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Useful website of the week: Fantastic Fiction

Last week I discussed Stop, you’re killing me!, a useful website for readers of crime fiction. This time around the useful website is for all kinds of fiction, and if an author has also written non-fiction, that is included as well. The site has bibliographies for over 20 thousand authors with works in English.

Fantastic Fiction offers searches by author and book title, and if you go to the Preferences page, you can also search by short story title and ISBN. As with Stop, you’re killing me!, this website is only for books published in English, and doesn’t seem to include information on untranslated works (conclusion is based on a sample of Icelandic authors with both translated and untranslated books).

Putting in an author’s full name will take you directly to that author’s page, while searches by first or last name will bring up all authors in the database who share the name. A title search will bring up all the books that share the title word, or if the title is unique it will take you to a page with different editions of the same book.

Each author page contains a short bio, information about that author’s latest and upcoming books, and books classed by series, along with other information, such as prices from different online shops.

This is a commercial site, so you will see some (unintrusive) banner ads, but they mostly seem to derive their income from linking to online bookstores and collecting incentives from them.

Other features include:
An awards page with listings of the winners of numerous awards (hasn’t been updated for 2008)
A New Books page
A Coming Soon page
Most popular listings (seems to be a listing of most searched-for titles on the site)
Top authors (seems to be a listing of most searched-for authors on the site)
Series
Listings of authors who were born or died, by year
A preference page, so you can see, for example, the most popular titles or authors depending on what country you’re in
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