Rename: One Book Author

I think One-Book Author should be renamed to One Work Wonder, which is currently a redirect to the same. Most of the examples listed aren't authors/books, and the title One Work Wonder makes it more inclusive for actors who did only one role, directors who did only one film, singers who did only one song/album, etc. What say you?

One-Hit Wonder is probably the more common term (it's what Wikipedia uses), if it does need a rename.

If the current title is already being used correctly to refer to non-literary works, it shouldn't need a rename.

Edit: Apparently One-Hit Wonder is its own page. I think we may have a duplicate trope on our hands.

edited 15th Dec '10 8:29:00 PM by troacctid

One-Hit Wonder is entirely music examples and it's not for artists that one wrote one song or one album. They can have thirty albums as long as they only had one song that was a hit. They're different tropes.

One-Hit Wonder could be one popular book author.

One-Book Author is one count book author.

edited 15th Dec '10 8:45:44 PM by CTrombley

that's how they're defined at the moment. It's just that people have only stuck music on One-Hit Wonder.

• One-Book Author: An author has only ever written one book.
• One-Hit Wonder: An author has written any number of books between one and infinity. One and only one of those books is a hit.

The difficulty with that is defining a "hit" book. Best-seller lists? Those have only been in existence relatively recently, compared to books. One book that everyone knows about? That gets into notability problems.

Which would probably be the reason that it doesn't have any literary examples. I just was using it as a metaphor to explain the difference between the two tropes.

Aren't all the examples on this list people that wrote only one book, period?

And my main complaint is that it includes so many non-literary examples. Since it does, it should clearly be renamed to something more universal.

Unfortunately something more general would also make the trope harder to understand. The trope isn't just that someone ever made one work. it's that they made only one work in a specific medium. They could have made a million films, but only one book and they'd still qualify for the trope. So any general name is going to hurt the trope by making it look like it's narrower than it is.

Which would probably be the reason that it doesn't have any literary examples.

Err... actually, if you scroll past all the music examples in One-Hit Wonder, you'll see that there are non-music examples included, including literary examples. <<

edited 16th Dec '10 3:18:26 PM by Servbot

Ah, see, and all but one of the literary examples has written multiple books. It looks like the tropes are being used properly. The sole example of writing only one book, was actually a hit so it actually fits under both tropes.

I was also only able to find one bit of misuse in One-Book Author, though I can't tell if the editor responsible for it was aware that the person done more than one work or not. It's deleted now, anyway.

Can we at least rename the trope so it's obvious that it's not just about books?

There is no way to do that without making it look narrower than it is. We can't replace Book with Work, and anything else gets too long. The trope is being correctly used for things other than books. I see no reason to change it.

I was the person who proposed this in YKTTW and launched the trope. One Work Wonder was my original name for it. I changed it because people seemed to think it was too easily able to be confused with One-Hit Wonder.

EDIT: Here's the YKTTW Archive, if that'll help clear anything up: [1]

edited 12th Jan '11 9:12:36 AM by 0dd1

We have a cultural trope with the phrase "One Book Author". The description and the in-fiction examples line up and display that. This helps to give us the idea of the trope and gives us the way we can understand it won't be medium specific.

Generally tropers are good at taken "Word [Medium Specific Word] [Nationality Specific Word]" and replacing them with the medium and nationality of choice and people are good at seeing a pattern and going "That! I know that. I've seen stuff like that but in a different place."

^ Very well put. I oppose a rename.

also oppose rename

Bumping this for resolution. The lesser consensus seems to be that the current name is fine and this is pretty objectively the case, but not everyone agrees.

Can we get this rapped up so we can lock this topic?

Yeah, I'd say it's pretty much unanimous. Locking this would be nice.