The collection development policy Eric linked to touches on this, but perhaps could be more explicit (emphasis below is mine):
"Project Gutenberg worked with many different content types, including audio books, digitized sheet music, some movies, and quite a few copyrighted items that were donated by contemporary authors. By the early 2000s, it was clear that Project Gutenberg was not as well-suited for those different content types as for public domain literature. There are now many other outlets for these other types of works, including a self-publishing portal for contemporary authors that is operated by a Project Gutenberg affiliate."
The "Submitting your own work how-to" is much more explicit about it (again emphasis is mine):
"Project Gutenberg’s collection is focused on older literary works for which copyright in the US has expired. Contemporary works are not being accepted for the collection.
"Instead, our partner, the World Library Foundation runs self.gutenberg.org, the Project Gutenberg self-publishing portal. This is a collection of author-contributed works."
Dan
On Wed, Jan 7, 2026, at 5:08 PM, Walter Farrell via gutvol-d wrote:
Interesting discussion.
Perhaps I missed it, and if so I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't
see anything in that policy that prohibits self-published works. It
prohibits works that are unpublished and not distributed. But many
authors self-publish by producing their books through Amazon as epub, or
even physical books via print-on-demand services. If that were done, and
then the author dedicated it to the Public Domain after at least one
copy had been purchased, wouldn't it be eligible for the main Project
Gutenberg collection?