Which is a map of all authors in the world sorted by overlap in readership. I found some of my favorite writers by browsing it.
I wonder which approach is better suited to find something that is spot on to my interests.
When I think of my favorite books, they usually are the most popular books of their authors.
Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for some reason?
That said, I do think book-level might be much more valuable. My first thought for this was Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. I haven't read anything else by him yet because my brother informs me his other stuff is entirely different. Looking at Goodreads, I think that qualifies as far from his biggest hit. Is it "more profound?"? Doubtful, but seems likely that you shouldn't group it with his others. I want recommendations based on the book I like, not the author I mostly might-not.
A better example might be how Stephenie Meyer wrote the extremely popular Twilight books, and also The Host which is much less well-known, and better in many respects. Probably qualifies as more profound, too—it's told from the perspective of a parasitic alien. Picture the Yeerks from Animorphs if you read those.)
Weird though that for certain cases it spells English author names with Cyrillic alphabet. Like for instance when I center the graph on "Stanisław Lem", I can see names like George Orwell or Terry Pratchett spelled in Cyrillic. I wonder why.
Any reply is going to be somewhat subjective, but All Systems Red is not even in my top 5 books by Martha Wells...