Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing in 2024

Recently I discussed the odds facing the would-be self-published author in 2024. A writer's odds in the marketplace have never been good--and a self-published writer's odds were always worse than that. However, as I recently argued it seems to me that the return on effort in the area of self-published books has likely fallen in the years since the practice exploded, because of the way the e-book has been confined to a very limited part of the market, and because of how the Internet's evolution has made the forms of low-cost publicity it afforded less effective.

Does that make it time to turn one's thoughts back toward traditional publishing? Alas, I see no evidence that traditional publishing has become any more open than it was before. If anything the opposite has likely happened amid its own hard times, as people are not just reading fewer self-published books or e-books, but probably reading fewer books of any and all kinds (as the collapse of mass market paperback sales suggests). The result is that the chances of anyone whose only alternative to self-publishing is the slush pile are probably as grim as ever they were--leaving those looking for publication faced not with a "choice," but a dilemma.