"Welcome to the club", stuhisson. I say "welcome"; because I too am coming from an establish writing community (and I am even a book author).

There is now a substantial collection of posts which touch on various aspects of the matter that you raise. I suggest that you try to find them with a cleverly designed keyword search of Google within Steemit.

Look especially for the articles by @paulag and at mine at https://steemit.com/payments/@lestatisticien/how-well-does-your-number-of-up-votes-explain-your-author-payment . However, these are just the beginning of highly relevant commentary (much of which is in the comments to posts) now at the site.

If you need help digging up more relevant materials let me know; because I may have kept a collection of pertinent URLs somewhere on my computer.

One bottom line that I have stated, and which no one has yet challenged, is that you should not expect a reasonable "payment" for your work before you have built up a substantial number of followers (i.e., close to 200+) who are prepared to quickly up-vote your posts, and it may be crucial (if you are writing on a topic where payouts tend to be low on average) that among your followers are one or more 'whales'. Unfortunately, as you are no doubt aware, the process of building up that number of followers could take many months.

In any event, the issue of your posts disappearing into 'ether' within 20 minutes of your putting them up remains unresolved and so you need to find special methods of bringing them to the attention of the people in your community of interest.

Cheers!