Contributors

How ListenUp handles the people behind your books: authors, narrators, and everyone else.

In ListenUp, a contributor is anyone who helped make a book: an author, narrator, editor, translator, foreword writer, and so on. Where other apps draw hard lines between these roles, ListenUp keeps a single person as one contributor across all of them. That’s handy when, say, an author narrates their own book or writes the introduction to someone else’s: it’s still one person, with one page. ListenUp works these relationships out from your files as it scans.

Every contributor has a page that gathers all the books they’ve worked on, alongside details about them. Out of the box those details are sparse (usually just the name from your files), but you can fill them in two ways.

Download metadata#

To pull a contributor’s details from the web, open their page, tap the ⋯ menu, and choose Download metadata. ListenUp looks them up on a third-party source and brings back a biography and photo when one’s available. (It’s the contributor counterpart to matching a book .)

Edit by hand#

You can also add or change details yourself from the contributor’s Edit screen: a biography, birth and death dates, a website, and a sort name, plus a photo you upload directly. Hand-editing is the way to fill in the fields a web lookup can’t.

Merge duplicates#

Some authors write under more than one name: Stephen King and Richard Bachman, or J.K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith. Merging combines two contributors into one.

Start from the page of the name you want to keep, then merge the other into it. For example, from J.K. Rowling’s page, merge in Robert Galbraith. From then on the two share a single profile.