Touchstones for title only when title not unique

If I only want to display The Sea by writer X, how do I do that? Obv The Sea won’t work. But I see posts using title only in touchstones and clicking takes one to desired page.

When you attempt a touchstone, you will sometimes sea "(other)". If you click on that, you'll find other choices; just choose the one you want.

>2 lilithcat: i don’t understand. I want to reference The Sea by writerJohn Banville. What is the correct syntax? If I use The Sea the reader will not necessarily be taken to Banville’s novel. If I do The Sea, John Banville it will go to the right place I think. But I just wantto know what to do so the reader sees The Sea and it will link to the correct novel. I don’t want the person reading the post to click on other, as how would they even know what I meant.

Let’s see with an example.
I just read Gurnrah’s Afterlives.

I want the reader to see it without the brackets and to be able to click on the name for the author or the title for the title.
If the title goes to “other” anyone unfamiliar with Gurnah’s work would not know what book I meant.

When I typed The Sea above it just accepted it. I didn’t get any warning. It just picks another book. Now it’s goin to the right place. I will give another example. Afterlives. How does the program know which book I mean? There must be a way. There’s no way the program can know from the title alone. There is something missing and I can’t work out what it is. I’ve been giving up and not using touchstones as it’s too hot and miss and I have to check everytime to see how it works out which novel is meant.
I saw in a FAQ about adding something to the right. But what? Is there a page on touchstones syntax?

I think my first question must have been too vague.

>3 kjuliff:

Sorry, I misunderstood your question. Your touchstone for The Sea goes to the correct book, so I thought you meant the same or a similar title by a different author.

Your touchstone for Afterlives goes to the wrong book, because Abdulrazak Gurnah's book is found when you click on others. To create the touchstone for his book, as I did, you have to find it in that list and choose it. To create a touchstone for the author, use double square brackets rather than the single square brackets used for title touchstones.

>3 kjuliff: I am not clicking on others. I don’t see others.
Ok. I will try again.
Jane is reading my post. Jane doesn’t know I want Banville’s the Sea. I want Karl Largents “the see”. So I post,
I just read a great book called The Sea. Jane or whoever is reading this, when you see Other” please don’t choose Banville.

>5 kjuliff:

No, you misunderstand. When you create the touchstone, you look at the "other" list and choose the right one.

What list do you mean? I don’t know how to find a list. Is there a place where you see all books of a certain name? If you cleck on one, what do you Putin the brackets? Which one? There must be a way. I will try this.
Have you read A day at the beach? Without putting something else between the brackets how can the system know.
I assume there’s something in a list somewhere. Where do I find the list? Maybe I’ll give up after this as it’s frustrating. I’m a computer programmer and I know there’s no way just typing the name of a book between two brackets will point to the book I’m thinking about in my brain.

>6 lilithcat: when I create a touchstone? Well when I create one I type the left square bracket , the name of the book, and then the right bracket. No list pops up. Where can I find the list?

Where is the list. I have never seen “other”. After I type nothing happens.
Example Timd. 5 keystrokes. No “other” appeared anywhere.

>7 kjuliff:

there’s no way just typing the name of a book between two brackets will point to the book

Yes, it will.

When I put the words "The Sea" between single square brackets in this post, I get The Sea, by John Banville. But when I did that, I saw, on the right hand side of the box in which I am typing, "The Sea by John Banville (others)". If I had clicked on "others", I would have seen a list titled "Alternate Touchstones", and if I had, rather than the Banville work, wanted the work with the same title by Maryann Dobeck, then I would have chosen that.

The Sea

Oh, I don’t see “others” I only see my post.
I looked up on the intro to LT and it only says
——
Pro-tip: Add Touchstones, surrounding single or double square brackets, to your Talk posts. You can link to either work or author pages, which helps you find the conversations that interest you most.5
——
I will only use unique titles from now on, because I suppose it doesn’t work on iPads. I can’t be bothered testing it anymore as it’s time consuming. ‘’’The Sea” was a bad example” . But many books I read have titles that other books use, I will just avoid touchstones for non unique titles. Thanks anyway.

>11 norabelle414: oh thanks. I tried it with The Sea and it worked. I’m legally blind and so I must have missed it. So the same for writers. And I notice there’s a 3 bracket option .
What’s that for?
Thank you for your patience. I really was confused about “the list”. Thanks again and I will try to phrase my questions more clearly.

Here's what it looks like on mobile:


You can also "force" a touchstone to show what you want by inserting the work number (which you can find in the URL for the work... For example, the URL of Gurnah's Afterlives is https://www.librarything.com/work/25132139, so the work number is 25132139) followed by two colons and then the text you want to display.

For example:
{square bracket}25132139::Afterlives{square bracket} would become: Afterlives

>13 kjuliff: Three brackets is for a whole series, so if you type in Wolf Hall with one set of brackets you get the book, but three sets of brackets gets you Wolf Hall the series

>14 norabelle414: Thanks. I set back to see if I could fix some old touchstones. The main reason for the confusion was that I have my text on my screen at a high size, so I don’t see the right part when the list of others is. I have to slide the screen to the left. If I’d sent a crew shot you would have seen the problem.

Interestingly when I went back and typed the following
“I like Gurnah too. Afterlives blah blah”
The list on the right only gave author name options, not title options. But I will work it out tomorrow. It’s late here in New York.
Thanks again for your patience.

>16 kjuliff: Make sure you closed all you brackets before opening any more (and that you close only as many as you open) - that can cause one of the two touchstones to get wonky. If the site gives you only authors options, all it sees are authors touchstones (so two brackets). Count your opening and closings :)

And make sure you are looking at others for the correct touchstone - there will be a link on every line of a touchstone basically. So your first link above will show authors but the second one will produce book titles.

>17 AnnieMod: re your screen short of what you see on a mobile - I don’t see this. Because my text size is so big I don’t see a whole screen at once and have to manipulate to see. I understand about the brackets. The problem was I couldn’t see the list.
Example — I read The Sea by John Banville. I don’t see the right sidebar. This is what I see.

Thanks for persevering and for taking the time to make a screenshot. It is hard to diagnose things when none of us knows what the other's set up is. And useful to know that this kind of thing can happen, so (even if it's unavoidable due to how screen magnifier software works) it at least helps for next time someone posts with a similar question.

>19 Nevov: I should have sent a screenshot earlier, as soon as you told me about “the list”. But it’s solved now and thank you. I will also bear in mind to slide the screen to the left when I think there might be something in a side column.