Now, I can't claim to be well connected to the self-publishing industry, so I can't say to what extent the situation I'm about to describe is universal, but I feel it is fairly accurate for your average small self-publishing authors.
Sales are down. Enthusiasm to write and publish is down. Thoughts of giving it all up, are up. The big question is, "Why bother anymore?"
Three cause of this bout of despair are offered up: the market is being flooded with AI produced books, the economy, and the declining number of fiction readers.
Of the three, the flooding of the market with AI books is certainly a factor in dampening the spirits of small self-publishing authors. For many it seems that getting your books noticed, much less purchased, is almost impossible. Oh, there is social media, of course, but often authors are just following other authors and being followed by other authors. Not readers who might actually purchase your book. And well, I've heard it said that AI produced books are dominating some of the bestselling list of some romance sub-genres. While there are those whose motto is "Never AI," it appears that Kindle Unlimited readers prefer their formalistic genre fiction to come with good grammar and no typos, no matter the source. Art and soul be damned.
Steps are being taken by the publishing platforms themselves as they find themselves flooded by these mass-produced books. Amazon recently limited the number of books that can be uploaded and publish to two a week. And Draft2Digital charges an activation fee of $20 for new "authors" and a $12 a year fee if your books don't earn at least $100 in royalties. Both measures are meant to slow down the flood of AI books. But they won't stop the trend, using AI in some manner is becoming just too useful to writers of commercial fiction. Little wonder that people who write books the old fashioned way are feeling down.
The economy is suggested to also be playing a role in the downturn in sales, though I tend to doubt this. Most of the authors complaining about poor sales have their books in the Kindle Unlimited program were readers read their book for free after paying Amazon's monthly fee. People who read enough books in a month to justify that fee would seem unlikely to cancel it, since it's a relatively minor expense for the entertainment they derive. I suppose the economy may be a factor in individual book sales rather than page reads.
The third reason often cited is that the percentage of the population reading fiction has been declining for a decade or more. Often this seems to boil down to them young whippersnappers are spending all their time on social media and consequently, have the attention span of gnats. Which is to say, a version of the classic "the world is going to hell in a handcart" one hears from an older generation whenever the younger one doesn't do what they did, back in the day. I doubt this has much, if any, effect on declining sales, seeing that it is probably the casual, one book or two a year reader who has fallen off the wagon. Besides publishing companies' sales are actually increasing, though the higher price of books may account for some, or all of that.
There is one extra factor that I think must be considered in this discussion. And that is fashion. When a writer is producing commercial work, i.e. stories written for a specific market and reader, that subject/style will grow old and inevitably fall out of fashion with readers. The savvy author may be able to pivot with the trends, but even so, their back catalog still falls out of fashion. And if they don't quite catch the latest wave of hot sub-genres and style this time around, they can become yesterday's news. Many readers are fickle. (And with short attention spans!) So when I hear of writers selling far less than they once did, I have to think that perhaps readers have just moved on and left them behind.
As I said at the top, while expectations are always high, selling books, especially as a self-publishing author, has always been a tough go, and rarely successful. And even when it is, success often does not last for long. Fashion is ruthless and fleeting. Judging from my experience giving away books, it is indeed harder to sell books today than it was five or ten years ago. But given how hard it's always been, would most self-published authors really notice much of a difference?
Perhaps all this despair is really just the realization of how hard selling books is and has always been, which is finally filtering down into the hopes and dreams of writers. But probably not.
However, remember folks: No One Undersells Crazy Charlie's Book Emporium!
Bring it on, AI!
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