r/Fantasy's Favorite Female Authors

I wanted to do a sample project using Reddit's praw module. r/Fantasy is one of my favorite subs and they conduct various polls to help readers find new books to read. So, I decided to do a small analysis using one of their lists.

About a month back, a thread was made titled The r/Fantasy Top Books by Women: 2021 Edition. For the 2019 poll, the results thread also included ranking changes compared to 2018.

To avoid replicating something that'd possibly be done again, I changed the ranking criteria to total votes per author instead of per book/series. I know that this is a significant deviation, since readers were asked to pick their all time top-10 book/series, not top-10 authors list. But hey, I just wanted to pick a simple enough project that I thought I could do with Python, so I tried this. This also made it easier to handle the data inaccuracies.

The biggest challenge I faced was correcting the input data. Readers were asked to use by or - to separate book/series and author. However, some used , or an em-dash instead of hyphen. Some switched the order. Since the data I got from praw was in markdown, I had to also remove formatting. I was able to handle most of these issues with code. I separated out lines that didn't follow the pattern and manually corrected them since these were small enough.

After the above process, I was left to deal with minor differences in author names, like initials, spacing, typos, etc. There were too many entries to adjust manually, so I used fuzzywuzzy to determine if two entries were close enough. This trick would fail with authors, say R.J. Barker and R.J. Parker but I didn't find such entries during a sample manual sanity check from these groupings.

So, with all the remaining flaws that I didn't catch, here's the top-30 authors list I got:

Rank	Author	2021	Author	2019
1)	Ursula K. Le Guin	141	Ursula K. Le Guin	61
2)	N.K. Jemisin	134	N.K. Jemisin	59
3)	Robin Hobb	129	Lois McMaster Bujold	54
4)	Lois McMaster Bujold	114	Robin Hobb	51
5)	Martha Wells	114	J.K. Rowling	49
6)	Naomi Novik	111	Naomi Novik	47
7)	Susanna Clarke	81	Becky Chambers	38
8)	Becky Chambers	76	Katherine Addison	34
9)	Katherine Addison	74	Jacqueline Carey	30
10)	Madeline Miller	73	Martha Wells	30
11)	Tamsyn Muir	67	Susanna Clarke	29
12)	Octavia E. Butler	67	Patricia A. McKillip	27
13)	J.K. Rowling	64	Katherine Arden	25
14)	Diana Wynne Jones	57	Octavia E. Butler	22
15)	Tamora Pierce	50	Ann Leckie	20
16)	Katherine Arden	45	Tamora Pierce	20
17)	Arkady Martine	44	Claire North	19
18)	Ann Leckie	44	Madeline Miller	18
19)	Leigh Bardugo	41	Leigh Bardugo	18
20)	Robin McKinley	40	Diana Wynne Jones	18
21)	Jacqueline Carey	40	Helene Wecker	17
22)	R.F. Kuang	38	Janny Wurts	17
23)	Fonda Lee	35	Maggie Stiefvater	16
24)	Patricia A. McKillip	34	Catherynne M. Valente	15
25)	Seanan McGuire	33	Robin McKinley	15
26)	M.L. Wang	33	Rachel Aaron	15
27)	Alix E. Harrow	33	Anne McCaffrey	15
28)	Erin Morgenstern	33	Sherwood Smith	13
29)	Marie Brennan	32	Seanan McGuire	13
30)	Mary Robinette Kowal	32	R.F. Kuang	13