[nikkie]

Originally Posted by maddz

My primary use is searching specific authors (I'm slowly replacing physical books with electronic editions) so I generally want to see exact results as I'm after reverted backlist titles. I'm not usually interested in partial matches here - if I'm checking Sherwood Smith, I don't want to see other authors whose names include Sherwood or Smith. On the other hand, S N Lewitt also uses Shariann Lewitt, and Brenda Clough also uses B W Clough, so I'm not sure what to suggest; perhaps consider combining authors? Looking in my library favourites, some authors have 2 or more individual entries:
Melissa Scott x 3 & Melissa Scott Amy Griswold
Mike Resnick x 2
Nancy Kress x 2
S N Lewitt & Shariann Lewitt
Sherwood Smith x 2

Yeah, we definitely need better handling for authors with multiple pen names. It's not something we offer right now but something we want to do. We do offer the ability to create "ghost accounts" after converting the author account to a publisher account which can be used for this purpose but it's not really optimal for pen names and so most authors don't use it for that purpose. Until we are able to collect the metadata to know that author accounts are the same person though, we can't really offer searching for it. Probably not on the short term list.

(Talking about favourite authors, please consider a direct link in the 'your account' dropdown menu - I have to hunt for the list every time!)

This is a great idea. I cleared it with my boss and we should be able to add that.

I don't find tag searching at all useful; there's too many results because authors throw tags around like confetti.

I'm with you, I don't really see the appeal. But a surprising amount of our searches are for tags (almost 45%) so making sure those who use this can get what they want is on our list of things to ensure.

Ditto genre searches; about the only time I use that is during the sales, and I usually stick to a fairly high level. What I would find useful is being able to select a tag or genre, and be able to see the author list who have a book with that tag or genre, and then I could go into the list of titles by that author.

I think it makes sense to add filtering ability to author search. Authors aren't directly associated to categories though (we'd pull it from their books) so it'd be a little awkward but I think not unduly so. I'm not entirely sure how common your use case is. As a note, it seems like some of what you're trying to do with search might be accomplished using the Author Alerts feature for authors that we have on our site.

The ability to limit the search to titles in a specific language, and also to exclude any titles translated into that language (i.e. the primary language only).

We definitely plan to add a language filter to the search engine. It's been on my personal wishlist for a very long time. We don't have metadata about whether a book is translated or not currently so we can't currently filter on that property.

thanks for the notes! I'll keep these things in mind going forward.