Unrelatedly, one of the core problems in the industry is that while the costs of paper and publishing have risen (and the distributors have eroded to the point of being useless for anything except shipping product), the pay rate for authors has remained flat or even fallen. TSR was paying 10 cents per word in Dragon in the '80s, and paying top authors triple that or more (assume 35 cents), and Paizo generally pays 7 cents per word for their top authors now (vs. 71 cents per word in 2005 if the top author was making 35 cents in 1982). Most non-TSR rpg publishers were paying 1-4 cents per word in the '80s, and the industry standard today is about 2-5 cents per word, with the author signing away all rights for the book to the publisher (whereas many publishers in the '80s paid for first publication rights only).
If you use the US Department of Labor inflation calculator at
data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl you can see that in 1982 publishers paying 4 cents per word should be paying 8 cents per word now, just in order to keep up with inflation. Similarly, the DOL National Compensation Survey calculator at
data.bls.gov/PDQ/outside.jsp?survey=nc shows that wages for authors USA-wide average $30.53 per hour in 1997; using the Inflation Calculator, if we reverse engineer that back to 1982 we get $18.36 per hour, then if we take that forward to 2005, we get $37.37 per hour. I don't know any rpg author who makes that money in this industry, even those working for WotC (which was paying ~$45,000/year for MtG project managers [well above authors in their pay scales] in 1997).