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Q&A 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?

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 que...

posted 6y ago by Laurel‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

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#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:50:48Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42051
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Laurel‭ · 2019-12-08T10:50:48Z (about 5 years ago)
Although it only has _speculative_ fiction, [The Internet Speculative Fiction Database](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi) 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](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/adv_pub_search.cgi)), 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").

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-02-08T02:19:10Z (almost 6 years ago)
Original score: 1