Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Not daft at all. I've been waiting for somebody to notice

Short answer:

SF Masterworks has been moved to the Publishers section.

Long answer:

We are updating some areas of the main menu to make room for more content and to correct some confusion between "lists" and "series" etc. First a few notes on list types to get everyone on the same page...

A book list is a list of books that a person, group or organization has assembled from disconnected books by multiple authors and publishers that they have determined fit a particular theme. They usually have some claim to excellence -- like being the best of their type -- as the rationale for their creation. Examples of these are all the ones you see in the book lists section.

A WWEnd list is a list of books that has been created purely from our data or as an idea from one of our team. Top Listed, Most Read, and Top Nominated are all based on the data we have collected for outside awards and lists and our own user data. We don’t exercise any editorial control over those they come straight from our data and can change over time as our data changes. Other WWEnd lists are curated by Uber Users who had a great idea like Spoltz’s LGBTQ list or answered the call for help to create a list like Engelbrecht who took over and massively expanded the Genre-Lit Flicks list.

A publisher list is a list of disconnected books by multiple authors with a particular theme attached. These are books the publisher has the rights to publish and usually have some additional claim to excellence and/or collectability as their raison d'etre. They often have a common cover design that joins them together like Gollancz SF and Fantasy Masterworks or Winston SF while the Easton Press SF Masterworks are all published in leather-bound volumes. These examples have been moved from the Book section to the Publisher section and we have just added 6 Ace Doubles lists as well to kick things off.

Author lists are lists of books that focus on the authors themselves -- usually as biographies or studies etc. We don't have any of these lists on the site yet but we do have the data for some like the Starmont Reader's Guide, Borgo's Popular Writers of Today, and Modern Masters of Science Fiction. You’ll see these pop in soon.

These different kinds of lists have all been dumped into the Book section where they are growing out of control and not leaving enough space for all the new lists — of all types — that are coming down the pipe.

Now for the series/list confusion part. A series is different from a list in that the books tell a contiguous story or take place in the same universe. Most series are single author like Tolkien's LoTR trilogy but they can be by any number of authors like the Expanse series with 2 authors all the way up to The Horus Heresy series with dozens of authors.

In the old system we used to input list books into the DB as series in order to connect them together so users could see them all in one place. Hence we had publisher lists like the Ace Doubles in as series. Not a huge deal in this case because the Ace Doubles are rather unique with their double titles and covers etc. The worst they did was clog up the SF book series page. You will note that they are no longer there which has shortened that page by hundreds of books.

The problem comes in when a book is part of a series AND a publisher list. A book can only be part of one series but we can add that same book to any number of lists. Right now there are hundreds of books in the DB that have their series field taken up with list data. Those books can’t be part of their proper series until we get that field cleared for what it was intended for. In the most obvious of cases we have manually made those updates to keep the series whole but that leaves a gap in the list that has to be deal with.

These updates will correct many display errors across the site, give us room to grow our data and make our navigation more intuitive — though it may take some getting used to the changes. Most of these updates are required for the changes that are part of WWEnd 3.Oh! and will make more obvious sense seen there. We are making them now because we have the time and they are almost entirely data updates that require very minimal code.  They will not impact development on the new site very much at all and will position the new site to be that much further along when we do launch.

I’ll take my prize for “longest answer ever” now. Anyway, I hope that answers the questions I expect to be asked as folks grok to the new changes. If it has not, please hit me here with further questions or comments etc.

Cheers!