Ah my understanding was along the lines of "market [rate]" for a person being the "rate they could get in their first choice occupation assuming a job was available to them".
Or market rate of a field being the mean rate for workers of that occupation.
If it's work below market or gut chickens for a living people will tend to accept less than they feel they're worth.
kevinr used that phrase poorly. Working well below market means that there is enough demand for your services so where you could charge more, but you choose not to, typically due to inexperience.
But that's not the case, the market for the output of authors cannot sustain living wages, there is no 'market wage' to make. If you look closely at this and other creative professions, that has always been the case; there is always more people that want to make a living with creative work than there are people that want to pay well enough for that work so that the creators can live.
This is structural and unlikely to change barring something like basic income. The usual answer given to aspiring creator is both to generate the income you need to live in the service industry, say as a waiter, and also to be your own agent and pimp out your professional services yourself.
