See, I'd put Novik in the same seat-of-the-pants category, because I don't really get the impression that she worked backward much at all from the Napoleonic Wars, or thought much about the world outside Europe as of the first book. I get the impression that she started with "Napoleonic Wars with dragons" and then has worked outward from there as she's written the books. I'm not saying her worldbuilding isn't impressive (actually, it's maybe MORE impressive to do it on the fly and keep it internally consistent); it's just that I'd put her pretty solidly in the category of authors who seem to be figuring it out as they go along. One of the main things that makes me think she's doing it seat of the pants style is that history is already diverging pretty significantly from what we know, given the events of the books, but doesn't seem to have diverged all that much beforehand due to the presence of dragons.
As an example of the opposite approach, though, I suspect Kate Elliot HAD to have worked out a tremendous amount of historical and cultural detail for her Cold Magic series before ever touching pen to paper, because her modern Africa/Britain fusion is really really different from history as we know it -- it's not modern Britain with a few twists, but an almost unrecognizable country located where Britain is in our world, yet it's plausibly derived from early Britain with a very different historic trajectory. It's so radically different that I don't know how she could have written it without having a great deal of detail planned out beforehand, not just about Britain but about cultural, social and political details of countries elsewhere as well.
These are just guesses, though; I really do think that you can't accurately work out the details of the writing process just from reading the finished book! I read an interview recently with a mystery writer -- unfortunately I can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but she mentioned that she never plots her books beforehand, just starts writing ... and my reaction was a stunned "REALLY?!", because her books seem so meticulously plotted that I never would have guessed she doesn't have all the twists planned beforehand.
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As an example of the opposite approach, though, I suspect Kate Elliot HAD to have worked out a tremendous amount of historical and cultural detail for her Cold Magic series before ever touching pen to paper, because her modern Africa/Britain fusion is really really different from history as we know it -- it's not modern Britain with a few twists, but an almost unrecognizable country located where Britain is in our world, yet it's plausibly derived from early Britain with a very different historic trajectory. It's so radically different that I don't know how she could have written it without having a great deal of detail planned out beforehand, not just about Britain but about cultural, social and political details of countries elsewhere as well.
These are just guesses, though; I really do think that you can't accurately work out the details of the writing process just from reading the finished book! I read an interview recently with a mystery writer -- unfortunately I can't remember who it was off the top of my head, but she mentioned that she never plots her books beforehand, just starts writing ... and my reaction was a stunned "REALLY?!", because her books seem so meticulously plotted that I never would have guessed she doesn't have all the twists planned beforehand.