED SERVICES
3) I consider my most versatile skillset to be in things related to graphics and visuals, so I imagine that I’d be doing a lot of different work in that field. However, I also have skills with copy editing (albeit no real professional experience at this point).

I just know I’m good with picking apart text and fixing not just grammatical mistakes but also providing advice on organization and flow of the text), and would like to incorporate that into my graphic design business somehow – e.g., “Yes, I can do your pamphlet layout, but for an additional charge I can also provide copy editing services”. But after doing some reading on the freelance experience, it seems like it’s a lot of work just to keep up on ONE field!

Are there others out there who have managed to monetize unrelated services that they can personally do? I mostly just see people offering services that fall within an easily definable group. Even a lot of the jack-of-all-trades people I notice seem to stay within a certain field, e.g. almost everything they do is graphic-related, or everything they do is writing-based, and so forth. Am I just not paying attention in the right places, and there are more multidisciplinary types out there than I think? Or is it uncommon for a reason?

Hope I’ve made sense!

Thanks,
-Seu Do Nym

Question 1

Unfortunately, working under a pseudonym is not the same as working under a business name. You can certainly register a business name different than your own to freelance under, but it basically has to be associated with your real name. The IRS doesn’t particularly care, provided that you’re giving your actual Social Security number when you’re filling out tax forms, but you can run into problems if you’re signing contracts under a name other than your own. At the very least, you’d have some concerns about whether you’d be able to get the contract enforced if you had to take a situation to court. In general, I’d recommend that you use a business name rather than a pseudonym. If you feel that you have a driving need to keep your work from being associated with your real name, you can consult with an attorney to see if there are any steps you can take — but there are almost certainly still going to be people who can associate your real name with your pseudonym.

In general, you can use any work you’ve done in your portfolio, whether you’ve done it under one business name or another. The exceptions can be if you did the work as an employee or your client specified in your contract that he’d prefer you didn’t include a particular project in your portfolio. If you’re going to the trouble of setting up a pseudonym and splitting the type of work that you do, however, I’ve wonder why you’d want to include work done under another name in your portfolio? At the very least, it can confuse your clients as to just who they think they’re working with.

Question 2

The biggest reason that most freelancers stick to just one creative discipline is that it’s a lot of work to market yourself as a professional in just one area, let alone doing so with a second (and very different) field. There are some freelancers who offer secondary services in other fields, but it’s usually only as a part of a larger project focused on their main specialty. It takes some care to add in a second skill set, though. Most clients are looking for a freelancer who is great in his or her field — when they see someone who seems to be all over the place in terms of the work being offered, clients tend to worry that you’re not an expert in your field. It’s generally best to focus your work on what you want to do most and then go from there.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Siew Yi Liang.