Is a book a year too much to ask?

Greg Iles was in Britain recently for pre-publication promotion of his newest novel BLOOD MEMORY, due out in April. Aside from traumatizing the poor Brits with anecdotes about Amy Tan’s penchant for dominatrix getups and whips, he unleashed a rather blistering rant about why thrillers now suck in his opinion:

Iles has forged a successful career in a competitive field, but he is outspokenly critical now of the dynamics of thriller publishing.

"So many thrillers today are formulaic and one-dimensional. I feel like there used to be a higher standard," he says. "I know I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but the problem is that the whole industry is built around writing one book a year, so the next hardcover comes out with the mass market paperback of your previous one. That’s great from a marketing perspective, but from a writing perspective it’s terrible, because people have to write their novel in six or seven months. It’s not enough time to write a good book.

"I’ve done it for the past five years, but if I’m completely honest, three of my first four books are the best I ever wrote because I spent two years apiece on them. Some of the stories I’ve come up with since then are just as good, but have I been able to do those stories justice? No, not completely."

I’ve long wondered why the book-a-year treadmill is publishing gospel. For those writers who can naturally produce a book in that time period–great, and more power to them, but so many can’t and the books suffer as a result. So when did this trend originate? Hopefully certain anonymous publishing types might be further willing to enlighten me about the so-called history of the "book-a-year" idea…