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CronoDAS comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong
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The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn't any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That's a bit of a special case, though.
Clive Cussler manages to write a lot of books that don't become more hokey when he shows up as a DEM.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The "author" in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he's already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won't be anyone around to read his book - so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
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