Who is Kevin Sanders Kettletown?

Audiologist Wow! is a true story written by a fake author.

The book bears the name Kevin Sanders Kettletown, but you will quickly notice from the author’s profile description and photo that Kevin is a… puppet. A very well-dressed, cheerfully orange, impeccably manufactured puppet—but unmistakably inanimate.

How did this bizarre pseudonym come about?

Was the marketing department drunk? Does the Editor-In-Chief of Bad Pug Publishing have a paraphilia for Sesame Street? How ugly or uncharismatic is the “real author” that he needed to be replaced with a bulbous-nosed, basketball-headed dummy with a hand up inside him?

The back cover of Audiologist Wow! states simply that Kevin “hides his identity for fear of the consequences.”

And while I am not at liberty to breach the author’s confidence, I can offer some insight into the process of arriving at this admittedly unusual publishing circumstance.

Part One: The Author Declines

He told me the devastating news over dinner, accompanied by suburban curry and Yarra Valley shiraz. I’d been laying out the marketing plan: a conference launch, blogs, and possibly an Instagram account, when the author interrupted me.

“I’m not doing that. I’ve decided: I’m publishing anonymously.”

“What? No, that’s… commercial suicide. Why?”

“Look, Keith. I don’t want my patients to know I wrote it.”

I swallowed both vindaloo and the little negative voice in my head saying, No patient will know—because no one reads a book about audiologists by an audiologist if you won’t promote it. Instead, I said:

“So what? It’s an amazing story. You humanise audiology—not just our profession, but all the jobs connected to healthcare. It’s so honest it’s unpublishable by mainstream standards, but it’s pure, unadulterated reality. It’ll be a landmark of healthcare confessionals!”

(Yes, I may have been overselling, but I’d already sunk an indecent number of hours into editing, proofing, and formatting the Audiologist Wow! manuscript.)

“Yes, I wrote it—it’s my confession,” he replied. “But at the end of the day, I’m an audiologist. Audiology is what pays my mortgage. I’m not risking that.”

“What risk? This book will make you famous… An audiology influencer!”

“I don’t want that. I just like to write. Isn’t that enough?"

“You can’t just write!” I said. “It’s unrealistic. You’ve got to be a persona—someone the audience can connect with. Especially since it’s a true story—”

“There’s the rub! You know, there’s the thing with the tissues. What would a patient say about that?”

It was, admittedly, an awkward rub.

“Mate,” I said, washing down garlic naan with shiraz. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. You know, the “romantasy” genre is like one of the biggest sellers out there? Your sadly human antics are vanilla compared to blow-by-blow descriptions of acrobatic intercourse between dwarves, dragons, and demons! That stuff is literal pornography. With fairies!”

“But it sells,” Kevin said, laughing. “I wrote in the wrong genre, didn’t I?”

“No! You’ve made something those other so-called books don’t have—can never have. You’ve made literature. Something truly human.”

“My patients don’t want to see me as human,” he said. “Not a flawed human. Maybe even a terrible one.”

“We’re all human, Kevin,” I said. “All flawed. That’s the point.”

“It’s not a luxury I have,” he said. “What if they see the real me? And what if what they see erodes an already tenuous trust in our… perceptually challenged profession? How could I ever sell a hearing aid again?”

Here lies a problem with releasing a “true” novel. Hearing aids carry profit margins in the thousands of dollars; audiology work is reliable and well-paid. First-time books? If you sell more than fifty copies, you’ve beaten the average.

Kevin, the audiologist, had a lot to lose and very little to gain by becoming Kevin, the writer.

“But I need you,” I said at last.

“I know. But I need to protect myself. I’m too old now for the risks of youth,” he said, topping up our glasses with shiraz, a gesture so familiar: it was the first thing he ever did for me. He grinned, “But Keith. You’re the so-called Editor-In-Chief, and publishing was mostly your idea anyway. Fixing problems like this is what I pay you for, right?”

And thus, my ego came back to bite my now authorless ass. I had pushed Kevin into publishing. I had created a business just to do so, sunk my money in as readily as his. I had co-opted his creativity to live vicariously in the literary world.

Who was going to buy a book by a faceless author?

I downed the shiraz, dug into the curry, and began to think…
 
Part Two: Blame It On The Shakespeare

And so, I was left with no face.

No face for the author profile. No face to spruik the book on social media. No face at the Audiology Australia conference launch—and no hands, feet, or body to lug boxes, furniture, and marketing paraphernalia up to the exhibition floor and sell the actual bloody books.

In a crisis—and as a shameless literary nerd—I remembered Shakespeare. In Hamlet, he writes: “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”

I’m not sure the Bard intended me to take him quite so literally, but that’s exactly what I did.

Over the next few weeks, the mad idea materialised. I thought of Sesame Street and asked: What would Ernie look like if he aged into a writer? I commissioned a professional puppet maker. I coined the “Kevin Sanders Kettletown” pseudonym over a bucket of KFC with my family. Then I worked out how to sign books with a marker strapped to a stick, later clipped into the puppet’s hand.

I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself when I revealed to the “real” Kevin how I was going to replace him. Kevin picked up the page of my practice, puppet signatures. His face went pale. I admit, my first attempts were more than a little… scribbly.

“You’ll never sell books with that graffiti on them!”

“But it’s fun,” I said with a shrug. I was feeling rather smug; by choosing anonymity, he’d really given up the right to veto.

“It’s ridiculous!”

“So is much of your book.”

“The book’s a comedy, sure, but the message is serious. The farce serves to illuminate the human condition. This is turning the whole thing into some sort of silly prank.”

“No. That’s where you’re wrong. Kevin isn’t a joke. Kevin is a… symbol.”

“A symbol of an unsound mind,” Kevin whispered under his breath.

“We’re self-publishing a book about audiology,” I replied. “That’s not something anyone with a truly sound mind would do.”

Kevin nodded. He looked at the puppet sitting on the table. “He’s a cute little bastard. But I need you to do one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Mention that I’m still really good-looking in person.”

And so, I did (and do again).

And so, we published.
 
Part Three: Dogs Chasing Perfect Tails

When Shakespeare wrote, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another,” he was referring to the interpersonal masks we all wear, one after another. The small but different personas we present: the dutiful son or daughter, the fun-loving mate, the attentive lover, the scholarly student, the dutiful audiologist, and the perfect employee.

We, in audiology, as in all healthcare, present the Face of Best Practice. We must be human with patients, yes—but only the very best of humans. We must be interested in our patient, not ourselves; we must be correct even under conditions of uncertainty; we must be impartial, despite all our innate biases. It’s a clinical ideal we pursue minute by minute and never quite reach, because no one can be the best of anything. And yet professional hubris says we must.

We’re an industry of dogs chasing our perfect tails, barking at each other: “You should do better and catch it already!”

What better way to symbolise the farce, the falsity of catching the ideal, than with a puppet like Kevin Sanders Kettletown?

Kevin is bright orange, obviously ridiculous. His wobbly “KSK!” signature-from-a-stick remains atrocious. As a puppet, he attracts attention, lowers expectations and leaves behind nods of acceptance, bemused smiles, and silent acknowledgment that life is, in many ways, rather silly. He is the Face of Human Fallibility.

To laugh at him is catharsis—through that laughter, we remember that no healthcare professional is perfect and never can be.

In the end, we all wear a face. Inside, like Kevin, we’re full of some kind of stuffing—histories of mistakes, good intentions gone wrong—and we’re trying, very hard, to be greater than the dull matter that we’re composed of.

The “real” Kevin confessed to me, only recently: “You really should tell people the puppet was part of the publishing strategy from the beginning. He’s been a far better advocate—or, what did you call it? Symbol—than I ever could have been.”

“I could. And probably should. It'd be nice to imagine people thought I was that clever. But, I think, that is not the point of a… Kevin.”
 
Regardless, cunning plan or happy accident, Kevin the puppet is more than a funny author’s non-de plume:

He’s how truth reveals its face.