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Notes -
Print-on-demand services have reduced the cost of actually publishing a book on paper to nearly zero. Even if you get professionals to design your cover and typeset your interior, you're looking at single-digit thousands of dollars on the high end. The problem is getting people to notice your book, which is the main thing a publisher gets you these days. There is a decent audience of people who read books by traditional publishers, or follow critics that a traditional publisher can get you in front of, etc.
But if you already have an audience, paper books are not an especially good thing to sell them. Most authors would get more money from a $7/month Patreon or Substack subscription then they'd get if you bought all their books. So you usually see authors either treating physical books as a relatively niche merch item (like the paperback version of Unsong), or trying to leverage an online audience to get noticed by the traditional publishing industry's audience (like Fifty Shades of Grey or There Is No Antimemetics Division), and neither of those strategies involves becoming a serious alternative to the traditional publishing industry.
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