David VanDyke said:
For example, representing pen names as real persons and having conversations between them... Yeesh. Just...yeesh. That's a no-brainer, yet we still see people defending that practice and others. Legal? Sure. Ethical? No way.
I don't actually see that as a no-brainer at all. I think the ethical implications are going to depend on context and details of the situation.
The central ethical issue that a typical 'sock puppet' situation raises is that a person is deceptively creating the appearance of a broad(er) consensus of opinion. E.g. one person, rather than stating "I recommend Author Bob's books!" as an individual, pretends to be ten people making the same claim. To the uninformed observer, this claim therefore seems weightier because [human psychology stuff]. So in situations where an author has three or more pen names, and is using two or more of these to hype up a third, then it is reasonable to see that as unethical.
However, in situations where an author is using just
one pen name to recommend books by his or her other pen name.. that's much less clear, and personally I find it hard to see what is ethically problematic about it. There's no attempt to create an inflated sense of the general opinion that the books by the second pen name are worth reading - it's just one person offering his or her perspective. Further, it is presumably more or less the truth; the author probably does genuinely endorse the books that belong to his or her second pen name.
This is what may be the most important aspect of the second situation: Giving fans
the whole truth - mentioning "Oh and by the way, this is my second pen name!" - is not likely to make them
less trusting of the endorsement, but rather, it is likely to make them even more interested. If I'm a fan of Stephen King and he says "Hey, I just read this Bachman fellow, he's pretty good, check out his book," then maybe I will - because I reason that if King likes Bachman, maybe Bachman writes kind of like King, which means maybe I'll like Backman too. Whereas if King just says "I wrote this book under my pen name Richard Bachman, check it out," then I'm much more likely to check it out. It was written by an author that I already like, so the chances of me liking it are much higher than they would be if I merely thought it was an author that Kind recommends.
In any case, I do wonder what the point would be - having multiple pen names, pretending they are in fact different authors, but also cross-promoting between them. I only have one pen name at the moment. Sometime in the future, if I want to try out a very different genre, I'd probably cook up a new one. But.. different genre, so I wouldn't see the point of cross-promoting. I guess if it was a somewhat similar genre - I'm writing Contemporary Romance, so maybe if I ever did a Paranormal Romance (though I don't plan to) - but then I wouldn't see the point of
not telling current fans "Hey check out my other pen name if you like PR!"