I found this site & thought it was great. Figured I'd share.

http://www.literature-map.com/

That's awesome.

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One day I shall be on there

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Hmm, so I put J.R.R. Tolkien in there, and one of the closest authors it found was Stephen King.

That's odd.

Yes, it has a lot like that where the connection doesn't seem obvious, though one could draw similarities (both King and Tolkein are LONG WINDED)...but it doesn't work that way.

It's purely a 'people who like X also tend to like Y'. When I put in some of my favorite authors, seemingly unrelated authors who are also favorites popped up pretty close to their names. A few names I didn't know kept popping up as well, and I'll be checking them out to see what I'm missing.

Not really sure how good their database is or anything, but it seemed relatively accurate to me, and may be based purely on something like Amazon buyer (people who bought this item also bought X at Y% rate...even when sometimes the items do not seem at all related.)

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Wow, it seemed way off when I tried it at first.

My favorite author is a fantasy writer named Stephen Lawhead (Read the Pendragon cycle-- Arthur legend + Atlantis legend = win!). He's religious, but his books aren't overtly religious. In other words, you won't find him in a Christian bookstore-- he's in the fantasy section of regular bookstores.

I mention this because that literature map put Randy Alcorn as the closest author-- who writes Christian self-help garbage, and motivational books, as far as I can tell. Not even close!

It did, however, place Jack Whyte nearby (which is pretty close) and Robert don Hughes (in the right genre as well).

It probably didn't place him there because they're both religious, but because religious people are more likely to buy his books (because they know he's religious).

Just a guess though, I have no idea how they rank authors.

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I've found that 'current' & best-selling authors get strange hits that are not that similar. If you take a lessor-known author like James Kunetka the hits are better.

The music section is also interesting; I haven't checked out the movie section yet.

Is there a way to see the works of the authors? Other than Google...