Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Yeah, that has been a hot topic around here for the last few days.  We debated several strategies but none of them was completely satisfactory.

In the end we decided to keep 2 entries because the book was nominated for 2 different awards under the 2 different names.  This way the award listings will maintain the proper book title.  If we listed The End Specialist as an alternate title for The Postmortal it would show in the Clarke list as The Postmortal which would not be accurate and people would complain.

We thought about changing the title for The Postmortal to "The Post Mortal / The End Specialist" and replacing the cover with the combo graphic you see here but that seemed a bit odd.

We put a note in the synopsis for both books explaining they were the same book and cross-linked them.

I can't say I'm completely satified with this solution so I could be persuaded to try something different if you guys have other ideas.  Mostly I just want to do whater is least confusing to our visitors.  So what do you think?

Rhondak101 - 2012-03-28 4:05 PM Well, then. I guess I only have to add one to my reading list!

You know, I thought The End Specialist was a sequel to The Postmortal when I added it to the DB.  I figured it just came out in the UK and would be published here later.

I might be an old fuddy duddy but I prefer one title per book and one name per author.  Nice and clean.  No confusion.

That it does.  Actually, this is the first time we've run into this scenario.  There are lots of books with dual titles in our database but we've never had one nominated for different awards under different titles.  Black Man is the original title and fortunately both the Clarke and the BSFA are British awards and use the British title.

It's a mess no matter how you slice it.  <shakes fist at publishing industry>

Oh, that's interesting.  I'll have to go over and see how they work that out.

Actually, this isn't the first time that this problem has come up - M. John Harrison's third book in his Viriconium series was nominated for the BFS under it's original British title (In Viriconium) and was also nominated for the PKD under it's subsequent American title (The Floating Gods).  The book appears in WWE as a single entry with the title The Floating Gods / In Viriconium (with a note in the synopsis explaining the double title), a solution which seems to me to be optimal.  It's much clearer for users and it solves the awards statistics issue.

I'd actually like to see this approach used more extensively.  I'm sure that there are a number of times that someone looks for a book in the WWE database but doesn't find it because the book is listed under a title that  is unfamiliar to them.

The existence of multiple titles is really a pain, but listing both titles in a single entry should improve the end user experience with the site.

Wow!  I totally forgot about that book!  That one has plagued me before.  Viriconium is used as an omnibus title which confused the hell out of me when I first added it to the site.  Hmmm.  I guess since we have a precedent I'll have to update the records tonight. 

So, what do you all think about the split cover?  If you all like it I can replace the Floating Gods / In Viriconium cover with a split version too.  If you don't like it I'll use the The Postmortal cover since it was already in the DB and add The End Specialist to the cover gallery on the page.

Thanks, Engelbrecht, for pointing that out!

I knew I was forgetting something!  It's fixed now.  Thanks, Rhonda.