I'm not familiar with the author, but a book a year is pretty standard as to what a publishing company wants to keep momentum in the sales and build....
Nothing abnormal there. (Pointing at Jim Butcher, here, but I figure Kenyon and that Anita Blake gal do the same. Hamilton?). Let alone the one who does the stuff that's titled like old westerns with a demon twist.
Then there are the multiple series folks.
Anyway.
Duma Key has a painter, The Shining a hotel caretaker, The Stand doesn't have any writers that I remember. In forty-ish short stories, the only writer I remember is in "The Typewriter of the Gods,"
Insomnia - no writer, Dreamcatcher - no writer. To me that's enough to say the characterization isn't inaccurate, it's false.
And as to the Internet being poison - authors need to develop a thicker skin, that's all. And if you can't take it, (A) don't allow comments on your blog / website and (B) don't read your reviews. Simple enough and something you could do years ago when you told your agent only to forward the positive fan mail and positive reviews.
As far as I'm concerned, I'll make one blanket statement -- all art is individual taste. One man's graceful semicolon is another man's strychnine.
Fantastically enough, there are a lot of writers who dream of quitting the day job, and here's one that's quitting to get a day job. It takes all kinds.
Personally, I never expect to get that far--being able to quit my day job, and frankly, I'd rather not quit my day job. I happen to enjoy it. But I also enjoy writing and the occasional sale is basically like getting a $5 lottery ticket that pays for itself, or slightly more. (I have this hypothetical bet with myself that I need to sell stories to fund buying the writing books I've already bought, but at this rate, I'll be ninety by the time I pay them off.)
Anyway.
I could probably churn out a book a year, but I doubt I'd have time to open my mail... no comments or promises on quality. But a lot of novelists work at this pace, so if you can't keep up, well, you've got competition. (Pointing at Heinlien, Asimov, and Philip K. Dick as examples) Other authors get away with taking a decade to produce the seventh book in a series (bitter, me? No!). But Come On, Orson!
On the topic, I figure if I had notebooks on notebooks of setting, it'd be easier to write a book a year (Philip K. Dick worked similarly to this, writing notes and notes and notes until he felt he had enough to write, then never referring to the notes --it kind of shows, but--). And if I managed to sell one, a sequel would be easier to write because, well, I'd learned a few things the first time through.
To say nothing of the fact that the one book I've written (unpublished, not seeking publication yet as not publishable quality) I would love to write another book in that world. It has a lot of things I'm passionate about cooked into it. As it stands, I keep making notes on new things to include, and the book is starting to resemble a Rube Goldberg version of a Calliope.
--Brian.
I do know that when I explained I never get more than a 5 hour break from caring for my disabled child (i.e when she's at school) and that this makes attending conventions, meeting journalists in London, and signing books in other cities etc difficult, they've been totally understanding and said 'no problem, don't do it'. In fact the only thing I've ever been asked is whether I had a webpage. I think my agent encouraged me to set one up. At no point though was I asked to tweet, go on facebook etc etc.
