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Good points all around!

It's funny because I expect most of us do it for the art, but artistic merit doesn't pay the rent. This is why many smaller publishers have "locomotives" that are guaranteed to sell so they can publish "good" literature books that won't sell. Don't know about the big American ones, seeing as they're flooding the market I assume they're just playing a numbers game, let God sort them out...

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Loads of industries use hits to pay for the entire rest of the industry with the “for the art” stuff often at best making small returns.

It’s even true in tech. Most VC backed companies fail but the few mega-successes fund the entire ecosystem.

True, I guess most artistic industries must work this way, since we all know that about 95% of all art is terrible (and that was before AI).

I feel like there's a difference between a company and an industry, though in the end I suppose it's all a sort of natural selection. Good (or rather, "fit") authors publish second books and third books, while good companies get to exist into second, third years etc.

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