That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works. Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and

That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works. Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable, because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers got large was to publish lots of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)