Should You Self-Publish (part 3)

I'm talking about marketing. My naïve, 2012-self figured that putting up a website, putting my product on sale through a reputable digital storefront (RPGnow.com), and talking about it on social media would be what I needed to get the word out. Five years later, I have only 100 followers on my product's Facebook page, around 630 followers on Twitter, and my product is buried among the thousands of other sci-fi RPG's on sale at RPGnow.com. That's not to say that I'm not making sales—the last time I sent out an email notification of a new product, I had over 700 emails on my list of people that have purchased my products on RPGnow. Don't just take my example, though, there are plenty of self-published authors selling their books online, often through Amazon, and I typically see around 4 or 5 reviews total on a book that is ranked somewhere in the millions in the Amazon best-seller rankings. This can be true of books online sold through a reputable publisher, too. The difference, though, is that the self-published author is doing all of the marketing himself. On Twitter, I've followed a lot of authors, and I'm constantly seeing announcements and ads for their books. These authors are working hard, using social media to spread the word. Although I don't have actual statistical numbers on this, my guess is that a lot of these authors aren't investing much money, if any, into paid advertising. There is a line we all must face where you ask yourself how much more money are you willing to pump into a project that is seeing a limited return?