Kasspian’s honest read
Amazon KDP is genuinely free to start, but it's a saturated market now flooded with low-effort and AI-generated books where the vast majority earn next to nothing, so it's tough to win without an existing audience, a defensible niche, or writing good enough to earn reviews and rank.
Who actually pays
Amazon readers browsing or searching for a book — a huge audience, but one with near-infinite cheap alternatives.
Riskiest assumption
That your book gets discovered and bought in a market where millions of titles compete and quality is hard to signal cold.
Cheapest test first
Publish one genuinely good book in a niche you understand and see if it earns reviews and organic sales before scaling a catalogue.
The pitch is seductive — no printing cost, global distribution, passive royalties — and a small number of authors do build real income, especially in niche non-fiction or with a series and an audience. But the median outcome is bleak: most self-published books sell a handful of copies to friends and then vanish, because discovery is everything and the shelf is effectively infinite.
It's gotten harder, not easier. The market is saturated, low-content and AI-generated books have flooded categories, and Amazon's discovery rewards reviews and sales velocity you don't have on day one. The people who win treat it as a real product business: a sharp niche, genuine quality, and usually an audience or email list to drive the first wave of sales and reviews. As a get-rich-passive scheme it almost never works; as a slow build on top of a real niche or following, it can. Quality and distribution decide it — not the number of titles you upload.
This is the read on the category. Your version isn’t the average — get the honest call on your exact idea, with live market data, in about 90 seconds.