How to search for titles of novels that are or begin with a word or phrase previously used as the title of many nonfictional works?
Say I have a possible title for a novel I am writing, and it's a word or phrase that has been used in the title of quite a large number of nonfictional works, sometimes as the whole of the title. But I am not interested in those works, because I am only interested in novels. What I am interested in, first, is whether my possible title has ever been used as the whole of any other novel's title; and, second, whether any novel has been published which starts with my possible title and then contains one or more other words following it.
For example, the word might be the term "Literature", in which case the first question would be Has a novel ever been published called "Literature"? and the second would be Has a novel ever been published under a title containing two or more words of which the first is "Literature"? It is no surprise that many nonfictional works have been published with titles that are "Literature" or begin with that word.
Google's advanced search tool at Google Books, as far as I can tell, allows only searches for book titles that contain a specified phrase, regardless of whether they also contain other words and regardless too of whether they are fiction or nonfiction.
The British Library's tool for conducting an advanced search of its catalogue is more useful insofar as it allows you to search for items that have a given phrase as the whole of their Title field, but like the Google Books engine it does not assist with selecting only novels, or only fictional works, and a further weakness is that it cannot pick out only books and it will also return plays and musical works.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/42050. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
Although it only has speculative fiction, The Internet Speculative Fiction Database could help. It's a start, and it's powerful enough to do exactly what you want (plus it can be downloaded and queried with SQL for even more power if you needed something more complicated). On this page), you should search:
- Title | starts with | literature
- AND
- Publication Type | is exactly | NOVEL
(If the title of something is just "literature", then it will be found by this search.)
However...
From your description, it sounds like you're trying to use a title that's going to be very frustrating to search for, unless people remember your name. I very rarely remember the names of authors and I suspect that a lot of people are the same.
If you need a specific example of how frustrating this is, try searching for the book "Literature®" on Google. It exists and you'll know it when you see it (because of the "®" that's part of the title), but you probably won't be able to find it without resorting to ISFDB. (Since most search engines ignore special characters, it's basically the same as if the book was titled "Literature".)
Because of this problem, you should consider titling your book with something distinctive enough that people can find it when searching for only the title (and maybe a description like "book" or "novel").
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42051. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Easier said than done.
I tried Goodreads. The good news is it allows you to search by genre. Not just fiction but also type of fiction, if you want. And by title. But you can not set it to just choose the titles that start with the keyword. And you can't alphabetize the results.
Then I tried my local library, and it works! I was able to set the keyword search for titles only and I could set a category. I chose "adult fiction." There are 60 results for "literature." Note that it also looked within series names and sub-titles.
It then allowed me to alphabetize them by full title. Drawback? A fairly small database.
The search engine company is SirsiDynix. Find a bigger library that uses it and you're in business.
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