> there would be an entire ecosystem built up around finding these authors, then giving them enough money to write their books, in exchange for a cut of the pro

> there would be an entire ecosystem built up around finding these authors, then giving them enough money to write their books, in exchange for a cut of the profits down the road. That's a great idea! We could call the entities that do that "publishers". They'd pay their authors in advance, independent of book sales, but then after that they'd take almost all the money raised by selling the books. Perhaps they'd give the authors, say, 10% of the takings, so that authors of really successful books could do well too. It's amazing no one's thought of it before, really. (Less-snarky version: It's perfectly true that you can't sit down, write for a few months, and reliably get rich. But what you present as evidence for that isn't, because in fact exactly the ecosystem you describe is what already exists, and it works just like you say, except that usually the authors do more work than 3-6 months and only a tiny fraction of them walk away with $1M.)