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Originally Posted by BookJunkieLI
This has nothing to do with bestsellers. It has to do with quality and the idea that just because a writer is able to produce a large volume of work that therefor all of it must be crap.
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You've said this more than once, but I don't think anyone has claimed that.
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I'm not saying that all of their work is going to be the greatest thing ever but it's not going to all be crap either.
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Well, it might be. In any case, junk (I'd prefer not to employ the crass term you use) is a continuum. There's good junk and there's very bad junk. The less time an author spends on a book, the farther along the junk continuum the book will likely fall.
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Plus just because a writer spends a lot of time and effort on something doesn't automatically mean it's going to great either. I've read more than one novel that I know the author spent months or even years working on only to not be able to get past the first chapter or even the first couple of pages.
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Generally speaking, the more time spent on a work, the better it will be. Perhaps the book would never have been to your taste? Perhaps you don't recognize quality? You seem to be very willing to accuse others of that.
One of my favorite authors, Trollope, was highly prolific and he had a day job, too. Not everyone who cranks them out is a Trollope, though, or a King or a Christie. Some are Gardners producing a bunch of potboilers. There's nothing wrong with that and I'm not even saying they're not good entertainment, but great literature it isn't. I've not read anything by Lackey, nor will I, but I don't think rate of production is an unreasonable litmus test; many authors do write the same book over and over or cut other corners, especially in terms of language. There's a lot of books out there and we all have our rules of thumb.