As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.
“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't.
You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful"
And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.
Yes, survivorship bias is probably happening here; but I’m not doing anything like “sorting by paid”. Each of these authors I discovered “organically”; generally through Reddit or Royal Road, any many I’ve been following (on Patreon!) since before they started making $$.
From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.
