I seem to have mucked something up...

[Phil]

Author "J.D. Robb" (ID 17065) has been translated into a language I do not recognise, and the translations have been attributed to "J.D. ロブ" (ID 806407) with the original author and translator added as extra roles. This prevents these editions from appearing on the "combine editions" list for the real author.

I attempted to remove this "primary author" from the first book on the list (ID 5984602) in order to merge the translations in with the other editions, by the simple expedient of blanking the author field: I assumed it would either roll the other roles up to fill the gap or complain about a required field being blank.

However something went wrong and I can't even view the book now. It's not on the list of that "author" any more either.

What did I do wrong, and how can I do it right next time?

[This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For]

I took care of it for this case, but in the future...

What you need to do is go to the author page for the incorrect name and change the name of that author to J.D. Robb. Then when it asks which profile you want to keep, make sure you pick the correct one!

You also may have to go into each individual book that was in the secondary author and delete the second occurrence of J.D. Robb. I haven't quite figured out if it will automatically do this or not.

[Cait]

Michael wrote: "I haven't quite figured out if it will automatically do this or not."

It won't -- but, you know, we can ask for it. :)

*heads off to the feedback group*

[Phil]

Thank you. I'm still not clear on why I got an actual error, rather than a complaint about leaving a required field blank, but I'll try to remember this way of doing things next time.

I see somebody has preempted my follow-up question in the case where the erroneous primary author is not an unwanted duplicate of a secondary ;-)