I am at the beginning of my career, but I already participated in several conferences and published 1 paper (and a reply) as the main author, and co-authored a revision with many other authors. In total, I currently have 11 citations.
In my first publication, I used the last name (A) that is very common and which I don't identify with. In the review, I started using another last name (B) which is less common but still not very unique. I came now to the realization that I can use my mother's surname (C), which is very unique, pronounceable, and have other nice interesting features as beginning with the letter 'a'.
Currently, I am about to finish and defend my MSc dissertation and there are probably more publications coming along the way. Is it too late for me?
For reference, A yields > 4million results in google Scholar, B yields ~ 1million, and C have less than 100 entries.