The critic Geordie Williamson writes at the end of his article “Writing to Win” in the February 2010 Australian Literary Review about how literary prizes have skewed the publishing landscape for fiction, and even what writers choose to write:
Prize culture, like aristocratic patronage, makes a lottery of literature, in which one, sometimes unworthy, winner obliterates the hopes of a thousand others.
See the entire piece here.
One could substitute “Australian publishing” for “prize culture” and it would be equally true. Publishers seem to select one or two novels that they promote to the hilt while at the same time reducing their fiction lists and letting other books fall by the wayside through lack of any sort of marketing.