Help:How to clone a publication

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If you're entering information about a book, and there's already another edition of that book in the ISFDB, then you may find the easiest thing to do is to "clone" the existing information and edit it as needed.

To decide if this is the right thing to do:

1. If your book is a novel, it's always simpler to just enter it afresh. Cloning saves time with re-entering contents; there's no need to do that for a novel.
2. Find another edition of your book in the ISFDB. If you can't find one, there's nothing to clone.
3. When you've found one, take a look at the contents listed, and see what differences there are. Are any of the titles of the stories different? If so, you'll have to deal with the title variations; this is described further down in these instructions.
4. Once you've found and displayed a publication that is appropriate to clone for your version, click on the "Clone this Pub" link in the left navbar. This will display the publication editor. See the new publication help page for more information about the fields on this screen, but note that any content records for the publication are not editable, except to specify the page number. However, you can add further content, and you will also need to change the records about the publication itself -- date, publisher and so forth.
5. When you have finished, and submitted the record, and a moderator has approved it, a new publication will have been created. All the titles created for the new publication will have been automatically merged with the title of that name in the old publication. This saves a step that is necessary when a publication is entered by hand rather than by cloning. The one part of the record that is not automatically merged is the cover art. Even if the artist is the same for both editions the software currently creates a new record which will need to be merged with the existing cover-art title record. See Help:How to merge titles for that step. In this case the "Author" would be the "Artist".
6. If any of the titles in the old publication do not appear in the new one, you should now delete them.
7. If any of the titles in the new publication appear under a different title or using a different author name than they did in the old publication, some repair must be done. The cloning process creates the title as it was in the old publication. The simplest solution is usually to delete the content record showing the old title, and then edit the publication to add the correct title. After adding it, one of the titles should be marked as a variant title of the other, depending on which is the canonical title.