How much does a fiction writer make, on average?

Question:

How much does a fiction writer make, on average?

If they had maybe one to three books published, would they earn enough to make a living? Or if their books wasn't very popular, or unpopular, it was just the average book in a store, what kind of figures do you think they would make? I am looking into a writing career, but I would like to know if I would need another job on the side to be able to make a living, or if I can dedicate most of my time to writing. It will influence the choices I am going to make in school. Thanks!

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: "On average" makes this question tricky. I've been writing fiction full-time for over twenty years. Most years, I do not make enough from my writing to make a living. I have part-time teaching jobs, and a spouse who is happy to be a patron of the arts. I have lots of writing friends. Some of them are able to write two or three novels a year under different names and earn $100,000 a year. Others work just as hard, but produce fewer books with more modest sales and struggle to bring in $10,000 a year.

The $5,000 and $10,000 a year writers are much more common than the few who pull in ten times that. More to the point, the market is always changing, and publishing is an industry where there are a lot of question marks right now. The number of individual titles is exploding, but bookstores carry only a fraction of these books. New technologies mean that texts could be distributed in new ways, but it's not clear if this will mean more money or less money for writers.

On average, right now, fiction writers don't make enough to live on. On average in five or ten years when you are launching your career? I haven't a clue what the situation will be. But I can tell you that if you love fiction and are willing to follow a career that is very uncertain, a career that may always mean that you're doing some other work on the side to support yourself, nothing is quite as satisfying as writing books.

The source link below is to a book about meeting some of the practical challenges to a life in writing. I think it's a good book, but I'm biased. I wrote it.