Movie studios do this a lot - they’ll have their smaller production houses make movies that compete for awards and then the larger big budget companies make the

Movie studios do this a lot - they’ll have their smaller production houses make movies that compete for awards and then the larger big budget companies make the blockbusters that subsidize the other stuff. Same with book publishing. Big publishing houses probably lose money on most of their literary National Book Award-chasing titles, but the prestige is worth it, if not subsidized by the more mass market books they put out.