User:Pburka/Sole authors of notable books

Wikipedia has many articles about books and authors. Some authors are so notable that their books are all widely discussed and studied, so we have pages for the author and each of their books, and maybe even a bibliography. But many authors have written a single notable (but not earth-shattering) book and we must decide if Wikipedia should have a page for the book, the author, or both. By a strict interpretation of WP:AUTHOR#3 and WP:NBOOK, we could justify pages for both, but these may both languish as stub-class articles indefinitely.

In many cases, the best answer is a page for the author, with a redirect from their notable book.

BLP coat rack

It's natural for a book page to have some biographical information about the author. If the author is living, then the book article becomes a coat rack for a biography of a living person (BLP). This is undesirable, as it may not be obvious that the article is also a biography and requires the additional protections that we grant BLPs. We should prefer to keep biographies in people-titled articles.

Natural expansion path

There's a natural path for the page to expand if the author goes on to write a second and third notable book. When that happens, a reasonable editor will add a new section to the author's page. Instead of two or three stubs with duplicated biographical information, we'll have one substantial page that provides some shared context for the author's oeuvre.

Consistency

Preferring pages about authors is consistent, or at the very least, not inconsistent. We have pages for Noble Prize winning authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, whose books are individually notable, as well as for prolific authors whose individual works might rarely be notable like Louis L'Amour. Maintaining pages for authors of single works is consistent with how we present these other authors.

Exceptions

• Books with multiple authors don't have an unambiguous redirect target, so fall outside of this guidance.