(Borrowing from Stephen Colbert): A Tip Of The Hat to commercially published authors who are self-publishing their backlists. That’s good for them and their readers. We don’t want a return to the days of the midlist mass-market paperback that had a print run of 2000 copies, and about two weeks on the bookstore shelf to prove itself.
A Wag Of The Finger to those same authors who imply or state their current self-publishing experience and results are 100% applicable to the masses of unpublished, unagented, likely unpolished, and possibly under-informed writers who follow them.
A reasonably successful commercial author can springboard their self-publishing efforts off already existing readerships, and whatever work their old publisher’s marketing department did on their behalf.
Unknown self-published authors have a far rougher road. ∞