I wouldn't call him a "hack". That I reserve for authors who churn out sub-literate potboilers without any meaningful reflection of the author's own interest outside of pieces of green folding paper.
This is exactly why KJA deserved the appellation of "hack."
Any time you tell him why you think that (whatever nuDune book you're talking about) isn't good - repetitious chapters, explicit and gory torture scenes, egregious departure from FH-established canon - he smugly points to all the books of his that have been on the New York Times Bestsellers list and says that if people are buying them, they must be good.
Contrast this to Robert Silverberg, who started writing professionally in the late '50s. He wrote some SF in the '50s and '60s, and then didn't really like how the genre and SF publishing industry was going. The '60s brought in the "New Wave" of SF where publishers were allowing bigger books, less formulaic, sex and swearing was allowed (not that it wasn't before, but it couldn't be common or explicit), and science fiction became less science and more fiction.
So Silverberg dropped out of the SF community for awhile. So long, that some people figured he'd quit writing altogether.
Except... he hadn't. This is something he told us in his online discussion group some time ago, earlier this year if memory serves. He
was writing all that time, just in different genres, under a variety of pseudonyms.
Much of what he wrote were detective stories, potboilers with murder, sex, other violence, and they were the kinds of stories that he could churn out in days. Writing like this didn't pay a lot, so the authors who did it had to write a lot, to put food on the table and make the rent. They didn't have the luxury of time to make them into more literary kinds of stories.
They were, I suppose, the detective genre equivalent of Harlequins, most of which have the same basic plot and it's just the location and names of the characters that change. The woman is always some prize for the male protagonist, and the author churns out a LOT of them.
Of course some do turn out to be "house names" used by any author contracted to write those books - even children's authors did it. Nancy Drew was not written by Carolyn Keene, as there's no such person. Ditto Franklin W. Dixon, for The Hardy Boys.
There are "house names" for reviewers and critics too, btw. Any time you see a book with a comment attributed to "Harriet Klausner", for instance, be aware that this is a house name. There is no way in hell that can be a real person, due to the sheer volume of reviews attributed to that name. A reviewer is supposed to have actually read the book they review (or at least skimmed it). Klausner could not possibly have done all those reviews even if "she" was just churning out reviews without even reading anything.
Which meant I was amused when one of the more pompous Trek authors who hangs out on TrekBBS started pontificating about something, I mentioned I hadn't particularly cared for that book, and he promptly bragged that "Harriet Klausner gave me an excellent review!"
He had no idea that he'd gotten a rubber-stamped review from someone whose job it is to churn those out under the name of "Harriet Klausner."
Now, back to Robert Silverberg. Yes, I suppose you could say that in those years when he was churning out erotic detective potboilers, that was hackwork. He admitted himself that he wasn't really proud of them and hadn't made any effort to take advantage of his fame later in life to say, "I wrote those, too" and watch as completist collectors bought them just to say they had them.
Silverberg returned to science fiction with what is widely considered his masterwork: Lord Valentine's Castle. That book is a joy to read, and takes you on a breathless adventure as Valentine wakes up on a hillside overlooking the city of Pidruid, not have a clue about anything other than he thinks his name is Valentine, and he can't remember anything else.
He's taken in by a troupe of wandering jugglers, who are happy to have him, since there's been a recent edict that in any mixed-species group of entertainers, at least three of them must be human. So Valentine makes three, even though he doesn't know how to juggle. No matter; the other two teach him and he becomes reasonably competent (as in not dropping stuff).
Anyway, that book took years for Silverberg to write, and he did extensive research on juggling (even consulting the Flying Karamazov Brothers about what is and isn't possible for human jugglers, and how things might work when you have alien jugglers with six arms each).
Silverberg has gone on to write more books about the planet of Majipoor (where Lord Valentine's Castle takes place). I haven't read all of them, but I did read the first three books that constitute a trilogy (though the 2nd book is a story loosely connected with various short stories interspersed).
Silverberg has a lot to be proud of in his career. He's written some fantastic stuff - alien worlds, time travel, adventure fiction set in Africa during the Age of Sail, speculating on what the world would be like if Rome and Greece never fell (when Rome decided to sail across the Atlantic to loot the Aztecs of their treasure... oops, seems the Vikings got there first...). He's been an incredibly prolific author, in numerous genres of fiction and nonfiction. My SCA persona is partly based on inspiration from his time travel novel Up the Line, and I used one of his nonfiction books in an anthropology paper.
But so not a hack, when you're counting his non-potboiler stuff under another name.
KJA merits the title of 'hack' no matter what.
It is more expensive and bigger bits are showier and likely require a grinder. It is just regular salt without the iodine and with small amounts of other mineral that make it look fancier. Grinding one's salt is like grinding one's pepper.
Besides, "Back to the pepper mines!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it...
