The Best-rated Authors on Amazon.com

This list was adapted from an article on my blog.

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 on my own.

I looked at the top current best-selling authors and added up their star ratings for their top five most popular Kindle books.  I eliminated any author without at least five full-length Kindle books with significant numbers of ratings.

After compiling this list, I realized that Amazon star ratings aren’t reflective of how good the book is at all. 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 (for example, religious books tend to be rated highly... how can a devout Christian give a book praising Jesus 1 star?). The low ratings most likely come from people outside of your loyal fans.

Are J.K. Rowling and Don Miguel Ruiz better authors than Stephen King and Delia Owens? No. But their fans have rabies and King and Owens’ don’t.

Here are Amazon's current top 10 authors.