Help:Getting Started

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First, I suggest you pick a novel. Novels are simpler to enter than collections or anthologies, because they usually only contain the novel, and you don't have to worry about entering each story in the book. I'm going to use George Alec Effinger's What Entropy Means to Me as my example; you can follow along with whatever book you've picked.

The first thing to do is bring the ISFDB website (http://www.isfdb.org) up in another browser window/tab. There's a search field on the left: enter part of the book title in that field. There's a pulldown menu just below the search box; make sure that it says "Title", and then click "Go".

This will display a list of all the titles in the ISFDB that have that string of letters. If you can spot your book in that list, go ahead and click on the title (not the name, which would take you to the author page). You'll see a list of publications for that title -- in my case I can see that two editions of What Entropy Means to Me have been entered: a 1972 Doubleday edition and a 1989 Bart edition. What I've got is a 1973 Signet edition, so this is a publication the ISFDB doesn't know about, and I can go ahead and enter it.

If you don't see the title at all when you do the search, it means that the book is unknown to the ISFDB, and you can enter it.

Many times, however, the edition of the book that you have will already exist in the ISFDB. In that case you can do something equally useful: you can verify the book.

For the next steps: