<p>Fiction reading has attracted increasing research interest for its potential role in fostering verbal and socio-cognitive abilities. This study set out to develop a Chinese version of the Author Recognition Test (ART) as an objective measure of lifetime exposure to print fiction. In a large-scale study (1305 college student participants), we used item response theory to examine item characteristics and identify a set of functioning author names for the Chinese ART. Corpus analyses revealed that item difficulty was inversely related to the frequency of author names in large Chinese text corpora, thereby verifying the presumed linkage between author recognition and print exposure. Factor analyses did not yield a robust separation between “literary” and “popular” fiction authors, indicating that readers did not reliably encode this distinction and that the test is best characterized as a unidimensional measure of fiction-related print exposure. In a subsequent validation study, we assessed the degree to which ART predicted participants’ reading-relevant abilities. Results revealed that participants’ verbal achievement scores correlated more strongly with ART than with self-report measures. Regression analysis further suggested that ART score had the highest explanatory power among other print exposure measures for predicting Chinese language achievement score, demonstrating a satisfactory level of criterion-related validity. The present study represents one of the first efforts to examine Chinese readers’ fiction reading experience and its relationship with reading-relevant performance. Recommendations for the assessment of fiction exposure and future directions are discussed.</p>