I own scrivener so it’s in my own name, but I also do a lot of ghost writing and work under pennames-- in some cases, it’s pretty important that my own name not show up. So how can I be certain that my name as owner of the program isn’t showing up in any metadata and is there any way to set it so by default there is no name for author in the meta data so in case I forget I’m not having uncomfortable discussions with clients.
You can set this in the Project Properties tab of Project > Meta-Data Settings… The defaults are taken from your Windows account name and there is no way to change this, but you could create a new blank project and set these to whatever you want, then save the whole thing as a new project template for future work. (You could also make whatever other preparations you’d want for your new projects to save as part of the template.)
In compile, the author name, etc. is taken from the Meta-Data Settings, so if you have set these for the project, they’ll be called the way you want them for any placeholder tags used in compile. For most places in compile, they will need to be explicitly referenced via a placeholder tag like <$surname>, so you could also create a compile preset that simply avoids these if you like. The only time they are inserted automatically is for ebook formats where the project title and author name are used for the meta data settings if none is supplied. So again, if you have already set this information in Project > Meta-Data Settings, it will be used here; or if you explicitly enter some other name in the compile settings, that will be used instead and saved as part of a saved preset.
So if I go into the metadata settings and just change my name from X, to Y that does it the, correct? I’ll just have to put a sticky note up reminding me to always do that 
. (so much for the paperless office).
Note that all project settings are saved when you create a custom starter template. Just set up a blank project the way you like, including this setting, and then use the File/Save as Template… menu command. You could create a few starters for the different types of projects you work with regularly. You can discard the starter projects after creating a template off of them. If you need to revise them in the future, just make a temporary project from the template, modify it, then save it again.