Amazon.com ranks its book sales hourly. They used to rank authors publicly, but they seem to have removed that functionality from their website. I was curious who the current best authors are, so I did some basic number crunching.
I looked at the top current (August 2021) best-selling authors and added up their star ratings for their top five featured Kindle books. I eliminated any author without at least five full-length Kindle books with significant numbers of ratings.
Here is the list I came up with (sum of five ratings in parentheses):
- J.K. Rowling (25.0)
- Mark R. Levin (25.0)
- Don Miguel Ruiz (24.0)
- Barack Obama (24.0)
- Robert Greene (23.5)
- Stephen King (22.5)
- Colleen Hoover (22.5)
- Matt Haig (22.5)
- Douglas Preston (22.5)
- John Grisham (22.5)
- Frank Herbert (22.5)
- Robert T. Kiyosaki (22.5)
- Taylor Jenkins Reid (22.0)
- Gregg Olsen (22.0)
- Andy Weir (21.5)
- Laura Dave (21.0)
After compiling this list, I realized that Amazon star ratings aren’t reflective of how good the book is. Amazon star ratings are more reflective of how rabid the fanbase is. That means if you write a book with mediocre writing but sell it to a loyal fanbase, those fans will generally rate the book highly. The low ratings most likely come from people outside of your loyal fans.
Are J.K. Rowling and Mark R. Levin better authors than Stephen King and John Grisham? No. But their fans have rabies and King and Grisham’s don’t.
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