Publishing is about marketing, and a bit about finance (investment in printing). Self-publishing by means of an eBook still requires marketing, though the printing costs are sneakily avoided (sneakily, because the reader - if s/he prints it - will have to spend far more to get it printed... An eBook has the disadvantage that the book can be forwarded to others, thus reducing your sales. There are solutions for that but they are a hassle. If you have the time and skills to market it yourself, using clever guerilla tactics for instance, you can try. The OP's idea to create a fanbase is imho a good way to do that. I am setting up a blog with regularly publishing short stories for that precise reason. Ha, maybe it goes viral some day....
i checked out smashwords recently, since i wanted to make my free books available more widely than on my website, and found they wouldn't retain my ms' format, so went to scribd.com instead, where it was almost too easy to turn my mss into 'real' e-books...
