Vonnegut put himself in Breakfast of Champions as a minor character.
It’s more than a name check, and it’s a movie, but Charlie Kaufman is all over this in Adaptation.
And William Goldman is all over The Princess Bride in the abridgements.
And in Slaughterhouse 5.
Ah, yes, I forgot about that one.
Maybe I’m taking the thread title too literally, but I thought the OP was looking for examples where characters in a book (who are the author’s creations but not the author himself) make reference to the author (in the third person).
Are those examples of that?
Yes, thanks. But it’s the SDMB and I enjoy the examples of other similar situations.
IIRC, a Don Quixote’s character in the first novel made references to their creator when describing the Battle of Lepanto (Cervantes was proud to be a participant, as his nickname was “the one-handed man of Lepanto”. However, I think you are referring here to Avellaneda, who did make a fake second part of Don Quixote (what we would call nowadays a fan fiction)
Cervantes, in the real second book, did demolish Avellaneda’s fake second book of Don Quixote by pointing out how wrong Avellaneda got it from the first book.
Right! I knew I didn’t have it quite right – thanks for the correction. I read it all 25 years ago.
There’s a subtle one in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, unpublished in his lifetime and existing in several drafts. The setting is complicated: it is feigned to be a 21st century compilation of the minutes of a club, taken down in the late 20th century. In one passage, some characters are discussing the works of C. S. Lewis and other 20th century writers:
The other minor lights were only known by the few who read old C. R. Tolkien’s little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford. But Jeremy had made most of our club read some of those people…, though beside Jeremy only Ramer and Dolbear bothered with Tolkien père and all the elvish stuff.
“C. R. Tolkien” is Christopher Reuel Tolkien, J.R.R.'s real life son (who never wrote the named “books of memoirs”), and “Tolkien père” is of course J. R. R. Tolkien himself.
Mark Twain, in the start of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has Huck mentioning the first book, and saying that Mr. Twain got it right, mostly.
When he did it there was always some bit about Dirk Pitt looking at him strangely and asking something to the effect of “Have we met before?”, and it usually involved Pitt obtaining his classic car, plane, or other historical trinket that he got in every book.
Jack Higgins didn’t name-check himself, but based on the idea that not everyone would read all of his books he tended to include the same background information about his characters in every book. Cussler did that also, both as an inside joke and to make sure that everyone understood that Dirk Pitt was a semi-autobiographical character.
Quentin Tarantino does this in his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Whit Stillman wrote and directed the movie The Last Days of Disco. He later wrote a novelization of it. The main character is a character from the movie, who points out what the writer/director got wrong.
Heh, I had skimmed this thread when I first noticed it days ago, couldn’t think of a good example off the top of my head, and forgot about it. Then purely out of coincidence I downloaded ‘Badlands’ from the ‘Just Added’ section of my online library to my Kindle., read the “a couple of good thrillers from Preston and Child.” part, and thought, hey, now I have an example for that thread about name-checking authors!" Glad I re-read the OP.
So how does that work? If she’s a ‘Preston and Child’ character, how do ‘Preston and Child’ fictional books exist in her world? Could one of those audiobooks she was listening to have been ‘Badlands’? That’d be a shock, to hear a fictional novel about yourself being read. But, if you were having trouble figuring something out, I guess you could just fast-forward to the last chapter 
That’s what I was thinking.
That’s what “Dark Helmet” (Rick Moranis) did in Spaceballs…
And the Electric Mayhem did in The Muppet Movie.
And in the Gunslinger series, mostly to throw more shade on the guy that ran him over.
Philip K. Dick’s VALIS has “Horselover Fat” which is a literal translation of the Greek-German origin of his name.
I wonder how much input Cary Grant had in getting his real name (Archie Leach) used in His Girl Friday? Ralph Bellamy gets a name check as well.