9. Clive Cussler
Cussler writes mostly modern day adventure novels. His most notable work is the Dirk Pitt series. Cussler is not exactly outright awful. He writes pretty fluffy adventure books that can be read on the beach. The problem is that the story lines in his book are so moronic it's painful. For example, there is Raise the Titanic! The exclamation point is actually part of the title. As you can probably guess from the title, the plot involves raising the Titanic. The reason? There is a super rare material in the hull and bad guys are after it. Which is pretty much how all his books go. There is something in a weird, remote location and the hero races the bad guys to it. Beyond his lack of innovation it is worrisome that a book featuring a character named Dirk Pitt has sold more copies than all the Beat writers put together.