https://defector.com/the-money-is-in-all-the-wrong-places
Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn't exist. You could be the most popular novelist in the world and not make $21/word to report. You could argue that no writer today is as good or popular as Hemingway was at his peak, but no writer today is even making half or a quarter of what he made, and writers only ever get so famous. If someone were paid $5/word in 2022—which is something I have never heard of happening and is a full $2 more than than anyone I know has ever been paid per word—that would be a quarter of what Hemingway was paid. That writer would be able to pay their rent and health insurance premiums and tuck some money away in savings off a standard-issue story per month, but again, that lucky writer does not exist.
What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut.
That's not because there isn't money to be made in any of these industries, either—not just Sydney Sweeney's, but mine, too. Some people are making very good money in these fields, and have been for a long time. They just aren't the people making the art—the product, if you want to think about it like that. They aren't the people whose names you know, whose lives can upend overnight because of the attention and lack of privacy that fame brings. They are people who profit off art without actually making it.