How can I easily follow all works by an author?

Question

The Problem

I'd like to follow all questions on works of one of my favourite authors, Ray Bradbury, but there's currently no way for me to do so.

Constraints

Our policy is to not put an author tag on questions about one of their works, so following ray-bradbury doesn't work.

I could follow tags for the individual works. However, for Ray Bradbury that would be a lot of tags to follow. And even if I wanted to follow that many tags, I can't follow non-existent tags for works about which no questions have been asked yet.

Other Examples

Jules Verne is another example of an author whose works do not fall in one franchise, where a user in chat has expressed a desire to follow questions about his work.

And there are plenty of other authors whose works do not fall in one franchise.

How do I follow questions about works by a specific author?

Answer 1

TL;DR: We use the author tags when there are few questions per work and in total as current practice already, this should be incorporated into current policy.

Current Policy

Current policy would appear that author tags are to be used solely on questions about the authors themselves and not for questions about their works.

If the question is asking about a) aspects of the author's life, or b) aspects of the author's work that are not specific to a single work or franchise, then we tag the question with the name of the author.

_{What is the correct usage of individual works tags vs. author tags vs. franchise tags?}

This meta post also quotes the same thing above and uses that to come to its conclusions.

This post about Fahrenheit 451 and Ray Bradbury has no clear consensus but does point to how things are done in practice.

Current Practice

This comment alludes to how things are done in practice.

Re: "author" tags... imho, the utility varies greatly depending on how many different titles the author contributes. For example, J.K. Rowling only has the Harry Potter world (at least as far as relates to SciFi/Fantasy), but authors like Heinlein, Dick, etc., have dozens and dozens of titles, many of which only have the author as a common factor. I see utility in have author tags for the more prolific writers. I might want to look through the Heinlein tag for ideas for other books of his to read, for example. – Beofett

In reality though things are currently slightly different: we use the author tags when there are few questions per work and in total. However, if there are main franchise/universe tags we should still be using them in place of the author tags.

Of course there is no explicit cut off on when we should stop adding author tags to works with higher than "few" questions so we use common sense.

What needs to be done?

Current practice should be incorporated into current policy.

Apart from that personally I don't think anything needs to be done. The author tags are already used in the proposed manner in cases where it is more appropriate and do we really want to group works by tag just because they have the same author? I don't think so. If the work is unrelated to another work in universe then they don't really need to be linked.

So how can you follow them easily?

Well depends on the author and the traffic they bring to the site. I believe Ray Bradbury and Jules Verne already have their author tags used as "all works by author" so not a problem there. Though I'm not too familiar to check all the works to see if this is the case.

In cases where the author tags are used solely for questions about the author well then there's generally quite a few questions already. To take the below example adding the author tag wouldn't make it easier to find new questions about Wild Cards, The Thousand Worlds or whatever other work he's letting distract him at the moment because they would be lost in the storm of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire questions. (Note: adding the author tag to GoT questions wouldn't necessarily be the case but the point still stands even if it is solely applied to ASOIAF questions).

---

To take things to an extreme example lets look at George R. R. Martin. There are currently, that I'm aware of, 4 universe tags that relate to his works and the author tag:

• game-of-thrones: 1,284 questions
• a-song-of-ice-and-fire: 1,068 questions
• the-thousand-worlds: 6 questions
• wild-cards: 5 questions
• george-r-r-martin: 4 questions

In this case do we really want to have to retag 2,383 questions to have the author tags on them and then dilute questions about the author themselves. This would then also hold true for harry-potter, although slightly different because there's only really one work here.

---

On a side note this might not work as you expect. For example, if you watch ray-bradbury but ignore fahrenheit-451 questions tagged with both will still show up as highlighted. See this answer to the meta announcement, for example.

Answer 2

Solution

In absence of another franchise tag, we tag questions with works-by-author.

Explanation

An author's works can be said to form a franchise. In absence of another franchise, we can use that. That should show up among the suggested tags when typing the author's name, and its use should be clear from the name of the tag.

Examples

• JKR's works all fall under harry-potter — or at least the ones on topic on this stack. There's no need for works-by-jk-rowling if one would want to follow everything JKR.
  A user can follow harry-potter and be done.

• Jules Verne's work have no such overarching franchise. So we tag questions about his works with works-by-jules-verne, alongside the tag for the specific work.
  A user can follow works-by-jules-verne and be done.

• George Orwell's only works that are on topic on this stack are 1984 and possibly Animal Farm. Those two works should have their own tags that can be followed; no other tags are necessary.

• Ursula K. Le Guin's works fall under two main franchises, Earthsea and Hainish Cycle. Works in those two franchises need no additional tags. Other works, like "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", should be tagged with works-by-ursula-k-le-guin, even if they have a tag for the individual work as well.