We were always taught to never judge a book by its cover. But perhaps the greatest hurdle in literature is not judging a book by the author's name.

A female writer's pseudonym experiment is fast gaining attention in the publishing industry after she received almost nine times more manuscript requests when sending her query under a male name.

When American author Catherine Nichols found herself suffering from writer's fatigue - “I wasn’t feeling like a writer, and I hadn’t written in weeks,” she writes on Jezebel - and feeling crestfallen about studies on gender biases that favour men's names over women's, she decided to test the waters herself.

She created an email address under the male name George Leyer and sent her cover letter and the opening pages of her novel from the new account to six publishing agents whom she planned to contact that day. Within 24 hours she had five responses, three of which were manuscript requests and two which were “warm rejections praising his exciting project”.