You would think this would be an elementary part of the Goodreads API since getting the genre associated with an author or book is a fairly common task. But, as far as I can tell, none of the xml returned by any of the relevant methods gives genre info. For example, given the author name “Stephen King” none of the returned xml contains info on the genres associated with the author–in this case,”Mystery & Thrillers, Horror, Literature & Fiction.”
The “search.book” method does contain a search[field] option which can be ‘title’, ‘author’, or ‘genre.’ But that’s of no help here since I need to know the genres given an author, not the authors given a genre.
Any help would be hugely appreciated.
I asked a Goodreads developer about this. His reply: “Sorry, but our API doesn’t supply author genre information.”