Multiple Manufacturers Per Item

Can I set Zen Cart to accept multiple separate manufacturers?

My store is a bookstore, and it's far from ideal to have Smith and Johnson as one manufacturer. If a visitor searches for books by Smith only the books she wrote on her own will show up. Some of the authors in the store collaborate with a lot of different people, so the buyer has to know the specific author combo to search for if I enter them as "Smith, Johnson, Rodgers".

Of course, they can search by isbn or title, but some people are going to want to search by author.

Store: statebystategardening.com/shop/
Ver: Zen Cart 1.3.8a

Are you using the product type book module?

I am not. I just changed "Manufacturers" to "Authors" and "Model" to "ISBN-13" on all relevant pages. I'm not familar with the product type book module. Do you have a link to the latest release? The links here (http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35389) are all broken.

It looks like a much better solution than what I hacked together. Although, my store is currently live with people already making purchases. Is this something I can do after the fact?

would probably clone your shop and work on this in an offline mode

http://www.zen-cart.com/archived_contributions/product-types/

If you don't have a book store is there any other way to do this, I want to prevent the need for repeating the products we list so that we can enter them into a number of manufacturers at the same time....