A couple of suggestions on tracking author diversity, apologies if they don't belong here, but this seems to be the hub for the discussion. I really appreciate the way that plus custom stats have been implemented which enables us to manage this ourselves. While it feels simple to get this data accessible, the risks and consequences of it going wrong for authors and for Storygraph are high.
Two suggestions to make it easier for us to achieve tracking the diversity of our reading tho 1. Allow us to copy all our tags from one book to the author's other works. This would save considerable time where some of us are allocating tags to authors. 2. Consider a field for books to record the original country of publication. This wouldn't help with most diversity (lots of non-American authors are first published in the USA), but for those of us who read a lot of global literature, it would help a bit. And by attaching to the publication record, it avoids intrusive judgements about people's nationality. Hope this is helpful.

With the new Plus Stats this is something I really hope to see coming sooner then later. I agree there is nuance and issues involved. Just ideating as I love this whole idea and hope it can be implemented to make even better use of the Plus Stats.

Maybe it could be helpful for people to be able to tag authors like they are able to tag books. Then authors can claim an author page and they can have the option to officially add tags to their page if they believe they are applicable and they want them be author verified. That could allow authors to have nationality's, sexualities, genders "assigned" but the author can decide if they want those tags to officially be applied to their author page or if those tags are just unconfirmed and float around for peoples personal stats without the author verification.

Hi I am posting here because I really do miss just having an author page. Honestly the only times I go back to Goodreads is when I need author info and I know they don’t always have it as well but just a link to their official website is sometimes really helpful and and overview of their series.
Do you plan to do the pages so that authors can verify themselves and add their own information or are you planning to leave that open to the whole community?

I want this so bad

I completely get that it would be really difficult to track author nationality (especially when it comes to those with dual nationality) but as a compromise would it be possible to publish a map where the original publishers are based? It might begin to provide an insight into the diversity of our reading using information that may already exist without being intrusive to the authors. It may also encourage people to read books from a wider range of publishers, especially books that were originally written with a different audience in mind. This might distinguish between (as an example) books written by a Japanese author that were written for Japanese readers before being translated and read throughout the world, compared to a book by a Japanese author that was written with a western audience in mind and first published in English by a UK or US publisher.

I would love a feature like this, as the one reason I still catalog books in a private spreadsheet besides storygraph is to keep track of author's nationalities. (I want to avoid having USA/UK as more than 50% of the authors I read). But I understand that implementing it right would be quite a challenge, and not because of the coding ^^'

I just wanted to say, with my author hat on on, that while I can see this on the one hand being really valuable to readers, unless it's implemented really carefully it has the potential to be quite invasive for authors, especially because we're dealing with complex aspects of identity.

Of course I don't want to speak on behalf of communities that aren't mine, but in LGBTQ+ circles alone there's been situations where people have been forced 'out' before they were ready due to reader scrutiny/hostility. You've got situations where authors have been deemed not [x] enough, where [x] is a particular marginalised identity, simply because their experiences don't match the specific expectations of some readers. More complicatedly still, you've got the issue that writers maybe be dealing with aspects of their gender identity in ways that may affect how they publicly identify: and having a public record essentially charting these changes might not feel kind or useful to the author in question. Although, of course, that's a very personal and subjective thing.

I hope this doesn't sound negative or selfishly author-focused. I just wanted to note some of the complexities in play here when it comes to the marginalised community with which I have experience.

I wonder if an mvp of this could be allowing users to tag authors in a similar way that we can tag books. I’d love to tag authors to help myself and others not have to look up nationality, sexuality, and other details because I’ve forgotten. Then this info could be used help users trying to read own voices books and to help build the author pages mentioned

I'm a huge fan of this idea!

This would be awesome!

Very neat! As a work around, I actually created a challenge to this. https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/3a91e110-c5a9-48c1-a589-35f0aa63c0fd

IIn general I think author pages will open up the option for a lot of interesting features, so I'm looking forward to this.

One of the features I would like is the ability to mark an author as incorrect, even if the name is right. For example, sometimes when I click on an author's name, I get books I know they didn't write. (I think when books are added it is hard to pick the 'right' author if it is a common name. ) So if users could flag problem authors for the librarians to go through, that might be useful.

YES. I really want to track how diverse the authors I am reading are and be able to find more local Authors.

I am very very excited about this potential feature!