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In practice, about 70% of the cover price of a book you buy in the shops is eaten by the distribution chain -- retailer and wholesaler. The publisher and author get to split the remaining 30%. For dead tree books, the split is typically 20%/10% -- but the publisher also gets to shell out the money for buying the paper and putting ink on it, not to mention marketing.
Amazon are pernicious because they collapse the retail/wholesale chain and still demand the biggest discount (off list price) of any retailer. They get to have their cake and eat it at our (the writers) expense.
Here in the UK, the Society Of Authors figures for 2001 were that the median income for a novelist was £4000 a year, and the mean income (including folks like J. K. Rowling pushes it up) was £16,000 a year, as noted in that Independent.co.uk piece linked to previously. However, I'd like to add that there are a lot of hobbyist novelists -- folks with a day job who write a novel every year or three as a hobby and take their income as an extra bonus on top. Those of us who work at the coal face full-time can generally top that £16,000 average without being best-sellers. What it takes to earn a reasonable living is an awareness that it's as much a business as an art form, and a willingness to work at it in a businesslike manner.
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