Help:Getting Started:Verify a Novel

If you've found that your book is already in the ISFDB, in this exact edition -- same publisher, same date, same printing -- then there's no need to enter it. You can do two useful things, though: you can update the publication with any additional information, and you can verify the publication.

Take a look at the information recorded in the ISFDB for this book. Check it against your copy. Does everything match? Is anything missing? If something is missing, it is straightforward to fix it: click on the "Edit this Pub" link on the left navbar, and you'll see a display of the record as the ISFDB has it. Go ahead and add any additional data you can see -- for help on what to put in these fields, see this page. Then click Submit Data, and your updates will be submitted for approval.

The other thing you can do is mark the book as "Verified". The "primary source" for a book is a copy of that book, and you have the primary source in your hands. You can click on "Verify this pub" in the navigation bar, and you'll see a list of reference works. You can ignore all of them except "Primary". If you are confident that every field in the publication record is accurate, based on the book you are holding, then you can check the "Verified" button against "Primary".

If you decide to do verifications, please read the publication field help in detail. There are a lot of areas where it is easy to make mistakes, and generally it's best to stick to data entry and clean up of obvious mistakes to start with. However, if you make sure you're following the verification help, then verifying the data is a tremendous help to the ISFDB.