Will the Real Morgan Drake Please Stand Up?

What’s in a name, said the Bard once. Meaning to say names are just labels. He wasn’t wrong, but he also did not have a playwright named Will Shakespear churning out 25 new plays a month for the good people of England.

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D. Bruce Berry (remember the guy) was a comic book artist you might never have heard of. He inked Jack Kirby’s pencils for DC in the seventies. He also, early in his career, wrote a number of erotic novels under the name Morgan Drake. He died in 1998, but the name went on.

In late 2024, I finally got the guts to start writing with a mind to publication and not just for fun. Soon, the big question posed itself: publish under my real name, or choose a pen name. Because — hopefully — I’ll eventually publish a different set of material under my real name, pen name it was. And trust me, it was not an easy choice.

Not just the name itself, but having to use one. Italy has nothing like the American DBA (Doing Business As), so the name is not registered in any meaningful way unless trademarked. And trademarking, as you will see, is a whole ‘nother issue.

The name itself, of course, took some thought.

The first book I drafted — set in Dimidium — was a maritime trilogy with pirates, sirens, and sea monsters, which is, as of today, still unpublished. So Morgan came first: for Henry Morgan — pirate, privateer, eventually governor of Jamaica — but also for Morgan le Fay, a figure who sits in Myth, a hero and a villain depending on who’s doing the telling.
Furthermore, Morgan is gender neutral, something I was specifically looking for, as I use they/them pronouns.

Drake was for Sir Francis Drake — another pirate, but also for the dragon-like creatures . Both names carry the sea in them, and the fantasy as well, which was exactly what I needed for the kind of fiction I was building toward: dark maritime fantasy, epic fantasy, gothic and historical paranormal romance. The Dimidium universe and the Reckoning Cycle.

I don’t think the initials were an accident. My subconscious must have been at work, because when I found myself with MD, apt considering the medical degree I’m pursuing. And DM, for the decades of Dungeons and Dragons scenarios I’d run long before I thought to call myself a writer.
It worked on many levels already, but when I saw it written down I knew I wanted it to spell MAD eventually — which is what my family called me when I said I wanted to build a career in the arts. And so the middle name, Alistair, was chosen.
Alistair D. Morgan also happens to sound snobbish enough to eventually publish literary criticism non-fiction.

The fact that someone had used the name before was coincidental — a little speed bump on the road. What I found when I checked (extensively) was a dead man and a handful of one-off titles in genres I don’t work in. A name not ‘in use’, per industry standards.

My due diligence done, I proceeded.

I bought morganadrake.com, built the site out, claimed the social accounts and all the various profiles that are considered ‘necessary’ in the indie landscape. I made sure the website was indexed, kept my name and bio consistent across every platform — in short, did all the things they tell you to do when you start out.

When I asked about trademarking the name, I was told to wait — establish a publication trail first. So I waited, published my first book in early April 2026, then applied.

And I was denied.

Between my first book’s publication and the trademark office reviewing my request, another Morgan Drake had appeared. Within a week of my first book, they had published their first titles — yes, titles plural. By the time my application was reviewed, they had twenty-five books out. By the end of July 2026, over a hundred.

I was too late by a week.

I found out they existed in early May, when the rejection reached me. I looked up my name on Amazon and found a swathe of cheap erotica titles clogging up the search results.
At the time I thought to myself, well, they have a faster publication rhythm and more titles, but there will still be ways to differentiate us — genre, for one thing, and its relative metadata— still ways to make sure my name can compete in search results on common search engines like Google.

So, again, I did my research. I tightened up my metadata and keywords on Amazon and other retailers, improved my bio across all the platforms my name and work appears on, and went on a SEO and GEO deep dive to make sure my titles would surface when my readers searched for me online or through AI queries.

For a while, it seemed to work. With the exception of Amazon search results — whose algorithm is layered and way too finicky for me to try to play with — my position in search results improved.

And then something happened, and my visibility tanked almost overnight. Now, as you can imagine, not having a publishing house at my back, means I make or break my fortune, and being visible and easily findable by your ideal readers is a big part of that.

So, what had happened exactly?

By the end of July 2026, not even four months after their first book was published, the other Morgan Drake’s titles — now over a hundred — had started filtering into the Goodreads database. This happens naturally, when you publish on Amazon books propagate automatically to Goodreads through the platform feeds.

The system found the oldest matching name — do you remember Berry and his own use of Morgan Drake in the seventies? — and attached the new catalog to it. Berry’s work had decades of bibliographic presence, and this huge new catalog was now sitting on top of his authority.

Now, in case you are unfamiliar with the ins-and-outs of search engines, and are wondering why this mix up would be in any way important (or concerning my work at all), let me explain.

In search engine terms, “authority” refers to how established and trustworthy a source appears to be. An older account with a longer publication history signals reliability to the algorithms — and so its content ranks higher in results than a newer one, regardless of what the content actually is.

Because this new Morgan Drake’s work was conflated with an author published decades ago, the algorithm treated the name as established. Authoritative. Thus giving it preferential treatment.

That’s how my work got buried.

As you can imagine, I was pissed. So pissed that I went and vented to friends online about it, which is something I usually refrain from, accustomed as I am to going straight to problem-solving before anything else.

It just felt so unfair. I had done everything I was supposed to do — established my presence on multiple platforms, kept a consistent name, produced years of work online before anyone had heard of the other Morgan Drake — and none of it mattered, because the algorithm was comparing apples to peaches. Rewarding speed and novelty (width) instead of depth.

Publishing a hundred titles in three months is not illegal, of course, and neither is using a name that resembles another author’s. There was nothing for me to report, nothing to flag. Amazon themselves confirmed this when I contacted them, worried about my underage readers — and their parents — stumbling upon those titles alongside mine.

Their algorithm works the way it works. They were very sorry.

Goodreads people were a different story.

Amazon policies had failed me, but as a last-ditch effort, I contacted the Goodreads team asking them to separate Berry’s legacy titles from the new catalog that had landed on top of his work. Suspecting that Berry (having died in ’98) had never actually created an account on the platform, nor ‘claimed’ his books.

They asked for the specific titles and identifiers, which I provided — not without difficulties, as a couple of those books were written before ISBNs were even a thing and only had a publisher code — and they actually did it.

Berry now has his own page, separate from the newer catalog. Yay for the system working.

To be perfectly honest, as my books were not directly impacted by this mix-up on the Goodreads platform, and being only a third party rather than Berry’s estate, I had no idea whether I was even allowed to petition for something like this. Goodreads librarians and their help desk deserve all the praise here. Once they understood the issue, they acted swiftly.

While they worked on their side of things, I went back to — you guessed it — research mode.

I went on a deep dive on disambiguation and ID methods online, but I also reached out to the community. I asked authors who have been in the indie space much longer than I have, whether anyone had ever faced a similar issue, and if there was any established solution. The goal, improving visibility agains an author with a similar pen name and a much bigger catalog.

Obviously, this is an edge case.

One would hope that authors would research any name they want to use — especially in their chosen genre, and not use the. same name as someone long established and with a huge backlist to boot.
But as a couple of authors have already told me they’ve experienced something similar — a new author appearing from nowhere, with an identical or very similar pen name and hundreds of new published titles — I fear it will not stay an edge case for long.

Below are some of the less common ways I found to improve my chances at discovery on search engines. They are not part of the standard suggestions for new authors (not that I have seen, at least) and can help in case you, for whatever reason, need to take measures toward disambiguation.

First things first, the obvious stuff. Claim your URL and your social accounts if you haven’t already. Make sure your website is indexed by Google Search Console. Use your name consistently everywhere — middle initial or name included, if you have one.

Once that’s in place:

ISNI — the International Standard Name Identifier. Not free, but cheap — a small one-time fee of around $5 through MVB’s registration service. It assigns a unique sixteen-digit number to a creator and links all known versions of their name together in the global bibliographic systems used by libraries, publishers, and databases. Mine, for Morgan A. Drake, is 0000 0005 3075 7028. My imprint Hæmera Edizioni has one too, so it’s not just limited to identifying human beings.

Wikidata — the structured data layer underneath Wikipedia, indexed by every major search engine and AI system. A Wikidata entry is a machine-readable statement of identity: who you are, what you write, what names you go by, what platforms you’re on. You don’t need to be Wikipedia-notable to have one. It takes about twenty minutes to set up properly, and is completely free. I’d suggest creating an ISNI before adding a Wikidata entry, so you can include it amongst the identifiers.

Schema markup — this is a bit more complex, but if you have no coding experience, any AI will be able to create it for you. It amounts to a short string of JSON code embedded in your website, or inside specific articles like this one, that tells search engines’ crawlers who you are, what you write, and where else to find you. Sort of like an invisible fingerprint. The code must be anchored to a domain you own and control (you cannot add code to other people’s websites, after all) which is why getting a URL and even a basic personal website is the first thing on this list.

Trademark your name — try early. Before you publish if your country allows it, or immediately on first publication. As you have seen before, once someone else has established use of the name, the window is gone.

Reviews and ratings — ask for them without shame. Works with a solid amount of social proof naturally rank higher in search results, which makes them more easily found by other readers. I know, asking for review feels cringy, but still now you know how much a rating or review on Goodreads is worth.

As human authors, we cannot compete speed-wise with a machine, and we should not try to, because we aren’t machines. A hundred books in three months is not a publishing pace — it’s a processing rate. But the algorithm doesn’t account for that, and so indie authors are increasingly having to learn to speak to machines in machine-readable ways to remedy that.

The above are all ways you can talk to the machine in a language the machine understands to specify to it who exactly you are and who you are not — improving search results for your readers and, book after book, hopefully casting a bigger and bigger shadow over catalogs that rely only on mass-release.

( Not in the list, but worth a special mention. Writing something like this and attaching a dedicated schema to it might help as well. )

This is how I spent the past two weeks or so. Finding the right language to say, to whatever is crawling the internet: I am here, this is me, this is what I write. Morgan A. Drake is my fucking name.

Over a dead body you will have it.

The writing community right now is full of authors emailing themselves draft files and screenshotting timestamps. Documenting their process in case someone, sometime in the future, will ask them to prove they wrote what they wrote. Trying to find ways to prove their humanity.

I understand the anxiety, but I trust my readers too much to share it. And I’m not about to go around trying to prove I’m human by using machines to do it.

I honestly don’t believe there’s anything more human than imperfection, frustration, and struggle. So this is an account of my frustrations, for other imperfect humans who might be struggling with something similar.

Frustration aside, one of the long-term indie authors I spoke with during my research spree had a really nice thought for me. He said: I hope this is the biggest obstacle you’ll have to overcome in your career.

You know what? So do I.

Morgan A. Drake