At the beginning of Stephen King's career there was a general perception, fair or not, among many of the big publishers that an author should only publish one book a year.
Stephen King was an extremely prolific writer, and didn't want to be pigeon-holed.
King argued with his publisher, and finally convinced them to allow him to write under a penname, allowing him to publish one book a year as Stephen King and one as Richard Bachman.
King chose "Richard Bachman," in tribute to crime author Donald E.
Westlake's long-running pseudonym Richard Stark, and his favorite band of the time: Bachman Turner Overdrive.
The name Stark was used in King's novel The Dark Half, a novel about an author with a pseudonym.
King dedicated Bachman's early books to people close to him, and worked in obscure references to his own identity.
These clues, as well as the similarity in writing styles, aroused many suspicions.
King denied any connection to author Richard Bachman and, to throw fans off the trail, dedicated Bachman's 1984 novel Thinner to Claudia Inez Bachman, supposedly Richard Bachman's wife.
There was also a phony author photo of Bachman on the dustjacket.
He also has one of the characters describe how the strange happenings are like "something out of a Stephen King novel.
" Thinner was Bachman's first title to be published in hardback.
It sold 28,000 copies before it became widely known that the author was really Stephen King, whereupon sales went up tenfold.
The link became undeniable when a persistent bookstore clerk located the publisher's records at the Library of Congress naming King as the author of a Bachman novel.
This led to the press release annoucning Bachman's death - from "cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.
" At the time of the announcement in 1985, King was working on the highly successful novel Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book.