With all that effort there is little time to focus on actual writing, so one can imagine the quality of that work.

There is a reason real authors and musicians have agents (who are actually reachable unlike the YouTube service ...).

The actual profession is a full time job.

> The actual profession is a full time job.

But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.

Other aspects are communicating, researching, not a deep dive into human psychology to ensure people don't pirate your software.

That's exactly what I thought. If you need to go through all this gimmick to sell books, when are you going to have time to write them? I much prefer to suffer the monetary loss in writing and make decent money with something else.

Jeez, mocking up a book to post on torrent sites is so much effort it eats a measurable chunk of time usually reserved for writing a novel? This is like an afternoon of work, compared with the months or years of writing a book.

Most fiction writers aren’t living from it. A lot of others books (educational material for instance) are written by people who have a job like researcher. So, writer is a professional job for some, but they largely don’t produce most of the work out there.