Sometimes authors like to write in different genres and when they do, they write under a pen name. The reason for doing so is to not confuse the core genre audience. If someone is known for writing SF, and then suddenly writes a traditional Mystery, they would probably confuse readers of both genres. That is what I believe is happening to my sole Mystery novel, Null_Pointer. People find out about N_P and then come upon this site which is all about SF novels and they get confused. Or worse yet, they assume N_P is a SF/Mystery novel.
Null_Pointer is a good book. It attempts to introduce Mystery readers to the more geeky profession of programming. But at it’s core, it is a traditional Mystery. It is that core audience that I will attempt to capture the attention of with the rebranding and re-release of N_P next Spring. In the meantime, I will be writing the next Joshua Jones Mystery novel, tentatively entitled – Kill Dash Nine. KD9 will be a darker, more intense novel and it will pit Joshua against a serial killer who happens to be a nerd. Deadly combination.
KD9 and Null_Pointer will appear as novels written by my pen name – Johnny Batch. JB blogs over at johnnybatch.com with a blog entitled “The Batch Files”. As you may have noticed, the attempt to appeal to geeks is still in full effect when I picked that particular name. In the coming week or so, all references to Null_Pointer will come off of this particular blog and slowly, as we rebrand it, N_P will appear on JB’s site.
Wait, now you’re writing two novels? Yes. Don’t look at me like that, plenty of authors have more than one iron in the fire. For me, one will be a Mystery and one will be a SF book. But if you come to this site, you will only hear me talk about my SF books. If you go to the JB site, you will hear me talk about the Mystery books. I will put a link on this site to the Johnny Batch site, to make it easy to go from here to there. But there will not be a link going from Johnny Batch’s site to this one. It’s not that I think it will be a secret who JB is, it’s just that I don’t want to confuse the Mystery readers.
So that’s the latest from Boise. How ‘about them Broncos! ;-)