[nprateem]

Ha ha what? The problem is there are low barriers to entry to working in the creative arts so there's huge competion. It's like app development. Creating isn't enough. You need a marketing strategy.

Publishers OTOH diversify so can build their empires by backing multiple authors etc, some of whom break out.

[apocalypstyx]

Anybody with feet can run around a track. So athletics has, in that sense, a low barrier to entry. That doesn't make them Usain Bolt.

It's an interesting look past the mystification of how capitalism is claimed to work. Behind the curtain it is unable or unwilling to find a way to sustain the existences of the producers of goods that the public desires. Instead it relies on disposability. Burn a part out (and many do; it's particularly a problem among romance writers -- and on through Hollywood, the porn industry, et cetera) and replace. Rinse and repeat.

The question becomes: is it a system instated by humans and controlled by humans, or a system that has come to control humans, a meta system, global capital as a type of planet-wide intelligence analogous to an ant colony or the cells in an individual body, bent on its perpetuation at the necessary cost of any of those individual components.

It's an interesting system to discuss in the hypothetical. The genre, however, changes when or if one realizes the part you are in such a system as it exits. Of course, we all think we're special. There's always a war going on around us, but there isn't a bullet out there with my name on it; those shells rip others to pieces, not me.

Which, circling back, is why we need 'content creators'. We need Lovecrafts to distract us from the cosmic horror of ourselves and what we label reality.