Hanging around on Reddit's /r/fantasy, I see a surprising number of people talking positively about self-published fantasy books. The coupled I tried reading—stellar Goodreads ratings aside—were utter garbage, but I bet there are some that are much better. Seems like some of these books (including the ones I disliked) are enough to earn the authors a living. Fantasy is a genre well-suited for series, so once you have an initial audience, you can rely on some level of recurring revenue for each subsequent book.

Publishing a book like this seems way more attainable than getting even a low level of success through traditional publishing a couple decades back.