I recently suggested that an optimistic calculation of the earnings of the country's novelists producing for adult readers from actual royalties in a given year might come to something in the area of $1.4 billion.
By contrast the same population includes in its work force over 1.3 million lawyers, earning a mean income of $144,000 annually. One might extrapolate from this that the country's lawyers collectively make close to $190 billion a year.
In short, if we treat market incomes as indicative of demand then there is at least a hundred times the demand for lawyers that there is for novelists. Thinking about this I can't help remembering what David Graeber wrote in Bullshit Jobs--that the society we live in "seems to generate an extremely limited demand" for people in the arts, "but an apparently infinite demand" for people in fields that, I suspect, people only work because of the money, like "corporate law." Alas, it is not a happy situation for artists, finding as they do so little effective demand for what they offer.
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