I know that the issue of Author Stats is complicated (https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/features/posts/author-stats). What if there were user-created author tags, in addition to the book tags that users can already create? I'm currently trying to add these sorts of tags manually to every book in my list, both to my "Read" list and my "To Read" list, but there are some pretty cumbersome aspects of this workflow.

If I have read multiple editions of the same book (e.g. one audiobook, one ebook), there may be some tags that I only want to apply to one of those editions, but these "author stats" tags I definitely want to apply to both. It also feels tedious to apply the tags over and over if I have read multiple books by the same author. I may not remember which tags I applied to the first book, so I have to either research the author again or remember which book of theirs I have already tagged.

My two use cases for these tags are:


1. The tag stats graph. I think it’s really interesting when I’m comparing YOY stats to be able to see whether there are changes in the diversity of books that I’m reading.
2. Filtering my TBR. My book club focuses e.g. on women and lgbt authors, and being able to quickly suggest books from my TBR would be really helpful.

I don’t know if this would mitigate some of the very reasonable privacy concerns mentioned in that umbrella app, but it doesn’t seem like it would be much more invasive than the existing tags that get associated with books. Maybe these tags would be private-only? I don’t know. But having an author-level tag that would get pushed onto any book of theirs that I add to my queue would be really helpful!