OK - "Database 101" time
.
The goal of any database design is to only store each item of information once, and once only. This is called "normalisation".
In my database, I have a table of authors ("tAuthor"), which has an author's name, and a ID, which is simply a number. Eg:
1: Asimov, Isaac
2: Dickens, Charles
3: Austen, Jane
...
I then have a list of books ("tBook"), again each one with a ID:
1: Bleak House
2: Pride and Prejudice
3: Sense and Sensibility
4: Oliver Twist
Finally, I have a "link table" ("tLnkAuthorBook") which contains pairs of numbers - an author ID and a book ID:
AuthorID BookID
2 1
2 4
3 2
....
This means that author number 2 (Dickens) is an author of book number 1 (Bleak House); author number 2 (Dickens again) is an author of book number 4 (Oliver Twist), etc.
The benefit of this is that any book can have as many different authors as you want (multiple rows in the link table with the same Book ID) and any author can have as many books as you want (multiple rows with the same author ID.
So, to find all the books that Dickens wrote, I just have to search the link table and find all the rows where the author ID = 2. Having got those rows, I look up the details of the book from the book ID. I can do this with a SQL statement such as:
SELECT Title FROM tBook INNER JOIN tLnkAuthorBook
ON tBook.ID = tLnkAuthorBook.BookID
WHERE tLnkAuthorBook.AuthorID = 2
This will give me a list of all the titles of the books for which Dickens is an author (or a co-author).
Sorry, that's very brief, but hopefully you get the idea! In reality, I don't have to type in the SQL by hand - I just have a form where I can choose an author from a drop-down list, and I'll get a list of the details of all the books that the author wrote.