Pretty amazingly (I think it’s amazing) the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons the average wage for a writer is almost exactly the same as the average wage of an engineer ($56,000), but it seems likely to me the median salary is much lower than in engineering (maybe something like $15,000-$25,000) with the mean heavily skewed by the handful of super-rich authors.
Ah yes, this makes a lot of sense and explains my earlier confusion; although it may still be true that there is a high variance in income between novelists, not all writers are novelists (for that matter, I suppose not all novelists are writers, at least as far as the BLS will bin them). I think that indicates my illustrative example is flawed, although I hope the wider point still stands.
Are you sure about that? http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-authors.htm reports only the median not the mean (good for them), at $55k, and in a tab gives an idea of the tails:
Most people who write for a living are not novelists, they are marketers, technical documentation authors...
Ah yes, this makes a lot of sense and explains my earlier confusion; although it may still be true that there is a high variance in income between novelists, not all writers are novelists (for that matter, I suppose not all novelists are writers, at least as far as the BLS will bin them). I think that indicates my illustrative example is flawed, although I hope the wider point still stands.