Some may spend 1000 hours on a novel, but many will write far faster. The stories of authors who looks themselves in an office for a week or two to write another novel is so "common" as to be a trope (Simenon is one example of someone who'd spent a week or two on his novels during his most productive period).
I've written two. The second one took me about 33 hours of writing, and a couple of tens of hours more of editing.
But yes, you're not going to make a lot of money unless you're both talented and hardworking and lucky.
In the UK the average full-time author earns below minimum wage - but the average full-time author lives in a household earning well above average; in other words, being a full-time author is, for most people who do it, an indulgence made possible by a two-income, usually reasonable well off, household..
Far more common is doing it alongside another job, and that's true even for a lot of very successful writers - even a few relatively speaking big successes are often not enough to live off unless you write fast and consistently.
Even a short novel is 50,000 words, that's 100 hours at a brisk pace of 500 words per hour. The NaNoWriMo folks famously challenge writers to do that in a month. So I don't doubt that some people can do it (10x writers?) but even typing 50K words at 70 wpm would take 12 hours. Famous writers tend to produce a few hundred to a few thousand words per day. Lets say 300-3000, so between 17 and 170 days to write a short novel.
The thing is "10x writers" (in terms of volume, at least) aren't uncommon at all. My best day while writing my second novel I wrote ~11k words. That was <6 hours of writing. My biggest challenge was 1) maintaining focus, 2) I have other things to do.
Most writers can write quite fast if they really have to, but given the income distribution it rarely seems worth it: If you make little, it becomes a labour of love and you're more interested in producing something you can be proud of; if you make a lot, the pressure to churn it out at high speed lessens. And while there are some in-between who need to churn things out fast because they depend on the income, they are few (incidentally there seems to be only poor correlation between rate of writing and income per book). And so the speed people write at seems to often depend more on whether people choose to because they see it as a job to get done vs art/a personal project.
I've written two. The second one took me about 33 hours of writing, and a couple of tens of hours more of editing.
But yes, you're not going to make a lot of money unless you're both talented and hardworking and lucky.
In the UK the average full-time author earns below minimum wage - but the average full-time author lives in a household earning well above average; in other words, being a full-time author is, for most people who do it, an indulgence made possible by a two-income, usually reasonable well off, household..
Far more common is doing it alongside another job, and that's true even for a lot of very successful writers - even a few relatively speaking big successes are often not enough to live off unless you write fast and consistently.