What are 'Works' in Stison?

In the Title Manager module, content that originates from the same title shares a Content ID. That is to say, if a title has a Paperback, Hardback and Ebook format, these will most likely be grouped at the title level. 

List of Works provides an additional, or in some cases alternative, means of grouping together content that originates from the same Intellectual Property (IP). This helps to create clearer relationships between your products internally, and to provide a level of sales reporting across varying formats or editions of the same IP. 

We call this grouping a 'Work'; however, we recognise that this term is used with great variety across the publishing industry.

At the moment, this grouping/categorisation is for internal use only and is not sent in your ONIX feeds.   

Grouping separate editions 

You may wish to use the List of Works function to link together various editions that have resulted from the same IP, or original contract with an author. For example, the First, Second, Abridged and Translated editions of an original work. These cannot be grouped under the same Title in Title Manager as they are distinct products, and will have differing metadata and content. However, they do all link back to the original IP, and it can be useful to be able to visualise this link, as well as produce life-time reporting. 

In this use case, you would have one work that groups all editions together.

Grouping formats that cannot be merged in Title Manager

Alternatively, you may have some formats that cannot be grouped under the same title (and content ID) in Title Manager. Say you have an audiobook and a paperback of your first edition, you may have to split them in title manager so that the audiobook can be assigned a Narrator separately to the paperback. In List of Works, you can then group these two formats of the same edition together under a work. 

In this use case, you might have multiple works, each one representing a separate edition, and being used to group together formats of an edition.

You can then link these separate works together. Read this guide to find out more.

An Example

In our example below, Title 01 and Title 05 are separate editions of a title that have resulted from the same original manuscript.  As you can see in the screenshots, each title has its own resultant formats, and these are grouped together under the same Works Title. In this case, we've called it: Sample Work.

You can download your List of Works from the main menu:

The following information will be downloaded:

Below is an example of a work that we have set up. You can see the separate editions that have come from this work, and the print runs associated with each edition.

Lifetime Reporting

Further down the screen, below the bibliographic data and production information, you will see charts and graphs. These display cumulative annual sales figures. This is very useful at-a-glance reporting to get a sense of the life of the content in all its various forms and editions.