Wikipedia:WikiProject Romance/Guidelines/Creating a new article

Notability guidelines are strict. Not every published author or book needs to be on Wikipedia. There are others that patrol new articles for notability and can either:

1. put a notice on the article questioning its notability and ask for sources
2. recommend the article for deletion, in which you'll need to not only argue for its notability but also persuade others to keep it.
3. if the article is only a couple of lines long and has no inkling of how it meets notability, an admin can speedy delete it.

To avoid any of this from happening, become familiar with the notability guidelines for creative professionals for articles on authors, and with notability guidelines for books before deciding whether to create a new article. Right now (May 2015), there is a proposal up for consensus to add being on a major bestseller list as another supporting factor in notability, so the fact that it's absent gives you an idea that not only does publishing a book with a major publisher not count for notability, neither does making the New York Times (yet). Winning a major professional award does, along with reviews in major outlets (not Goodreads or Amazon).

So with that, absent of clear cut specifics for authors (book guidelines are much clearer), the following criteria could be helpful in deciding whether to create an article for an author:

1. Has the author won a major award like the RITA or RoNA? and,
2. Has the author received at least two reviews in a major newspaper or magazine like the New York Times, USAToday, Publishers Weekly, etc?
3. Also helpful if there are articles in independent sources (not the author or publisher's websites) about the author and their work, which shows that people in the industry find them notable enough to talk about them.