Kate Garrett keeps life simple—working hard, riding her beloved horses, playing cards with her brothers. Lately, though, she feels a bit restless, especially when family friend Jack Monaghan is around. Sexy and shameless, Jack is the kind of trouble you don't tangle with unless you want your heart broken. Still, Kate could always use his help in learning how to lasso someone a little less high risk… 

Jack can't pinpoint the moment the Garrett brothers' little sister suddenly stopped seeming so…little. Now here he is, giving flirting tips to the one woman who needs zero help turning him on. Love's a game he's never wanted to play. But he'll have to hurry up and learn how before the best thing that ever entered his life rides right back out again…

In case you're reading this without having ever interacted with me in the last year or so, I guess I'll start by saying that I'm a fan of Kate Griffin. She wrote the Matthew Swift/ Magicals Anonymous books that I keep squeeing over.

Another important fact about me is that I'm vastly irritated by the plethora of pseudonyms that authors seem to collect around themselves these days.

So when I saw this:

http://www.kategriffin.net/2014/04/22/the-first-fifteen-lives-of-harry-august/

I felt (a) pleased to have a new book to track down, but

(b) quite irritated because it had been in freaking Netgalley recently and I considered reading it, but ended up deciding that because the author was an unknown quantity, (1) I didn't like time-travel enough to chance it, and (2) it had high risk of becoming a romance. So I didn't request. Grr.

But hey, Kate Griffin/Claire North/Catherine Webb/Probably Someone Else As Well has a new book out!

Dear Orbit Books,

Since you seem quite ready to have your authors construct an entire retinue of nom de plumes, could you please, please do a bit of A/B testing to figure out if it even has the positive effect you seem to think it has?  Because it seems to me that knowledge of an author produces a positive bias, not a negative one.  And you certainly have the experimental subjects to actually check.

Sincerely,

An increasingly frazzled reader attempting to keep track of pen-names.