One more thought about the relative merits of seeing one side, another, or both as the “core business” of the CoG/HG ecosystem.
Personally, I’m only a CoG-label author because I snuck in during the odd Phase 2 of the business model evolution mentioned above. Yes, I’ve published before, but I’m not a professional writer. In any other phase of CoG’s evolution, I’d probably have fallen on the HG side of the tracks.
And for most of the last 12 years, XoR has been my spare-time creative project. I do it first and foremost for the intrinsic enjoyment it gives me. Even now when I’ve left the day job and am putting more time into writing than into anything else, I’m still trying to keep that intrinsic motivation rather than getting sucked into a dollars-per-hour mindset. (Had a great conversation about this with a high school buddy over Christmas, who’s similarly trying to keep his awesome laser-carving side business as something he can do for the sheer joy of it, rather than slipping into maximizing his profits.)
You can’t build a business on writers like me. You need pros–people who can be counted on to hit their milestones while delivering good quality stuff that people want to buy. Being a pro writer isn’t first and foremost about meeting some criteria of literary elitism, but about basic criteria of reliable output. A company especially needs that reliability if it wants to work with a bigger IP property like World of Darkness.
Fortunately, CoG has a critical mass of reliable pros, so it can afford for its roster to include a few writers of rambling megafictions like me (and Kreg Segall–who’s much much more of a pro than me, but still delivering work on a scale and timeframe that you probably don’t want as the cornerstone of your business).
When we’re now discussing the extent to which the publishing house side deserves “core business” status…I think it’s worth stating clearly that HG also has that critical mass of reliable talent, and has for years. Sure, there are plenty of hobbyists and odd ducks and Devon’s free-time-rich college students, but the core of the HG business, as the bestseller list makes pretty clear, is in authors who produce popular, quality work and are also able to reliably churn it out year after year. You might not have wanted to bet the stability of your business on that talent base in 2017-18 – the quality was clearly there, but not necessarily the reliable pace of production – but I’d never argue against the reliability of the core HG authorship today.
CoG and HG reached that critical mass at different times and by different routes–one by emulating and recruiting from an existing industry of pro writers, the other by just growing a sufficiently big community of creators (drawn by the shared audience of the two labels). Neither CoG nor HG would have got there without CoG going first, with its publishing house strategy. But at this point, and since a good few years ago, I’ll bet you could pretty confidently run a stable, successful business on either body of talent alone.
Like I said above, I think we’re all much better off for not having HG and CoG as entirely distinct businesses–more resilient to have them continuing to share a talent pool, audience, a support team, etc. through the inevitable ups and downs for each label. I’m less confident than Hustler about judging either model to have shown lasting superiority, and accordingly less irate. But I sure haven’t seen any evidence that the HG of today isn’t the more profitable and reliable half of the business…and can’t help wondering if treating CoG as the clear core business is mostly a hangover from a few years ago.