Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Policies & Practices
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Psuedonym or real name as primary?
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The manual gives this guidance:Regarding author pseudonyms or pen names - some authors write or have written under multiple names. When editing or adding information for a book written by an author with multiple names, enter the author's name as on the front cover as the primary author. The author's other names may be added in the other author fields. Original name or other pen names can added and linked via a Librarian Note: in the description field, or using the Librarian Note feature located above the Title field. In some cases, a book may be originally published under a pen name, but then later reissued under the author's original name. When this happens, the author listed for any and all editions should be the author name the book was originally published under - so the reissued edition would need its author name changed to the originally published pen name. Doing this will allow the various editions to be combined.
Thank you Paula. I didn't think to dig through the manual. I will see if I can adjust the author I found, so they are listed with the correct primary. The author description on the pseudonym does point to the real name as well. It seems that I can just push the secondary listing (the pseudonym) up to the primary and that also saves the pseudonym role.Then I will also try to merge things properly. It seems like I almost always end up with a ton to do whenever I add books to my goodreads!
My thought is that the name printed on the cover (in this case Elizabeth Peters) ought to be the primary author under which the books are cataloged, with the option of adding the real name as a secondary author. It seems that right now some books are listed one way and some another, and this prevents them from being merged properly (ones listed with the real name as the primary don't seem able to be merged with the ones listed with the PUBLISHED name as the primary).
It seems to me that not everyone pays attention to pseudonyms, so the listings should be primarily available under the name listed as the published author, the name people reading the book is most likely to look up.