Salaries in the writing field

I've always told folks that technical writing pays far better than creative writing for the vast majority of writers. For every J.K. Rowling in the creative field, there are tens of thousands of aspiring writers who can't earn enough to support themselves. Someone has kindly pulled together the figures for various writing jobs, including technical writing, and it mostly supports my contention.

This is a list of the average salaries for a number of writing and editing professions. The figures represent typical scales for a mid-sized metropolitan area in the United States. Larger markets tend to pay more and smaller markets tend to pay less. Remember that these are typical salaries for people who are employed by other companies. There is a much greater income variation among people who freelance or own their own businesses.

Yes, as a technical writer, you may never see your name on the cover of the books you write, you almost certainly won't be going on glamorous book tours of exotic locales, and you'll be writing things that don't exactly engage the most creative portion of your brain. But you'll be relatively well-paid, work in reasonably comfortable conditions, and have a pension or some other form of retirement savings for your post-writing lifestyle.

I've never met a rich technical writer, but I've met many, many starving creative writers.

If you're really clever, there might even be a way of leveraging your technical writing career to, I don't know, maybe even support your creative writing habit until that multi-million dollar advance comes in for your next novel.