List of Prolific Writers | Hacker News Reader

List of Prolific Writers

en.wikipedia.org

54 pointslermontov10 comments

My favorite is Isaac Asimov: "Published in 9 of the 10 Dewey Decimal System categories"

His scientific writings for lay people are amazing(World of Carbon comes to mind). He could string everything together so well.

I love World of Carbon (and it's companion volume, World of Nitrogen)! I've been trying to get the rights to republish both with modern annotations, but I'm apparently not a big enough publisher for William Morris Endeavor (literary management for Asimov's estate) to respond to. It's sad, since both books are out of print.

I'm happy to see Corín Tellado there. Her works were always downplayed because of the genre (romantic pulp short novels, female public oriented) but she really worked her ass off to write more than 4000 books, and was quite popular with certain demographics, and sold more than 400 million books.

Single mother of two (her husband didn't want to take care of their children and left her alone) she could write a book in less than a week ¡!

So she had a life worth of one of her books. I remember how popular she was when I was a child.

I'd guess Andre Norton should be on this list:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Norton

Met someone connected with ACE books back in the 1960s and they said she wrote so many books and under so many different guises that she didn't even know about everything she'd produced.

> Philip M. Parker, by one measure the world's most prolific author, has an entirely different approach. Parker has over 200,000 titles listed on Amazon.com, having developed an algorithm to gather publicly available data and compile it into book form.

This NYT article is cited as the source: http://archive.ph/glW3U

12 years later, I wonder how computer generated books are now.

These days many prolific writers are probably publishing most of their work as online articles. It would be interesting to see a list that includes a total word count (although such a thing would be very difficult to compile).

In my own writing (such as it is), I find that putting down my thoughts too often means that when I go back and look at what I've written, the quality isn't very good. I have to sit and stew a while and write something carefully if I want it to stand up.

For very prolific authors, I wonder how much of their work is genuinely great and how much is just rephrasing something they'd written earlier or just uninteresting. I'm not sure I have enough time to read any to find out!

At the other end of the spectrum there is Harper Lee, who wrote one and a half novels but received widespread acclaim for it.

Dumas had a ghost writer or writers

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