You've picked a couple of BIG ones as examples, and both these are obviously big projects - I think they'd have taken a long time regardless. Plus there's a long lead time in finding a publisher.
There can be a long time between idea and a productive start on a novel. And work on the book doesn't really stop until until it's published, but how much work is done in that phase varies a lot. So what is the right measure for how long a book takes to write?
Get a publisher, become even moderately successful, and you can afford to spend more time writing. The find-a-publisher-and-editor lead time is gone, and so things appear to take less time ... maybe.
And there are examples of authors where the subsequent books also take a long time. Stephen Donaldson says Lord Foul's Bane took nine months to write (but that doesn't include the two and a half years of rejections and then the lengthy editorial process). The last chronicles he cites as having been in his mind for 25 years! I haven't tried to keep up, but I get the impression George Martin doesn't get much faster.
I'm not even sure you can reliably say that "good books take longer to write" (without the "first" qualifier). From Wikipedia about Michael Moorcock we get:
Quote:
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Most of Moorcock's earlier work consisted of short stories and relatively brief novels: he has mentioned that "I could write 15,000 words a day and gave myself three days a volume. That's how, for instance, the Hawkmoon books were written."
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and despite this speed he has produced some very good books (and some it's probably more polite for me to not to comment on
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It's all author and project dependent - not to mention the reader's tastes that dictate whether they think it was "good".