And it's far worse today!

clipped from www.nytimes.com September 23, 1984 Doris Lessing Says She Used Pen Name to Show New Writers' Difficulties By EDWIN McDOWELL n an attempt to dramatize the difficulties faced by unknown writers, the acclaimed novelist Doris Lessing recently wrote two novels under a pseudonym. After a rejection by her longtime British publisher, the books were published in Britain and in the United States with little fanfare and few sales. Mrs. Lessing, who has written more than 25 books and has been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, said she had staged the ruse to point up the difficulties of unknown writers, to offer them encouragement and to fool reviewers who had complained that she no longer wrote in the realistic style she had once used. Mrs. Lessing said she had been planning her experiment for years. Both her American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and Michael Joseph, which published the two pseudonymous novels in Britain, were aware of the experiment from the beginning.