Does it Make Sense to Self-Publish a Book in 2024 (if Ever it Did)?

Considering the question that is the title of this post I think it worth starting with a bit of background (covered before in some degree, but worth revisiting). Specifically, circa 2010, while self-publishing was not new, the proliferation of the e-book reader and print-on-demand publishing, significantly by way of Amazon, made part of self-publishing much easier. Writing, editing, copyediting were as costly as ever. But the cost of physically reproducing and distributing the book fell dramatically. For nothing up front anyone could take a manuscript, upload it, and in days have it on sale at retailers all around the world. Meanwhile, if there was still the problem of promotion, there was optimism that the Internet could facilitate that at similarly low cost--and that things generally were looking up. It seemed easier to get people to take chances on 99 cent e-books than on more expensive print works, and e-books were supposed to be moving toward dominance of the market; while it was to be hoped that the self-published would develop ways and means to publicize themselves, and win their way toward acceptance. There were, for instance, notions of book blogs providing a promotional ecosystem for the self-published writer.

Alas, the traditional publishers, faced with the disruption of their business by the e-book, did what companies usually do in the face of such challenge--fight back against disruption, and not by becoming "more competitive" but rather any way they could fair or unfair, and as is usually the case when established firms fight back from their position of advantage with every means at their disposal, they succeeded. The containment of the e-book (I suspect fewer people have e-readers now than did so in 2015) meant the containment of the self-published to a significant degree, all as the Internet, the utility of which for low-cost promotional efforts was probably always far lower than cyber-utopians would have had the public believe, became a lot less conducive to such efforts, with the web increasingly crowded, and search engines, social media and the rest increasingly "enshittified," fragmenting online life so that only big, well-funded, operations had much chance of reaching a wider public, to the disadvantage of the self-published, with this including not only book writers but bloggers, who found their audiences disappearing.

Likely significant in that has been the evolution of the Internet in the broadband era, away from the written word, and toward audiovisual content, often taken in over small screens carried by people on the go. The vlog replaced the blog, while people gravitated away from Facebook to TikTok--as reading generally collapsed. Consider, for instance, how the young adult book boom went bust back in 2015--not coincidentally, about the time that a majority of young people had acquired smart phones. Consider, too, how even as the e-book was contained, the sale of the mass market paperback collapsed (which is why, very likely, you have noticed the disappearance of the paperback racks at the supermarkets, convenience stores and other retail outlets you frequent).

The result is that I suspect that, all other things being equal, getting any self-published work to an audience requires doing more for less than was the case a decade ago--maybe much more for much less.

Of course, all things are not equal. And therein lie the questions that you probably should ask when considering the endeavor, specifically "Is there anything that will give this book a chance in the face of all that?" And if the answer to the first question is "'No,'" "Is what I have to get out there so important that it is worth my while to do that anyway?"

I admit that it can be very unsatisfying to ask a question and get in return another question. However, it is an honest opinion--which it seems to me is far more likely than you are likely to find in most places on the web, where all we hear from are the elitists of traditional publishing who think the self-published author has no right to be in the same market as they, and the services looking to bully and frighten the self-published author into handing over their money so that they profit whether the author themselves has any chance of achieving their own goals or not.