How Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write So Many Books?

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It doesn't hurt that she earns a ton of money for her publisher.
The constant flow of books is perfect for the way the publishing industry works now.
It is far more profitable to print a new title than to reprint a book or carry inventory, assuming you have a "name" author who can provide new work to print.

Most genre fiction is very formulaic. Once authors find a successful template, they can really just make minor changes and they have another book ready to market. Another thing to consider is that after a certain point, an author is famous enough to have a fanbase that will buy everything they write. Whether its good or not doesn't really matter much.

ghost writers

Some people with autism become incredibly good at doing the same thing over and over again.
Some of us are lucky enough to be paid for doing that.

If your special interest is solving computer issues and telling people how to fix them
plenty of people would be willing to pay you to work from home!
They wouldn't care how you did it as long as the customers went away happy.

Thats true of Tom Clancy. Later in his career he became a brand name and a franchise, and he hired a team of writers to crank out books with his name stamped on them.

Ms Steel apparently still writes her own stuff, formulaic as it may be.

Authors who crank out endless books in an inexhaustible manner, are the exception rather than the norm'.

Just like there are champion level folk of any discipline, so are there with voluminous (not necessary of good quality) - writers.

She is the American Catherine Cookson or Agatha Christie isn't she.

I wish I could find a formula like that and write endlessly.

Yes, she is. Its surprisingly easy to write bad genre fiction. I have twice done NANOWRIMO and completed with 60,000 words using Murder She Wrote episodes as a template (its so formulaic, you can use a timer to find all of the clues and the murderer. The trick is to write them well, not by volume.

[NANOWRIMO is National Novel Writers Month. The goal is to produce a Novel in a month (writing 2000 words per day or more]

I don't think I could do that though. I can only write thoughtful stories that emerge slowly and often end on an inconclusive or vague note.

 TV Tropes has a good article , and  another one, too! 

A "Walking Shirtless Scene" poses with his "Redhead Lady"
and her "Barely Hanging On Grand Dress".

John Creasy was a British crime/mystery writer who wrote over 600 novels in his lifetime. He'd write a set number of words a day and if he'd got to the end of a book before he hit his word limit, he'd just start the next one. His books aren't bad - they're decent mysteries but they're not literature or anything, they're like the book version of fast food.

I'm in awe of prolific writers, although I'd agree that quantity can often mean low quality. But even people like Steven King are pretty prolific in comparison to most mainstream authors and he's written some decent stuff.

Like DanielW I did NanoWriMo. I did it two years running and wrote a novel of 105,000 words. I don't like the book much, it trashed my confidence as a fiction writer and I've not really written much fiction since.

So yeah, people who can just churn them out without any apparent difficulty or self doubt blow my mind.