Q. V. Hunter and Dinah Lee Küng should not be combined.

Please separate Q. V. Hunter from Dinah Lee Küng, D. L. Kung and any other author. Please confirm to us at the email below. Many thanks for your swift action.

Many thanks,
Liz, Editorial
Eyes and Ears Editions
eyesandears.editions@gmail.com

? If they are miscombined (I have no idea) : sure. But if they are the same person? Why?

For ease of reference:

Q. V. Hunter
Dinah Lee Küng
D. L. Kung

So how many English language authors does Eyes and Ears Editions have that are living in villages in Switzerland?

>1 EyesandEarsEditions: You do know that you can do it yourself, don't you?

>4 Aquila: If they were the same person then one might perhaps expect more self promotion than is evident from 5 tweets in 6 years:

https://twitter.com/search?q=DinahLeeKung%20Hunter&src=typed_query

You missed the tweet where she said she was publishing a multi volume roman historical series under a pen name.
https://twitter.com/DinahLeeKung/status/506482334783524865

I suspect 'Liz' is a convenient fiction or a family member, since Liz is editorial staff at a publishing company with no web site and no social media accounts. Not sure how they are adding new authors other than asking around that Swiss village.

>4 Aquila: It's surprising how many English speakers live in small Swiss villages. This publisher is based in Switzerland.

I am not willing to separate without a specific statement that the authors are not the same person. And I am not prepared to send an email confirmation.

>7 Aquila: Ah, thank you, I did miss that tweet:

"Work on vol 5 of my Late Roman spy thriller series comes to a halt due to historical confusion among experts. If the best don't know...?"

https://twitter.com/DinahLeeKung/status/506482334783524865

I don't twitter. Sorry - not sorry.

>8 MarthaJeanne: Meanwhile they have been separated, which seems wrong.

>11 Aquila: Are they the same person, or aren't they? I have no idea, but that's the crux of the matter.

Lewis Carroll = C.L. Dodgson, Mark Twain = Samuel Langhorne Clemens , Multatuli = Eduard Douwes Dekker. Etc. Their works under their pseudonyms and under their legal names should remain on the same author pages as much as possible (imho).

But I have no knowledge whatsoever about this particular author.

The names look vaguely familiar to me; I know I did some work on the "Embers of Empire" series page (Q.V. Hunter).

I don't remember -- and I can't figure out if it is tracked somewhere in the changes log -- whether I combined the two authors or whether they were already combined when I looked at it sometime last year. If I combined them, it was because there was pretty indisputable evidence that the two were the same person.

Based on an old version of her (now defunct) website I was able to pull up via The Wayback Machine it sounds like Dinah Lee Küng has published a series of Roman-era historical novels under a pseudonym which she is choosing not to link with her real name. These may or may not be the books by Q.V. Hunter. It would probably be possible to determine this based on the book descriptions (Roman-era historical fiction is a bit of a niche genre).

I recall there have been occasional discussions about how to handle cases where an author hasn't publicly admitted to their pen name and goes to great efforts to avoid the two identities from being connected. I seem to recall that the preference was to respect this and not combine the two author names.

If that's the case here, it might explain some of the behavior in this thread.

(I would also gently point out that if this is the case, the horse has probably left the barn at this point regarding keeping the identities strictly separate: the internet remembers everything.)

I think it's really strange that so many LTers want to combine author accounts that might be for the same person instead of wanting to keep accounts that aren't certainly for the same person from mixing in ways that will likely cause reader/buyer confusion.

Also, in this case, Q. V. Hunter's publisher is saying they're not the same person. The author with the other pen names is an LT member who isn't claiming to be Q. V. Hunter. The evidence that they're lying and hiding that specific identity, respectively, seems weak to me. Multiple writers who live near the same historic sites couldn't have written in the same genre with similar settings as other at the same time? Writers share research and writing schedules. They often support each other's works. That's not unusual.

>15 aspirit: No. The publisher never said that they aren't the same person. She only said that they wanted them separated. The fact that the publisher never said that they aren't the same person is what bothers me.

My view is that unless there is clear evidence that they are the same person, the author pages should be separate.

I must say, however, it is suggestive that:
a) Küng's Twitter account refers to "vol 5 of my Late Roman spy thriller series", and
b) there is no evidence of such a series under that name, while
c) there is such a series written by someone living in the same area (but see below), who has
d) the same publisher

Though perhaps not dispositive.

On the other hand, Küng lives "outside Geneva" and Hunter in "a Jurassien village". I suppose technically any place that isn't Geneva could be described as "outside" of it, but there are a couple of cantons between Geneva and Jura, so I don't know . . .

>15 aspirit: The publisher is telling us emphatically not to combine the names. That's not exactly the same thing as saying they're not the same person.

If the two names are not the same person, it seems a bit of a puzzle as to how they ended up combined in the first place, seeing as they have no superficial similarity to one another.

I don't see any evidence -- beyond the publisher's request -- that the original combination was incorrect, and some evidence suggesting that the combination wasn't inaccurate.

I agree that having written books which share the same general historical setting is not sufficient evidence to assume that two people are the same. However, the archived version of Dinah Lee Küng's website (which I'm fairly sure I remember looking at a year or so ago when it was still online) mentions a few details about her pseudonymous historical fiction series. Both her series and the QV Hunter series are set in the same period of Roman history -- one that isn't particularly popular in the genre -- and feature the same historical figures. Both are described as espionage thrillers (again, not an especially common choice for the genre). The location doesn't have any particular connection to Roman-era Switzerland, as far as I can tell, so separate inspiration from local history doesn't seem plausible. Both Küng's website and the publisher descriptions of the Hunter books mention book six of the respective series featuring the same rather obscure historical event. Certain turns of phrase in the Hunter book descriptions feel very similar after looking at Küng's website. Etc.

On the archived webpage, Küng seems pretty clear about wishing to keep her pseudonym a secret, so I'm not going to be any more explicit with the examples, but it seems to me that the connections are there to be made.

>17 lilithcat: https://twitter.com/DinahLeeKung/status/1186719715458256896

"I am now going to go to bed, and hope that soon the dulcet @RemainiacsCast
'fu*ck this Brexit sh*t' tones of @iandunt
will soon be flowing into my ears in the darkness of the Jurassien hills to explain what comes next."

>19 Aquila:

Ha!

>17 lilithcat: "a Jurassien village" could refer to a village in the Jura mountains, not necessarily to one in the canton Jura.

>21 MarthaJeanne:

True.

I must say, whatever the case is, the author (or authors!) certainly has (have) us putting on our deerstalkers.

>16 MarthaJeanne: and >18 spiphany: The publisher* said they aren't the same person in the disambiguation notice. It's what prompted me to separate the authors.

(*who started this topic? See below--)

... but it the notice was added by DinahLeeKung? I don't know exactly what's happening, but below is the notice from the change log.

Dinah Lee Küng/D. L. Kung is not Q. V. Hunter, the author of the Embers of Empire series. Please separate these two authors as soon as possible. Many thanks, please confirm immediately, Liz, Editorial Eyes and Ears Editions eyesandears.editions@gmail.com

>24 aspirit:

it the notice was added by DinahLeeKung?

Interesting. The current notice was added by EyesandEarsEditions, but the original one was added by DLK, but signed by the mysterious "Liz".

>25 lilithcat: "I'm Brian." "No, I'm Brian!" "I'm Brian and so's my wife!"

/q.v. Life of Brian

>24 aspirit: The notice seems to have changed multiple times over the last several days. When I saw it, it said "Please do not combine or associate this author with any other author."

I'm not arguing that the authors should be combined again. The publisher has been very clear about their wishes and I don't see that it makes any sense to go against that, regardless of what the actual facts of the matter might be.

I think the evidence tells a different story -- rather compellingly so. Under other circumstances I would not be stating my conclusions about the identities of the authors in terms of "may" and "if" and "possibly".

However, given the efforts by the publisher and author(s) to control the branding and a certain secretiveness that is evident here, I'm reluctant to be more direct. There seems to be something going on here which I don't understand and I don't particularly want to go around poking sticks under rocks to see what comes out.

I do think that if there is a pseudonym that was supposed to be kept a secret, someone at one point was rather careless about leaving clues that would allow people to connect the dots.

>27 spiphany: Speaking of being careless about clues, or just plain carelessness, is the comma in the signature line between "Liz" & "Editorial" a mistake? Is Liz's last name Editorial? In which case, lucky for her that's what she decided to do for a living. Or does Liz not have a last name? In which case, she wanders the world as Liz, like Madonna but less famous. Or is the author of 5 or 6 volumes of historical fiction not imaginative enough to invent a last name or just an initial?