Also not unimportant, the quality of said novels. 2 shitty novels a year versus one praised novel every 10 years.
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Actually, I think it's the inverse. Most 2/year novelists are professionals, and it shows. Stephen King consistently wrote at about that rate. 6 months full-time is a good amount of time for a professional writer: 1-2 months for writing, and then another year or so of polishing and editing that happens in parallel with other efforts.
10 year novelists are often amateurs. That novel your next door neighbour asked you to read? He's probably been working on it for years.
Even notoriously slow George R. R. Martin takes less than 10 years to write a novel.
Two novels off the top of my head with far greater significance that anything GRRM or SK have or ever will write that took ~10 years to write: Dispatches (1968-1977) and Infinite Jest (1986-1996).
Feel free to think that a novel is something one cranks out as if it's just an object that carries no meaning, requiring no sacrifice from the author. But that's an opinion, and not fact.
I did not mean to imply that they have to be bad because of a higher frequency. But I am saying that it is possible that they are.
All I wanted to do was point out that quality matters as well, and not draw a correlation between frequency and quality.
(I do agree that 10 years sounds too extreme for a professional writer of course ^^)