You might find this a bit dismissive/cynical but i wonder whether that early phase can be explained also. There's two relevant strategies to an audience/market

You might find this a bit dismissive/cynical but i wonder whether that early phase can be explained also. There's two relevant strategies to an audience/market here: "open source" (/esteem/reputation) and "taste-maker"/brand/distributor. The free-to-read reputation-led strategy does not earn you anything in the early phase -- so you have to have a job elsewhere. But you build esteem/reputation more easily: more readers. If you do that well, you reap the rewards later by by-passing the taste-maker channels. This requires early-career funding from elsewhere. If you cannot get that funding you need to rely on distributors to earn anything at all. /Therefore/ I wonder whether this reputation-led anti-tastemaker ethos really is just selecting for wealth (of one kind or another). If so, yes Cory isn't a mere opportunist, sure. But his position seems to presuppose early-career privileges others do not have: in this sense he was never a "budding author" as I meantt it. My point was that as a person starting out /and relying on distributors for income/ you cannot really have this view.