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It depends on the goals you have as a writer, and to some degree how you write. It seems to me to write one complete novel a year is damned good going.
There have been enormously prolific novelists - John Creasey springs to mind with over 450 novels but he needed numerous pen-names to do it. Few if any of Creasey's novels are really memorable, and most are out of print (although there may be an unexplored digital market yet).
Edgar Wallace was another prolific writer. Again, few of his are truly memorable (and I've read most of them) but at leastthe majority of them are now epubs.
E Phillips Oppenheim poured out hundreds of all-but-unreadable novels which, fortunately, a few die-hard fans have turned into ebooks (he is out of copyright in Australia). Only The Great Impersonation is remembered now.
Contrast Raymond Chandler's miserly half dozen or so novels, mostly expanded or re-hashed from his earlier pulp short stories. All in print, all different, all memorable.
Or Hammett's tiny output, of which at least two -- The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon-- look like lasting indefinitely.
One thing which happens when you use a series character is that you rapidly run flat out into the improbability barrier. Real detectives will tell you that in a full career they might have just one major, dramatic or sensational case; what they do NOT have is lots and lots of them, all ending in face-to-face fights to the death with the baddy.
I think Lee Child already faces this with Jack Reacher. Look at Spenser--how many people has this PI killed over the years? Two or three each novel seems typical, and there have been many novels. He's probably Boston's biggest serial killer.
There's no doubt a fixed production schedule can result in a cookie-cutter product if the author is not very careful. Still, if you do it full-time for a living I suppose the schedule is necessary: new novels keep the old ones alive. Once new ones stop appearing, all too often the previous books' sales decline rapidly. Sometimes you can't afford to quit.
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