In the interest of not creating 'spam' works, should I delete my books?

I manually entered a few unsold novels of mine, in order to get around a bug that made it so the two names under which I have published 'secondary' works could not be combined into the same author. Adding works for which each name was a primary author, allowed me to get around the bug.

But now that I've managed to get my legal name and my pen name properly combined, I'm wondering if I ought to delete those entries. They are actual physical books, currently sitting on my bookshelf -- but they are private copies. The books aren't now and never were available for sale anywhere.

So what does the community think -- would they prefer if members who just happen to also be writers, didn't add their unpublished books to their LT libraries? Or are they okay with it, as long as I don't give them five star ratings, and glowing reviews and all that? If I do leave them up, is there anything in particular I should do or not do to prevent them from being a bother to other users?

I don't see a problem with keeping them if you wish to do so. Whether published or not, they're still books.

Shouldn't be a problem to leave them on the site. Might be an idea to put something like "[self-published]" after the titles if there is a likelihood that the titles may be used by other authors.

#3 - They aren't self-published. Self-published is something else. (And I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the self-published authors here would have extreme objections to notion that they should put a "self-published" designation in the title of all their works.)

I don't think they'll get mixed up with any other works, but I LIKE the idea of making it obvious what they are. Would "Private Copy" be a clear enough designation? I can put "Printed for the author's personal use by Lulu.com on (date)" in the publishing field, too.

... Why use square brackets? They mean something specific to the LT System, don't they? I seem to recall some discussion about it on a thread about adding movies (which I didn't pay much attention to because I had no plans to add movies to LT). What do they do differently from curved brackets?

If you really want to keep them separate:
- Add in the title something like "Private copy"
- Put a disambig note on the works so combiners don't combine them anyway - because uncorrected proofs are considered the book and get combined for example.

Although... I have a few books that had been printed in 10 or less copies and were basically gifts. Does not make them less of books -- regardless how you will call them.

If it is a book, it is a book. So no reason not to have it here.

PS: I like using curved brackets if any because if you use square ones, touchstones don't exactly work for these works... But it is up to you.

Sorry - I made an unwarranted assumption. It sounds to me that 'self-penned' or 'manuscript' would fit the bill better than private copy (on yet another assumption that the books are the original works and not 'copies').

Square brackets do indeed have a function in messages in the groups, but they are the convention for indicating items that aren't published written works (or are interpretations of other works, or for specific edition identification when that is important) when used behind work titles. I don't believe that there is any special processing applied to those elements in work titles, though.

ETA: but as Annie says, if all they are is books, then because recording them is the core function of the site perhaps all that is required is a notice in the disambiguation field.

#5 - If in the future it was possible for them to be correctly combined with some other LTer's copies of the same stories, I'd be overjoyed to have them combined.

The replies on this thread have made me realize what exactly it was about the situation that has been bothering me.

Records of these books belong in my LT catalog. I own the books, I have a right to catalog them accurately. I shouldn't have to feel guilty for having added them, and there is no valid reason for anyone to ask that I remove them. This is why I am reluctant to delete them.

But, by cataloging them, I make them show up on my LT author page, so if you go to that page right now, it looks like I've published four books. I haven't published any books. I feel like an impostor.

Marking them in some way as "unpublished" solves the imposter problem...

...but I don't think it looks very "professional" to have lots of unpublished books listed and no published ones. :(

I'm really starting to wish that I had just waited patiently for Tim to get around to fixing the "secondary authors cannot be combined" bug.

How about instead of "(unpublished)" you put "(forthcoming)"?

:D

>7 LShelby:

Well - a lot of the people that had "published" books had done so only because they paid for the publishing. So...

Quite honestly - I do not see a problem. If you want put a disambig note in your AUTHOR page that no books are published yet and so on and change it when you actually publish something. Or just leave them the way they are - you wrote them so the books are yours. End of story. They are your books, they belong to your catalog. Because of the way LT works, they end up on the author page -- so what? If you want to catalog your notebooks, it is up to you -- the idea is to catalog what you have after all - not to make people like your author page. Or whatever.

#8 - Brightcopy, I LOVE that idea. It's even true. My husband has told me that if I can't find publishers for these books, he will publish them. (It just might take a very long time, because for some reason he wants to start with the two I am working on right now, instead of any of the ones that are already polished and copy-edited and have cover images I made for them and so on.)

Thank you!

I've got a book by my brother-in-law that was printed specifically for family. If you feel like listing them, that's up to you.

Thank you everyone who replied! Seeing how other people viewed the subject was really helpful in figuring out what I was actually thinking and why.

If you like, you can think of your volumes not as published works but as cataloged works. One-ofs and manuscripts are often cataloged. As I am cataloging my late husband's library, I'm finding a fair number of manuscripts, limited editions, chapbooks and other ephemera. I go ahead and catalog them, which does create author pages for essentially unpublished writers.

About square brackets - in titles, LT has a few things that it deliberately skips. If there's a colon in the title, LT will ignore anything after it (which causes trouble for books that are cataloged as Series: Specific Title, or Series: Volume #). It will also ignore anything in square brackets...I think. I'm not certain whether it ignores parentheses or curly brackets. AnnieMod's point about using them in touchstones is one I hadn't thought of, though.

14> Yes, LT ignores things in parentheses. That's why you don't do (Vol 1) or (Part 2) if you don't want it combined. I think square brackets are *not* ignored in that case, which is why they're used - the curly braces take more effort to type/read.

#14 by @jjmcgaffey> If there's a colon in the title, LT will ignore anything after it

Just an additional clarification: this is only true for if the thing to the left of the colon is at least X characters long. Unfortunately, I can't remember what X is. But something like "Q: Part 1" and "Q: Part 2" shouldn't get autocombined.

ETA: There's also the difference of something getting auto-combined when you add it to LT using add books and things being suggested as combinations. I'm not sure if they use exactly the same approach.

I just was wanted to get it straight so I tried the following three manual entries:

Ender's Game (short story)
Ender's Game [short story]
Ender's Game {short story}

The first got combined with the main Ender's Game work. The last two got combined with the Ender's Game [short story] work.

Mostly just confirmation of what people already knew, but I just wanted to be sure.

I wish curly braces were the standard instead of square brackets, though. Talk eats square brackets if you don't go to some trouble and escape them.

Thanks, brightcopy. Yeah...well, it would work to use the curly brackets. So if we start making that the standard, it can only help. It's just as visible in combining and helps us if we want to touchstone it. And it's no harder to type than the parentheses.

BTW - I had it wrong, so this thread has been very helpful to me. If I'd thought about it I would have realized that if it's going to help with autocombining, we'd have to use something LT _didn't_ ignore...

#18 by @jjmcgaffey> I know the feeling. Prior to this, I didn't realize things inside parens were ignored. So I had in other threads long ago suggested using "(short story)" instead of "[short story]". And nobody corrected me. So apparently it's not all that widely known.

I wish Tim would write up the logic one of these days. Would be a big help.

Yes. Particularly how long a title can be. And what exactly is ignored...

16> Just an additional clarification: this is only true for if the thing to the left of the colon is at least X characters long. Unfortunately, I can't remember what X is. But something like "Q: Part 1" and "Q: Part 2" shouldn't get autocombined.

That doesn't seem right. I'm pretty sure I've read that something like X and X:A Novel will be autocombined.

#21 by @jjwilson61> Try it yourself. I just did. It's true. :d

Yes, the whole point of stopping after the colon is to avoid things like :A Novel making it a different work. But it can also have other bad side effects if you don't require what's before the colon to be a certain minimum length.

ETA: Oh, and my test showed me something else. Not only will "Q: Test Entry" not be autocombined with "Q" (even with the same author), each will also not show up as a suggested combination for the other.

ETAA: Though in the combine/separate potentials it does list "Q: o Caçador de Hereges" for Q. I believe this is due to that being one of the editions that is contained in the main Q work.

22> Oh, I thought you were talking about the length of the bit after the colon, not before.