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My point was that, from an author's perspective, most mainstream books are "failures" in that they never return any additional income (and most normal writers don't get big advances).

Neither of the articles does anything to refute that point. For that matter, neither actually demonstrates that big publishers don't lose money on most of their books; the two industry insiders are just tossing out their own anecdata and calculations. (The second case is a writer who I long ago lost any respect for, but that's a different issue.)

I sense that you're arguing for the sake of arguing. You can have the last however-many words. Oh, by the way, since you're so concerned with writing, you should be aware that "its" as a possessive does not have an apostrophe, and I don't think you mean to say "a book has not earned out it is advance," which is what you did say.