How do I override default metadata search terms?

[DC_Sonoma]

Good afternoon. I'm running Calibre 0.8.61 on Windows 7, 64-bit version.

For series books, I often prepend the title with the series name, e.g., "Dark Tower 01 - The Drawing of the Three" or "Dune 02 - Dune Messiah". When I execute a search to download cover art and meta data for books with this naming convention, I get an error that advises me to make my search less specific. I know that I can temporarily remove the prepend, leaving only "The Drawing of the Three" or "Dune Messiah", and I don't have any problem downloading metadata. But is there a way that I can manually make the metadata search terms less specific, as recommended in the error message?

thank you.

[PeterT]

If you are naming the books like that so they can be easily found / organized on your eReader you should look at two things:
1: Make use of the calibre Series / Series Index fields
2: Make use of a plugboard to rename the book on transfer to your eReader.

See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118563 for more info on the plugboards.

With this approach, a book is still called (for instance) Dune Messiah in calibre. However, it is also flagged as book 2 in the series Dune.

When the book is sent to the eReader the title of the book will be changed to Dune - 2 - Dune Messiah. This means it will sort correctly by title with other books in the Dune series.

It also means that the retrieval of metadata will work correctly, in the calibre will look for a book titled Dune Messiah.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by DC_Sonoma

For series books, I often prepend the title with the series name, e.g., "Dark Tower 01 - The Drawing of the Three" or "Dune 02 - Dune Messiah". When I execute a search to download cover art and meta data for books with this naming convention, I get an error

...

But is there a way that I can manually make the metadata search terms less specific, as recommended in the error message?

The best way is to not clutter your Title field with Series field data. Do as PeterT suggests and create a metadata plugboard to insert the Series data into the title field on the fly during transfer to your device.

I setup mine to place the series data in the author field (see attached.)