Paul W. Nielsen author not found when searching "Paul Nielsen"

[Paul]

I have recently published my first book, The Cambion under my name, Paul Nielsen. There is another author by that name who has already published several books, so when I set up my account, I used my middle initial, Paul W. Nielsen. When you look up by book, the book shows up and you can find my author page that way, but when you look up by author, "Paul Nielsen" my book does not show up. At least not on the first three pages. I tried to change my author profile to just "Paul Nielsen" but it said I would need librarian status to do it. Does anyone have a suggest to correct this problem

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Paul, the issue is that Paul Nielsen is a somewhat common name. There are at least 3 different ones on Goodreads (and I think one may actually be 2 or 3 different ones, but am not certain enough to separate them into different author profiles).

The reason why the system was not allowing you to change your name to Paul Nielsen is that we already have another author by that name. You could change your name on Goodreads to Paul-2space-Nielsen. The extra space between your first and last names would only show up on book edit pages and your profile edit page, but it tells the system which books are yours.

However, it probably wouldn't improve your search results. Those are just because the other Paul Nielsen has a lot of books, and so do authors with Paul in their names and Nielsen in their titles, and vice versa.

Filtering the search to just author names helps a bit: https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8...

[Paul]

That was very helpful. I added the spaces between my name. Thanks.