Quote:
Originally Posted by EnterNameHere
For me, there's a difference between "author name" and "real name". For the purpose of my library, "J.K. Rowling" and "Robert Galbraith" are two different "authors" and I'll file them completely separately, regardless of them having been written by the same "real" person. Likewise "Iain Banks" and "Iain M. Banks" are different authors - it's irrelevant (to me) that they happen to be the same human being.
I am struggling with Chris Brookmyre, who is listed as "Chris Brookmyre" on some of his books, and "Christopher Brookmyre" on others. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for this...
Ahem - W.B. Yeats (who went to the same school as me, if not exactly at the same time) was certainly not a "UK author" - he was Irish!
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I tend to normalize the variations of the same name. I see no advantage to separating books by Iain M. Banks from those by Iain Banks. Normalizing them loses the information about which version of his name is attached to a particular book, but that seems trivial compared to the advantage of making it a lot easier to search for his books in Calibre, not to mention avoiding the whole Chris Brookmyre/Christopher Brookmyre problem.
On the other hand, I keep the listed author on books in cases where the author wrote under a pseudonym. This is because often an author will use a pseudonym for a different writing style, and often different authors will adopt the same pseudonym either to write in a shared universe or simply to mimic each other's style. And in some cases, it's difficult or even impossible to know who the real author is. For example, any given book by Lewis Padgett might have been written by Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, or both. And in some cases the best we can get is a "probably."
Where the real author is know, I have a hierarchical tag-like Contributors custom column to track editors, illustrators, etc, as well as real authors.Kuttner, Real Author.CL Moore" in the Contributors column.
This is also why I prefer to leave out periods in author names. If a book's listed author is Lewis Padgett but it was written by C.L. Moore, "C.L. Moore" would add two extra levels to the hierarchy instead of representing a single name. For the sake of consistency, I leave out the periods in both the Contributors column and the Authors column.