One of the resources on ACLD’s website that I find the most useful professionally and personally is Novelist. With Novelist, you can search for things like series order, read-alike authors and titles, and bibliographies for specific authors.
To get to Novelist:
ACLD Homepage-->Research (at top of homepage)-->View All Databases (at middle of Research page). A box will pop up with names of all of our databases.-->select “Novelist Plus”.
There is a Novelist K-8 option if you’re looking for books for your school-aged children.
When you open Novelist, you’ll find the following screen:
This page is pretty self-explanatory and user-friendly.
I’ll give you an example of a title search. I’ll search for the title “Hunger Games”. This is what I get as a result.
At this point, you’ll have the ability to narrow your search if you need to. In my case, I want the original Hunger Games book, so I’ll click on the first title in the result list.
From here, you can do such things as:
- Looking for more books by this author by clicking the author's name.
- Reading professional reviews of the title.
- Clicking on the series link to find more books in the series.
- Look for more books with similar story elements (bottom right of screen).
- Look for read-alike titles (top right of screen.
I’ve pointed out some of the features of a typical Novelist entry. As you can see, it’s pretty thorough. If you’ve got the time, you could get thoroughly lost in Novelist, finding lots of new (to you) authors and titles. If you get too many to read right now, you can always log in to your account on ACLD’s website and create a Saved Title list to keep track of all of them. If you’re interested in doing that and don’t already know how, please feel free to ask a library staff member for help.
