I just got done reading Sweet spot marketing in Seth Godin's blog and was thinking about the Sweet Spot as being synonymous with doing you own thing, or "following your bliss", whatever.

"…My point isn't that you shouldn't try to get these middlemen to broaden their horizons or to give up on something you're passionate about. It's just that it might be easier to build a new sweet spot than it is to persuade an established middleman to change his rules for you."

I guess my mind is jetting back 150 years to the French situation in painting; as I recall, Manet and a bunch of other artists were banned from the French Salon….and instead of trying to change the Salon, they ended up, with help of the French Emperor, Napoleon III, of having their own Salon of the Refused.  Eventually, the French painters of that time had created their own schools of painting and being accepted by the French Salon, became almost irrelevant.

My feeling is that people succeed because they are "plugged in" to their dream and they follow their bliss, they don't try to make the New York Times like them, if it's not their inclination to, as Seth notes:

"…If you want to get reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, don't even consider self-publishing. Don't write a how to book. Don't write something particularly funny, either. But it sure helps to be published by Knopf. Literary fiction by respected writers published by Knopf is the sweet spot (history comes in a close second)."

Right, follow gut feelings and if your plugged in ….. end up as someone's Sweet Spot eventually.