Again... Most corporate published books don't get a lot of marketing money. Mine didn't. Most writers I know don't. Please don't count on a corporate publisher for marketing, or you'll likely be disappointed - most writers have to market their own books, regardless how they publish.
Also, please think before launching pejorative attacks like calling corp pubs "legitimate publishers" in a self publishing forum.
Legitimacy is acquired by production of a quality final product, not by corporate size or structure, thanks.
I disagree with both your points, Kevin.
Corporate published books get a marketing budget beyond just my own. Any marketing budget is better than none, and just having boxes of books mailed to reviewers on a publisher's dime is a huge savior of your own marketing efforts and budget. No promotions I've done for my books, no matter how energetic, has been as effective as review copies mailed to respected reviewers (by my publishers) nor as effective as placement on bookstore shelves for browsing buyers at bookstores (again, through the publisher's distribution partners).
You can replace these things with sweat equity and effort, but the return on your investment will not be much, generally. Again, I've tried it. Marketing Last Dragon after the imprint died was not successful, and I was a sales/marketing pro before I was an author. Things don't work as well as a publisher doing it for you through their established relationships and networks.
Browsing does not happen quite the same way with the kindle, and I suspect there is much change going to happen over time as systems find new ways to work out the problem of browsing on a device like this (but, the solution has not made itself apparent, yet. Nothing, yet, seems to match browsing in a bookstore.)
As far as the question of my word choice, I don't think it's bombastic to call a publisher that would be granted status as a publisher (before the latest products even arrive in the mail to be judged) by groups like SFWA, HWA, Literary Agents, the New York Times Book Review, and etc. a "legitimate" publisher. I also don't presume to call a company that is not part of that grouping "illegitimate" because it would be improper to label such a wide and diverse group of product-makers with a pejorative. Just because one exists as a recognizable thing, it does not mean a different category must be labeled as an antithesis.
Labels wouldn't be so potentially bombastic if they weren't often manipulated by the scam operations (not by well-meaning self-publishers) to try and bilk people of money. I don't think any of us are concerned with that.
Regardless, if I was interested in anything but factual application of reproduce-able business models for writers, I wouldn't be dabbling in self-publishing at all, no? I can tell you for a fact that my experiments in self-publishing have been dramatically less successful than my work with real, advance-paying, distribution-deals-having publishers. I can say with certainty, and with numbers to back me up after I was promoting a book beyond the life of the imprint that originally published it, that the marketing efforts, even the small ones, of a "real" "new york" publisher was over 80 percent of the success of a debut title.
Again, from what I can see after my dabbling, my numbers don't reflect the hype that is showing up everywhere. I don't see any huge shift happening in publishing to match the hype that I'm hearing.
My question for people who are succeeding, then, is this: Can you create a reproduce-able model of your success that others in different fields and levels of audience-involvement can pick up and also succeed with?
