How do I follow famous authors in my field on arxiv and other venues? To stay aware of the latest developments in my areas of interest, I'd like to be able to follow authors. I am quite unaware of any way to do this other than manually look them up on google scholar and subscribe to them. Is there something more effective out there that most people use?
At the end of the day, you will have to manually subscribe to an author or something else to be notified about new submissions. Scopus has a notification service where you can subscribe to authors or even specific search tags. Then you can choose an interval to be notified in (like "every 4 weeks"). That way you can collect all new publications that are of interest for you in a relatively simple way. Caveats are that you have to have a Scopus account and you have to be really careful about your search terms or you will get hundreds of suggested papers per notification. The article must also be indexed by Scopus for it to show up.

Alternatively, you could of course go the old-fashioned way and subscribe to whole journals that are related to your scientific interests and read them. This is probably way too expensive and my first suggestion will be more reasonable.