'A profession that died commercially in the last century' I heard that quote in a movie and I've been wondering, is it true? Do novels still have a considerable fan base in the modern world? Is a good story worth upgrading into a novel, with all the effort of editing, publishing, marketing...etc.?
I don't think there will ever be a time when novels are considered 'dead'. So long as people want to read them, they'll always keep being published.
Of course they still have a fan base. The publishers would be going out of business if there wasn't. E-Readers have probably helped keep them relevant in the modern age, but they absolutely still have commercial pull.
No. If you want to say the movie industry is more profitable than the publishing industry, who knows, I'm sure you could look it up. But that doesn't make novels no longer commercially viable.
Good question. I don't know. Not in terms of volume, of course, but as an overall group making a living I'm not sure. I've worked with some screenwriters on small projects with production companies that deal with cable TV, and those guys certainly weren't getting rich off a single script. I think WGA puts the low end for an original screenplay for television somewhere in the high $60K range, and the top end basically doubles that. Might be a lot less if you're just doing a teleplay, particularly for network TV. I haven't looked the WGA numbers in a while and only under limited circumstances.
Here is their schedule. As you can see, it can be less than the above, depending on the variables in play. http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/min2014.pdf
That would be highly dependent on the movie. The writer for a movie like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (not regarding quality of story) is going to make a lot more money than the writer for Terminator Genisys. There are some authors who are going to make more money than screenwriters though, and usually for name recognition primarily.
