As a writer, your strength is writing, period. It's your superpower, your value skew, in the same way as music is for Ed Sheeran or acting for Anthony Hopkins. That's how they provide most value, not through teaching how to do that.
IMO the goal is to figure out how to make the most of writing, not shift to a non-writing job like teaching how to write or selling t-shirts or other merchandise.
Couple of ideas from someone who's not in the field:
Reading MTF's comment, it reminded me of a Sci-Fi collection/saga that my father was totally hooked on: Perry Rhodan.
-> Keyword is HOOKED of course
The marketing cost of acquisition of a reader matters less if down the line you have readers who are HOOKED and you can feed them new quality romans on a regular basis (e.g. 1 per month)
-> the Perry Rhodan saga started in 1961 and continues to grow even after that the main writer(s) retired:
in 2017 they published "Perry Rhodan n°2900": Amazon.fr : Perry Rhodan n°2900 : Livres
-> You say that sharing Royalties with another writer can be a mess.
It seems that the market has become so competitive and the cost of advertising soared so much that is is hard to make it very profitable.
In that case, maybe some quality writers who find it hard to survive may be happy to switch to a freelance type of contract and get known by contributing to a well known brand.
Those writers/freelancers still wouldn't have to go back to a 9-5 job.
They still could get their name on the book as (co-) author.
So their writing skills can be recognized. And they don't close the doors for future personal success.
But in the meantime, there is no hard feeling from sharing royalties:
They are paid once (+ maybe a comm) for the quality output they produced following a plot and certain guidelines. A straight forward contract
The idea of those who created Perry Rhodan in 1960:
1) Write adventures that revolve around one main hero whose character evolves over time.
2) Produce lots of great quality romans.
3) very fast, the 2 main writers could not keep up with the success and they had to HIRE a bunch of other writers to keep the speed of output in sync with demand
So the business can become:
- keep writing great books
- build a brand,
- selecting quality writers who want in on the adventure and who don't want to spend all their time on marketing
- (coach writers &) Quality review their writing and story plot
- that way the saga has new books published on a regular basis,
- outsource marketing
You can read why and how they structured their approach in the Kindle of ther Perry Rhodan n°1: Perry Rhodan n°01 - Opération Astrée eBook: Clark DARLTON, K. H. SCHEER, Jacqueline H. OSTERRATH: Amazon.fr: Gateway
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