SteemIt has the structure of a social media site.

My observation is that people are earning steem for their social media skills.

The structure seems to favor short-format content.

IMHO, the best path for a person interested in creating long format content (a book, a movie, detailed art work, podcast, etc) is to build a web site to contain the finished work. The author would drop multiple posts about the project while creating the long format project.