> I've made that as a pitching coach and umpire throughout my career, why not hope for it as a pitcher?
Writer/editor are fundamentally different roles than novelist. In the former, the people with the up front capital already know what they want, at least in a more concrete sense than "something that makes us more money than we put in." The focus is on selling whatever makes them money, whether it's a product or a trade publication or ad space. They don't really need the best, they just want to avoid the worst so that the writing/editing doesn't bring down the rest of the product, magazine, marketing, etc. That's where most of that $100k comes from: the value writing/editing brings to the rest of the operation that is actually generating the cash.
As a novelist, you are the product. Your story & marketability, the quality of your prose, how closely you follow the cultural zeitgeist, and so on become the dominant factors. Instead of derisking the money making part of the operation, you the risky money making operation. Such roles are almost universally on a bimodal income distribution. Major league pitchers get paid anywhere from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions but the next run down is the AAA leagues, which pay at most $50k a year. There are far more people making $100k/year supporting the pitchers than there are pitchers making $100k.
Think of it from an economics perspective (rough math here): according to [1] "only 690 million print books were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction." Lets assume physical to e-book sales are 1:1 (they're not) so a total of 1.4 billion books sold. Let's assume the average price per book is $20 (a tad high). There were 17.1 million new cars sold that year, lets assume at an average of $30k each (a tad low). That's a total market of $28 billion vs $513 billion dollars. Assuming 30% cost of goods sold for the former and 70% COGS for the latter that's $21 billion left over for the novelists or $153 billion gross profit from selling the cars.
Now there's certainly lots of room for you to make $100k/year as a novelist in that $28 billion but that is for all novelists in the US and - I suspect - academic textbook authors are probably making a disproportionate chunk of that money while inflating the average price per book. My assumption is very little of that $153 billion goes to writers but that number includes over 16,000 dealerships, all of whom need their copy for sales and marketing. The average dealership in the US sells 500-1000 cars a year with upwards of $10-20 million per year revenue so $100k/year for a writer would be a drop in the bucket for them, especially with freelancers. Multiply that by all the other industries and the numbers grow to overwhelming amounts: if 0.01% of $21+ trillion in general industry spending (going by GDP) goes to writers in a gaussian distribution, there's going to be a lot more $100k/year authors in that group than among novelists.
[1] https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publish...