User talk:BillHousley

Welcome!

Hello, BillHousley, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• Help pages
• Field-by-field guide to entering new publications into the database
• Help:Getting Started
• What the ISFDB Wiki is for
• FAQ
• Wiki editing help - Tips on how to use the wiki-specific features when editing wiki pages.
• Wiki Conventions - How things are usually done on this wiki.
• Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Annie 14:50, 31 July 2019 (EDT)

Clarification

Hello,

Can you clarify your note here? Are you asking someone to add your books for you? As the change you made does not change anything, I had rejected the update but if you can clarify what you mean with the note, I can follow up on it. Annie 14:52, 31 July 2019 (EDT)

Same question for this one. Thanks! Annie 14:53, 31 July 2019 (EDT)

Thank you, Annie. Yes, I am new here and clueless. The reason for both of those notes to the moderator was to establish that and call out for help on getting my newer works added. Shouldn't the Amazon US link see them and add them automatically? I don't even know if this is the correct way to reply to your request for clarification. I couldn't find a "reply" button. Bill 4:17 pm 1 Aug 2019 EDT

Oh, look! I found a message with a link to the help file. Nevermind, I've got this. Thank you. Bill 4:27 pm 1 Aug 2019 EDT

We do not have an automatic link to Amazon that can just add books. We have a bot that checks Amazon for new titles and submits them but it is a semi-manual process (the data quality of Amazon ranges from bad to really bad for the most part if you care about data quality - between putting books in the wrong categories, putting series and what's not in the titles, weird author names and dates and not making a distinction between a novel and a collection/anthology, any attempt to import automatically is bound to make a real mess and turn the data quality here into just a wishful thinking). So except for a few loads at the very start, all books are manually approved and fixed even when the bot finds them and submits them. As a result, we do have a few tens of thousands of books that wait for submission (and manual check if they are eligible and if there are actually books we do not have) and we literally cannot catch everything (although we do try). And until a few months ago, anything that lacked ISBN had to be manually added (we can work with ASINs for ebooks now somewhat). Authors that are already in the DB kinda have a priority, so do publishers we know (the algorithm is complicated - I had been working through some less-covered publishers in the last months and catching up with their backlists for example). Amazon looks great to human eyes, trying to work off it via a programming language is a tad more complicated.

Onto your books. We can do that in two ways - you can try to submit them and a moderator will work with you (in this case start with a novel, see what the moderator tells you, then onto the next one) or I can add them for you. Let me know what you prefer. Annie 13:10, 2 August 2019 (EDT)