The canonical list of authors by rank

From Larry Correia (an oldie but a goodie):

THE OFFICIAL ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHOR SUCCESS
I’ve often been derisively referred to as a “D List Author” by my critics. Curious, I had to look up where that list came from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-list

Sadly, as usual my critics suck at everything. This scale is based on how recognizable movie stars are, and since most regular people wouldn’t recognize any but the most famous (or funny looking) authors, it doesn’t really work for us at all. So I have created this super helpful guide so critics know what bucket to arbitrarily stick writers in.

What’s way better than fame? All fame is good for in Hollywood is determining how much they have to pay actors. So screw recognition. Show me the MONEY!

And the list:

A List – High upon Mount Olympus They Gaze Down Upon the Pathetic Mortals = All the $

• • Authors who are worth more than the GDP of some countries.
  • Authors who build their houses out of gold bars.
  • Characters from their books get their own theme parks.
  • The lady who wrote Twilight.

B List – The King(s) =$$$$$$$$$$

• • Authors who have TV shows about their books starring Peter Dinklage.
  • Authors who sleep on large piles of money.
  • Politicians who get illegal campaign contributions masquerading as advances.
  • Oprah’s Book Club.

C List – The Perpetual Bestsellers =$$$$$$$$$

• • Authors who play poker with Castle.
  • Authors who have lesser TV shows not starring Peter Dinklage.
  • Authors who always get sold in airport bookstores.
  • Authors who are rich enough to have sex scandals and it actually makes the news.

And rounding out the list:

X List – The X

• • Writes violent pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little Ponies, Voltron, and Breaking Bad on the internet, while dressed in a stained bunny costume that looks like a strange gimp version of that thing from Donnie Darko.
  • Don’t make any sudden moves.
  • We’re just going to walk away real slow now.

Y List – The Yama

• • A primordial creature barely capable of vomiting words onto a page in a blasphemous impersonation of the act of writing, so mind shattering and terrible that a single story threatened to end language forever. He is The Thing That Should Not Be. To read his foul creations will summon the Black Goat of the Woods with its Thousand Young, and it will kill your muse and sodomize the corpse.
  • Is confident that he’d be a much more successful writer than A-X, if only he wasn’t too busy stalking Asian women on the internet to actually submit any of his crayon scribbles.
  • The reason sci-fi conventions have security.

Z List – The Guardian’s Village Idiot = ($)

• • A kind of Anti-Author.
  • Motivated by delusions of relevancy, crowd sources witch hunts against writers higher on the list.
  • Collects the opposite of royalties, and actually has to be paid a strange sort of “Book Welfare” to produce a book.

Heh - Larry is no slouch as an author - his writing is fun to read and he has a sick and twisted sense of humor. I love his work.