Evil Captor, actually the biggest change between the SF world today and the way it was back in the 1950s is that today it really is possible for a non-star writer to make a living doing nothing but science fiction or fantasy.
I remember a convention a few years ago when a bunch of us were sitting around trying to figure out who in the field was making more $100,000 a year. It was a surprisingly long list, in the dozens.
And there are many more people than Rowling who make over $1,000,000 a year. Names you might not guess. (Not that I would confirm any anyway.)
You have to be prolific, you have to have a following, you have to have good foreign sales, and your backlist has to stay in print for this to happen. But this is true for a great number of people.
And many more people can survive by doing, say, a Star Wars or Star Trek novel a year along with their regular books. That will give you a nice, solid middle-class income.
KidCharlemagne. Back when those Heinlein books were coming out, you could also find wonderful covers by such artists as Richard Powers, who did zillions of Ballantine paperbacks. Today any art director who allowed an abstract artist to do a cover would be run through the pulper along with all the returned copies of the book.
Scorpio. Sonuvagun. The search engine doesn’t treat sci and fi as separate words. You can use them to search for.
Tough. 
But if you all call it SF I will be far less likely to bite people, and Little Ed has already expressed uneasiness about the fact that my teeth DO leave distinguishing marks. He’s a spoilsport sometimes.
Seriously, the term scifi or sci-fi really irritates me. I guess it’s snobbishness from my grandfather, who encouraged the habit in me at an early age. My parents punished me by grounding me from reading SF and fantasy.
To address the OP: I read a variety of genres, and it does seem that ALL of them are falling victim to the fallacy that RealityChucknoted, that we don’t need no copyeditors cause we gots us some spellchecking software. It DOES seem to be worse in the SF/fantasy stuff, though, quite possibly because they know we are Hooked on it, big time, and they know that we’ll keep buying it. It does grate on me. I keep wanting to take some correction fluid and a pen to some of my books!
It’s especially glaring when I read older books and then switch to one that’s more recently published.
It drives me nuts, too. A few months ago I bought a reissue of R.A. Lafferty’s Iron Tears, and I was absolutely astounded by the abysmal proofreading job. There are fifteen stories in the book, and every single one has several major grammatical or formatting mistakes. I’m talking about entire words left out, frequent misspellings, incorrect paragraph alignment, etc. While I’m glad that someone cares enough to reissue Lafferty’s work, they should also have cared enough to give it the presentation it deserves.
I almost wanted to write the publisher and tell them, “Look, next time you decide to publish a Lafferty book, send ME the manuscript and I’LL proofread the damn thing for free!” :rolleyes:
Hey, Armilla, a fellow LightWaver and SF author!
Back on topic, publishers won’t improve the situation unless it impacts sales. And it won’t impact sales until free fan fiction and e-books equal the quality of the published novels.
That may never happen. While the quality of proofreading is still going down in the SF publishing industry, it is certainly not improving in the amateur market.
When grammar checking software is as effective as spell checking software, and when it is freely bundled with other software, then there will be improvements.
Hopefully, by that time, the publishing houses won’t figure out a way to save more money by peeing on our beloved books before we buy them. Because they would, and we would still buy them.