Simple Questions: October 11, 2022

In King's case, he was writing more books in the 1970s than his publisher was comfortable publishing (back in the days when one book per year was pushing it), so he used the Bachman pseudonym to see if he could replicate his success, under the radar, with paperback originals and very little publicity, simply on the quality of the book and the writing.

It's debatable whether a publisher would have indulged an unknown writer with as many books as 'Bachman' published, but he'd graduated through four paperbacks (the last one or two of which had more than one printing) and up to a hardcover release for his fifth book Thinner, though King's identity was blown just as that book was published—so it would seem as if King's experiment was succeeding. He was already writing another Bachman book, which was later published under his own name—a book called Misery.

He's kept the pseudonym going as a bit of fun, more than anything. He wrote two books as 'mirror universe' versions of each other, using both of his publishing names, and later exhumed another of his 'trunk novels' (books he'd put aside early in his writing when they were rejected—these were the source of most of the early Bachman books) and published it, rewritten slightly, as if it were a lately discovered Bachman book.