On chat, Ash, who doesn't have enough reputation to create tags [ yet :) ] pointed out a problem with our tagging system. Given that we use title and author tags, it's hard for new users to ask questions about obscure authors and books, because the tags haven't been created yet.
How can we fix this problem?
First off, it's clear that new users asking questions about books by authors that don't have tags yet are going to have to use some sort of generic tag, rather than the author and work/series tags which they don't have enough rep to create.
Thus, if someone asks a question about a long novel by a French author who doesn't have a tag yet, they can use the french-literature tag (which the question should have anyway) and wait for someone else to create the author/work tags for them.
It's worth noting that this is what actually happened in the case that motivated this meta post - Ash ended up posting her question with just the american-literature tag. So this seems like a practical and workable solution.
What if the relevant tag even for the whole body of literature doesn't exist yet?
I've been generally against using tags such as english-literature or american-literature, since by default (this being an English-language site) the majority of our questions will fall into these categories. But perhaps we should start using these tags more, precisely so that new users can use them as suggested in this answer.
Also, yes, we don't yet have tags for every language and country. If someone asks a question about Miloš Crnjanski, they'll have even more issues since we don't have a serbian-literature tag yet. But hey, the site is still young - as we grow, and broaden our horizons, these tags will get created. Eventually it'll be hard to find a country, language, or culture which isn't represented somewhere on our site.
Which we should all endeavor to do anyway.
In an ideal world, every question would have applicable non-title tags, and then there would be no difficulty.
If I were to ask a question about Book X by Author Y, I may not be able to create tags book-x or author-y. But I can still tag the question with something appropriate to the specific question -- be it historical-context, or reading-order, or sexuality, or why-did-the-author-not-use-my-awesome-idea. Every question is about something, and so ideally, there should be an appropriate tag.
And as for adding title-tags -- there would be no difficulty; other users would easily add them in.
Unfortunately, our tagging system and taxonomy are still in their infancy. I don't think we've established many clear, distinct classes of questions; even if we have some (or soon shall), a new user may have some degree of trouble finding those and figuring out how to tag their question. And the abundance of title- and author-tags muddies the water -- first by making it much less necessary for regular users to develop non-title tags, and second by bloating the tag list, so that many of our top tags are titles and authors.
Nonetheless, this is the system we have, and this is the best answer we can provide at this stage. Every question must be tagged with something; the user will need to find something appropriate. We all need to be aware of this, and make sure we don't "settle" for using only title-tags and author-tags, and put in effort to develop our taxonomy.
In the absence of a dedicated tag for that particular book/author, the user should use tags describing the content of the question, rather than which book is being asked about: inspiration, history-of, symbolism, etc.
Tagging here is not really important as long as the question is clear and it is easy to understand what is being asked. Our traffic is low for now and our users are vigilant enough to be able to look at all new questions; therefore, it is not at all a problem to have tags edited.
If the asker wants a specific tag applied, they could add a disclaimer to the end of the question:
Please create a tag for Stjepan Sejic and his series called "Ravine"
Then a 300 rep (or whatever) user would create the tag and delete the disclaimer. Easy!
