Before I begin, let me offer some advice to writers looking to self publish for the first time. A simple piece of advice, and one I wish someone had offered me a little over 11 years ago when I published my first novel. Go on to the big river company site, and/or the farm storage for blue bloods site, and type the word Author followed by your name.

You might be lucky, you might discover you name is unique, but no matter how unique you may think it is perform this simple check anyway. Just to be sure.

I offer this advice because I, full of the innocent joy of writer knowing they were about to hold their first novel in their hand, did not do this, and this has now lead to a whole lot of work in order to fix an issue I could have avoided for the very start. An issue compounded by 11 years of publishing, because it did not fell a huge issue to begin with.

What is the issue I hear you ask… Well simply put I am not the only Mark Hayes in the world who is published or publishes their own work. I wasn’t 11 years ago, and certainly am not now. This should not lead to confusion, as all my books are listed unto my amazon author account, but it does, and a couple of times people have messaged me asking if this book or that book is also mine. Sometimes as a joke, but more than once as a serious question. So to be clear…

I am Mark Hayes, the quantum pagan, goth, steampunk and urban fantasy writer from Yorkshire who also writes some non-fiction about 19th and early 20th century writers.

I am not the Mark Hayes, form the mid-west, who write church organ music, modern hymns and music of a Christian nature.

I am also not the Mark Hayes form Ireland who writes biographies about his time partying with Robbie Williams in Hollywood.

I am also not the Mark Hayes who writes dry looking technical books about nuclear reactors, wind turbines, and other engineering (*as I am also an engineer some people assume I am , I am not)

I am also not the Mark Hayes who writes books about the British Communist party 1935 – 41 or on the Rise of the far write in Britain (*which some people who know me have assumed I was as I have a degree in political science)

I am not the Mark Hayes from Bristol who has a doctorate and writes children’s books

And I am absolutely NOT the MARK HAYES, who published a couple of kindle only books in 2025 that are only 50 odd pages long, spells the name with upper case and was made with AI. Which is obvious as who ever made this was so dumb/blatant about it that they left the ChatGPT response to their prompt in the text… (see below)

I mean , really? I have zero respect for anyone using ChatGPT to write, but leaving the response in is a new low…

That last one is a real problem. The others I don’t mind been mistaken for me or me being mistaken for them, but that last one… And before you think this is just going to be me ranting about people using AI to create art , and writing is an art, I am sure everyone knowns my opinion on that subject. But the problem is that this utter garbage is out there with the name Mark Hayes attached to it but no author account, so if you click on the name it brings up a search of all the authors called Mark Hayes, and as I am prolific, it comes up with my books first. And to be clear I do not want my name associated even by mistake with this kind of AI generate trash…

Which brings me back to my name, and the reason it never occurred to me to check to see if any else had published under it in 2015. The simple answer is Mark Hayes is my name, the whole of my name, I had no middle name and I wanted to hold a book I had written with my name on it because that was the dream I had always been working towards. Added to which publishing was a nicer world in 2015 The kind of junk that the one calling themselves MARK HAYES was producing did not exist, and if I was getting confused with other writers called Mark Hayes back then, they were at least actual writers.

So lets get up to date. I have a new book coming out at the end of the month (hopefully) which is the book version of the four year blog series I was posting here, Dear Edgar. There has been a lot of work in the background to bring that to fruition as the blogs and the book are very different prospects. But having sorted it all out I made a decision I have been toying with a while, that has a lot to do with discovering MARK HAYES existed, though I have been thinking about it for a couple of years or more, which is changing the name under which I write form Mark Hayes to Mark J Hayes.

The J is a made up initial, as I said I do not have a middle name. J is for John, my fathers name, as he is one of the reasons I do not have a middle name, the other being my mum… Also there is no Mark J Hayes publishing books out there in the world, this I have checked…

But the issue here is that my author account, the author name people follow on amazon, the name on every one of my books, is Mark Hayes, and amazon don’t really allow you to change them without rereleasing them all. Losing all those reviews, rankings and identity. Basically starting from scratch. However I wrote them an email and after a little discussion they have agreed to change my author account name to Mark J. Hayes which I will now use perofessionally.

In order for them to do this however I first have to go and change the name on every cover of every book, and on the internals on every book, and the headers on every page of every book. And do all of them before the end of the month and the new book gets published…

I have a lot of books out there as you may know, this is a lot of work…

So anyway, free advice to myself, check your name, 11 years ago in my case… For what’s in a name? Everything.