Just How Popular Are Some Goodreads Authors!
Goodreads let you follow fellow-bookworms, show-off your bookshelf, and above all friend or follow the authors! However, the site has gone beyond just helping people find and share books they love or to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world!
As authors — both upcoming and established — started populating the site using the Author Program readers started following and befriending them. Popular authors such as Stephen King (#1 most followed) and Salman Rushdie are quite active on Goodreads. But some seem to turn their back to this site. So looking at the Goodreads Authors page I thought I should look further at the author-popularity — by numbers.
Using a Web-browser App Kimono, namesake of the Japanese dress, I scraped nearly 5400+ further pages. After loads of robot-hours, Kimono brought back errors and data — in a 50%-50% share. So what I found was only based on the rest 50% data — a look at nearly 70,000 author profiles instead of the whole set of nearly 164,000.
I went by the number of “friends” the authors had on Goodreads. Quite interestingly I discovered that the top 10 authors (or for that matter, even top 100) I found were all new to me — not that I already knew so much, still —none rang a bell! They were, to me, not as popular as King, Rowling, or Rushdie! See if you know anyone (DATA)!
But have a look where do some of the Top-10 Goodreads “most friended authors” come from in the one-minute map GIF below:
The new social media “friending” seem to change the way readers see the authors they read. So I asked a few users as to how do they find the notion of “author-popularity” on Goodreads!
Srividhya Sundaram says, “ I personally would not wish to follow any popularity list.” She added, “However, I agree that the list might introduce one to different authors.” For Bharat Ravi, the popularity need not correlate with good content. He says, “ I would NEVER go by the popularity list to check out books. The list would be useful only for having an estimate of popularity and that alone.”
Befriending an author on social media or going by the number of their followers only matter to whom these numbers mean so much. For a reader, though, the good old way seems to be fine.
