My experience is that the self-publishing business is a _business_ that generates money from publishing and marketing books. If you decide to self-publish and self-market, all you are doing is skipping the publishing step of recruiting an author, and substituting the step of writing one or more books yourself.
The key insight here is that it is a business, and the actual writing of the book is incidental to the success of the business. I repeat, incidental. The main drivers of the publishing business is marketing to acquire more customers, and finding ways to build additional revenue streams to generate value from each customer.
If you don't care to know what LTVs and conversion rates are, you will not be happy running a publishing business regardless of who wrote the book(s) you are publishing.
The other road forward is to have a publishing hobby. Some hobbies make token amounts of money. I know two brothers who buy collectible corvettes, fix them up, drive them for exactly one Summer, and then sell them.
The money they make seems like a nice side-business, until you listen to them tote up the hours and expenses and tax implications. They would make way more money selling almost anything else part-time. And that is my personal experience with my own writing hobby.
The money sounds nice until you actually look at it as a business, and then you start asking why I am on Hacker News writing this comment when I should be curating my email list. The "problem," of course, is that writing is my hobby, not curating email lists.
So I believe you need to decide whether you have a business or a hobby. If it's a business, then you have to put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the revenue. And that is not writing, in my experience or observation.
Whereas with a hobby, you put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the happy juice in your brain. If writing does that for you, you can write and make a little something on the side that will pay for some discretionary lifestyle purchases. In my own case, that's things like a 1950s-era Rietveld Crate Chair.
Blatant Endorsement:
FYI, I publish with LeanPub http://leanpub.com, because it generates the maximum revenue for the small scale of my writing hobby, and its "lean" approach helps me maximize my contact with my readers as part of the writing process. Since writing is my hobby, that's a win for me.
They also help people with a writing business in some amazing ways, like their tools for creating courses, which helps generate more revenue from existing content, and the ways they help you build a mailing list so you can develop other revenue streams from your existing readers. If you want to build a business, they help you build your business.