Your comparison to musicians is apt. Like most musicians/bands, most authors barely make enough to cover their advance; only best sellers make any money and it'

Your comparison to musicians is apt. Like most musicians/bands, most authors barely make enough to cover their advance; only best sellers make any money and it's usually less than you think unless you can write multiple best sellers that have a long long-tail. > - Patreon style subscription for your favorite authors (like how some youtube channels do it) Some self-published authors do this. It can work, although I find most self-published stuff to be pretty middling quality. There are a couple downsides. First, this can give your subscribers unreasonable expectations, like say demanding a book every 4 months, when a lot of authors don't work on a schedule like that. Authors used to write serially, publishing chapters or sections in newspapers, but most people can really tell those authors were always working by the seat of the pants and a lot of novels from that time period are kind of rambling messes. The rare ones worked and are remembered, but there were 100s that were just messes. Second, a lot of self-publishers forgo good, professional, editors in order to save costs. For some people, this isn't that big of a deal, but I usually find that the main problem with self-published stuff is a glaring lack of a good editor (even copy editor at times). With traditional publishing, authors are more like talent drafted by editors, who have their salary paid by the publishing house and insure that the book meets the "house standards" of editing. Aside from the marketing and distribution of your book, getting your book published by a big publisher was also a sign that your book passed through a certain scan of quality before publishing. > - Use it as a loss-leader to go on "talks" tours (like musicians) This was (kind of is still) also common back in the day. Most authors go on book tours. Some made money, some made barely any. Nowadays they're wrapped up with selling books, so in order to get a ticket to a book talk you need to buy a copy of the book as well. Unfortunately, like music touring, a lot of the infrastructure that supported these kinds of tours have either disappeared or become really expensive such that only already famous authors can really use them to make money anymore.