The Agony of Being Acronymed

Name recognition as an artist or a novelist is golden like grahams from a cereal infestation on your cupboards. Most people use that recognition to inflate their ego, because let’s face it—our society is based on self-glorification, it’s the backbone of our collective American dream. Don’t think that freedom is the only motivation for people coming to the states.

So I went about getting my last name (Sahm) embedded in every search engine I could. So when someone is looking for it, my art comes up, my writings come up, and so on. Sounds simple and industrious, right? You could imagine my dismay to learn that my last name yields more search results for the acronym for stay-at-home moms, than it does for my work. So much so that a site doesn’t even have to say Sahm, that many of the engines just associate the acronyms.

And thus I have come to meet the agony of being acronymed. That for the vast language of our simplistic alphabet, it does impede originality in some case. Since there’s a lot more stay-at-home-moms than me, I will inevitably lose that search engine battle. Unless I become ridiculously successful. But let’s not even bother smoking that pipe dream, eh?

So the million dollar question is:
If you were me, and trying to launch your creative career to another level, would you stick with Sahm, or would you create a pseudonym that has more originality?