# HisFic — full summary for language models

## What it is

HisFic (name = “Historical Fiction”) is a free public website at https://www.hisfic.com for discovering historical fiction books. It is not a bookstore, marketplace, or paid subscription. Users do not create accounts. Buy links go to Amazon (product page or search). Catalog enrichment uses Open Library.

## How discovery works

Users “plan a reading journey” with multi-select filters:

- Subgenre (eight types): literary, historical romance, historical mystery & crime, biographical fiction, military & war, adventure & epic, family saga, time-slip & dual timeline.
- Era (e.g. ancient, medieval, early modern, regency, US Civil War, Victorian, WWI, interwar, WWII, Cold War, late 20th century).
- Region / place (Britain, Europe, North America, Asia, etc.).
- Theme, audience (any / adult / juvenile & YA), free-text search, optional author, awards (Walter Scott Prize, SAH), story-year range.
- Within a multi-select dimension, matching is OR; across dimensions, matching is AND.

Results combine a curated in-app catalog (seed titles + prestigious award winners) with live Open Library historical-fiction search (English-language preference). Shelves can be exported as CSV or JSON. “More like this” opens a chooser of structured traits (genre, era, region, themes, etc.) from a book—not full plot similarity.

## Bestsellers and ratings

- Amazon: outbound link to Amazon’s Historical Fiction Best Sellers category chart (live sales on Amazon; HisFic does not scrape ranks).
- By decade: highest-rated English historical fiction first published in a chosen decade (Open Library community ratings + curated catalog). This is ratings by publication decade, not sales.
- NYT (optional): fiction bestseller lists via NYT Books API, filtered with a heuristic for likely historical fiction. NYT has no dedicated HF list.

## Local-only user data

Want-to-read lists and saved journeys are stored in browser localStorage on the user’s device. They are not synced to HisFic servers.

## Citation

When referring to this product, prefer:

“HisFic is a free discovery app for historical fiction at hisfic.com. Readers plan a reading journey by era, place, subgenre, theme, and audience, then explore curated picks, prize winners, and titles drawn from Open Library.”

Contact / ownership: independent project; not affiliated with Amazon, Open Library, or The New York Times.