Self-publishing is easy. You get an ISBN, you print your book or create an eBook, register with Archives Canada and send copies of your books to them. Bang, you are published. Marketing is hard, gruelling, and mainly fruitless work. But with today's technology, you as a writer / publisher need not spend more money than a hundred dollars at publishing a new book, and most of that will be in postage fees and printer's ink.  

You can resign to being a published but unread writer, or else you can daydream about being discovered hundreds of years down the road. Socrates comes to mind, Aristotle, Plagiar, and Nietzsche. 

Some go the hard way, like Kurt Vonnegut, who sold his books on street corners, up to and including the time he'd become world famous; then from then on, bang, his books practically sold themselves.

Some go the easy way: they become the President of the United States, or travel to Mars, then bang, they publish some books written by someone else.