Visual novel profits and costs How much money and time does making a VN usually cost? What's the profit it can usually generate? Is it profitable?

You can engage in any VN segment (indie games...) to answer my question as I know the topic is quite broad.
I've got a fair bit of experience in the indie VN developer scene. 
From that I can say there is no general answer as the prices you have to pay and also the possible profit vary very greatly, thus I will try to give a detailed and restricted example there:

Costs

As a note here: The prices vary greatly depending on the artist in question. They can be as low as 50% of the amount I'm mentioning and up to 200% of it!

Graphics

One thing of note here: The prices will vary greatly for different styles the artists use. Thus if cell-shading, soft-shading or semi-realism is used.
        (semi-realism being most often the most expensive one and can have costs of up to +100% compared to the others).


BGs
        The price here most often depends on how complex the BG in question is and sometimes even what resolution it will be for. 
        Usually you can count on 30-50 USD per BG.
CGs
        These have the greatest price range as I've seen artists take 30-250 USD here. Normally you have 1 simple BG included and 1-2 characters.
        You pay an additional amount per additional character on screen (either fixed amount like +30 USD or +50% total cost) and for each variation
        you want (most often between 10-20 USD). On average I daresay it is 50 USD per simple CG that you need to calc in.

Note: Most often the CG artist is also the sprite artist. Although the BG for the CG is often made by a BG artist. Additionally a title screen
              is often counted as a CG.
GUI
        The GUI adaptions often cost much and range from 50-400 USD depending on the artist and how much you want it to differ from the default of the engine you are using.
Sprites
        The prices here vary greatly with what you want: Thus how much is visible of the character (head only, hip up, or full body) and how many sets 
        of clothes, poses and expressions you want.
        Usually I pay 50 dollars base for 1 full body sprite (including 1 set of clothes, 1-2 expressions and 1 pose). For each additional
        set of clothes I pay 10-15 USD and for each expression 2-10 USD and for each pose 10-15 USD.

Thus for 1 sprite with 2 sets of clothes, 4 expressions and 2 poses I usually pay: 106 USD


Sounds


Sound Effects
            Most of the time you can use free sound effects (even for commercial games). IF you need to have custom ones it most often costs
            around 10-30 USD.
Music
            Music varies greatly in terms of price and quality. Usually the componists have prices set for 1 minute tracks each.
            The ranges for this are between 30 USD and 150 USD. I myself am usually only talking with componists who want 30 USD per track.
Voice over
        This varies greatly and it didn't come up often so far for me. But from what I know this usually ends up in a payment per line spoken.
        For a relatively small intro I got a price estimate of about 400 USD (so its one of the biggest cost parts).


Editor / Writers

Editors and writers usually want to be paid on a per word base which can vary a bit. A normal price I dare say for editing is about 0,2 USD
            per word. Not sure about writers as I never had to hire one, but I would dare say its very probably the same or double the price.

Programmers

Here I have to say....I hope you only want easy "default" things out of the VN. Experience wise most "programmers" for VNs can't do
            really complex things (or don't want to do them). The prices here vary greatly and I've seen things from 20 USD for a minigame up to
            200 USD for a dating sim, ... .

As a note here also: Many VN engines have tutorials and also free examples for different genres of VNs that can be easily modified, so
            if you have time and are an easy learner you don't need to hire a programmer too often.

Profit

This varies greatly on how you want to publish your work. One example would be via kickstarter or similar crowd funding services. Here an average income is about 3000 USD for a VN (although one has to say some rare get WAY over 10K out of it while many others fail to even make 100 USD).

If you want to sell your VN on online sites the profit will probably be very small (except maybe Steam but I have no data on them). Most VNs have price ranges
    between 5 and 15 USD there and sell between 0 and 20 times. With the exception of studios who are widely known or have good luck. These have price ranges up to 25 
    USD and often sell their product 100-150 times on a single online shop.

The costs for the engine you want to use I didn't put in, as there are many free engines around.



Then lets put things together:

Lets say you want to create a VN that has 10 CGs + 1 title, 3 tracks of music (1 title, 1 menu and 1 ingame music) and you have 3 sprites (full body, 2 sets of clothes, 4 expressions and 2 poses each). Furthermore you use 10 backgrounds. The VN has about 10k words and you hire an editor and a writer.  So the total cost would be:

BGs 500
CGs 550
Sprites 318
Music 90
Editor+Writer 400
-----------------
Total cost: 1858 USD