Find a book series

Have you been looking for a certain series? The old tool listed them by the author's last name. Here is what survives, and how to use it.

From the archive, January 2003

two kinds of series

Romance readers use the word for two different things, and the old site, like most bookshops, used it for both. The first is a story series: linked books about a family, a town, a regiment or a group of friends, read in order because characters from book one marry in book three. The second is a publisher's line, a numbered program such as Harlequin Presents or Silhouette Intimate Moments that put out a fixed number of books every month at a fixed length. A book could be both. Nora Roberts wrote whole family series inside Silhouette lines.

The series tool covered the first kind. The publisher list covered the second, and our desk article on category romance lines goes through what each line stood for.

the long booklists

The series tool itself loaded from the database and did not survive. The author booklists did, and for prolific writers they are the next best thing, sorted by publication date with publisher and ISBN. These restored lists run to thirty titles or more:

reading a series in order

Publication order and story order usually match, until they do not. Reissues come back with new dates, novellas appear in anthologies years after the novel they belong to, and authors write prequels. Start with the booklist, then check the author's own site for the intended order. If you are writing a series, the desk article on plotting a romance has notes on handing a story from one couple to the next.