Readers can usually tell the books that have their writers' souls behind them. Even worse, if we keep putting off those books of our hearts, the ones we really, really want to write, they'll fade away along with all our passion for writing, the love of words and story that drove us to the page in the first place. We'll forget that every book we write has to have magic in it because after all, we're just writing category. It's only soup. Don't worry about writing the perfect book, just get your name out there.
Quality always matters.
It matters more than anything else, more than decent contracts, more than money, more being published. We live and die by the quality of our books. But if you're writing four pretty good books a year, books you know could be better if you just had more time, you can stop looking around for somebody else to blame for category's bad rep. It's no sin to write a book that fails because we're reaching beyond what we can do, because we're trying something hard, because we're taking chances. We only go to Writer's Hell for phoning it in.