Only 11.5% can now make a living wage because there are more writers, on more platforms, but with total reader's remaining roughly similar. And a lot of these writers are using self-publishing platforms like Amazon.
Nobody is forcing writers to use traditional publishers. If they're only giving you 25% of the ebook revenue then move to Amazon who do either 35% or 70%[0].
I will say I WISH creative types (artists, writers, etc) all made a living wage, but unfortunately the market is too saturated since the barrier to entry is low-ish (although the barrier to success is higher).
Something to think about when suggesting that killing jobs by robotic automation will just drive people into more creative endeavours. The demand for everyone to do creative labor just isn't there.
You are thinking about things incorrectly I think.
Lets say that ubiquitous automation reduces employment in many manufacturing and service sectors. Prices will fall in those sectors, abundance will increase. People will need to spend less of their income for these goods and services. The additional income will be used for other things. Some of the other things will be things like books, music, etc.
If you doubt what I say, think about how spending patterns changed when the economy went from 90% employment in agriculture to 2% employment in agriculture. Prior to this transition, something like 70% of wage was spent on food. Afterwards less than 10% was spent on food.
In the future, something like 10% of income might be spent on all non-digital goods and services, and 90% of income might be spent on the virtual economy (games, books, music, film, etc.)
Content creators are still consumers. An artist can still read poetry, go the theatre, etc. So, if the vast majority of population goes into creative endeavors, the demand for creative labor isn't going to increase; all of the content creators are still content consumers.
IMO, I think the demand is there. It seems to me that our economic model just isn't ready to handle how we distribute/consume art. Once the art is created digitally, it basically costs $0 to reproduce it, yet we're still stuck on the idea that a "book" costs ~$20 each, and a generous portion of that goes to the distributor.
IMO, we don't even need distributors. I should be able to go to the author's website on my kindle, and download the book for much less than $20. And all of that would go directly to the author, not the distributor.
(I know a lot of this reply has a lot of hand-waving and over-simplification, trying to keep it concise)
Nobody is forcing writers to use traditional publishers. If they're only giving you 25% of the ebook revenue then move to Amazon who do either 35% or 70%[0].
I will say I WISH creative types (artists, writers, etc) all made a living wage, but unfortunately the market is too saturated since the barrier to entry is low-ish (although the barrier to success is higher).
[0] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8