How write down to database multiple authors in simple books table?

Question

I am wondering how should I save authors (in case where there are more than one author) in simple database.

In case one one book has one authors, everything is easy. The

Answer 1

Since a book can have multiple authors, and an author can write more than one book, I'd suggest a many-to many relationship between the Books and Authors tables.

Add another table which links the two, like so:

BookAuthors

| BookID | AuthorID |

BookID is a foreign key to Books.id and AuthorID is a foreign key to Authors.id.

If you want to return all of the authors for a given book, you could do something along the lines of:

SELECT Authors.id, Authors.FirstName, Authors.LastName
FROM Authors INNER JOIN BookAuthors ON Authors.id = BookAuthors.AuthorID
WHERE BookAuthors.BookID = '123'