[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by ACGAuthor

ETA: One more thing, though it's a little out of the scope of this particular thread. When setting up user categories (which are then made into Kindle collections), I would like to create user categories to shorten my lists of authors (Authors A-D, E-H, I-M etc etc.) Right now what I'm doing is I'm adding a tag (Author A-D, or whatever) to the tags, and then adding that tag to the custom user category.

But that is a bit clunky because it means each time I have to add a batch of books, I have to go through and add the appropriate tag, unlike, for example, a user category by series or author name where it gets updated automatically (assuming the series/author name is correct when the book is added, of course).

Would there be some way to make this more of an automated process, if the author's last name begins with a certain letter?

And to make it even more complex, say the I want to sort by author groups withinin a particular genre. If something has a tag of, say "Urban Fantasy" or "Romance" or whatever, could I sort it by author then? I'm not good enough with composing searches to come with with that specific of a search, and then I don't know how to translate those search results into something I can add to a custom user category.

Thank you again!

All searches are boolean -- you can type in the search field

tags:"=NameOfMyTag" and authors:"=The Author"

The boolean operators "and" "not" "and not" & "or" can be used to group your search terms however you like.

You can also click any element in the tag browser on the right, and by holding down Ctrl select another element as part of the same search. The button "alter tag browser" will give you the option to choose "search type when selecting multiple items" whether to use "and" or "or".

Wherever you are adding the authors' initial, you can use the template "{author_sort[0]}" to get the author's sort value "LN, FN" with only the [0] character, where the first character in the string is "0" away from the beginning. You will need to use it in a custom column built from other columns.

EDIT: Or rather, the column should be equal to

Authors {author_sort[0]:switch([A-D],A-D,[E-H],E-H,[I-M],I-M,none)}

Continue filling out the middle with comma-separated pattern,value pairs, then end with "none" for unmatched values. Even though there should never be unmatched values, the program requires you to give a fallback.