Hasn't this always been the case? It's like being a playwright or any artist really. A very few successful ones, and lots of people who do it as a hobby. Even some of the successful ones are only successful in death, not life.
This is true, the creative arts have always been volatile as a career choice. And it's true that some of those artists become successful as a fluke or as an accident of their death.
But it's also true that many of the successful creatives intended to be successful, or at least tried very hard to be, and those were the seeds that set up for some kind of "big break." For example, in the case of Dan Brown, one of the most successful authors to date, he scheduled his own press tour, booked his own interviews, sent out press releases, etc. And his early books actually did pretty well, selling about 10,000 copies each because of his promotional efforts.
Of course he went on to sell millions of copies, but I don't think he would have accidentally become a best seller without developing a platform for his work with those early novels.
