WordPress custom query by meta_key - wordpress

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to achieve a specific query to modify my search results for posts with WordPress. I'm trying to search via a custom field called "Common Authors".
There can be multiple Common authors, which is causing my query to sometimes fail. Here is what I've got for now:
<?php
...
$query->set('meta_key', 'common_authors');
$query->set('meta_value', serialize( array(strval($_GET['common_author'])))); // I get a single ID from the url as a string
$query->set('meta_compare', 'IN');
This is what I see when I var_dump the query:
'meta_key' => string 'common_authors'
'meta_value' => string 'a:1:{i:0;s:5:"17145";}'
This works fine if there is only one common_author.
However, there can be multiple common_authors for a post. Here is a meta_value example from the database:
a:4:{i:0;s:5:"14409";i:1;s:5:"17145";i:2;s:5:"14407";i:3;s:5:"14406";}
Could somebody help me out, to figure out how to adapt my query, so that it would return this one as well?

Answer 1

Try This One Work Prefect!
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'post',
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'key' => 'common_authors',
'value' => array ( 'author1', 'author2', 'author3' ),
'compare' => 'IN'
)
)
);
$query = new WP_QUERY($args);
if You Need To Use It In pre_get_posts
$meta_query = array(
array(
'key' => 'common_authors',
'value' => array ( 'author1', 'author2', 'author3' ),
'compare' => 'IN'
)
);
$query->set('meta_query', $meta_query);