Knowing full well that Birol may snatch back that welcome mat if someone persists in beating a poor dead horse ...
... someone rolls up a newspaper and contemplates swatting someone, or something, instead.
Swat!
Tate offers services for a fee. They charge four thousand dollars for services that can be rendered for much less expense if an author wanted to pay to have a book published.
Evidence available suggests they do
not "pour marketing resources" into a book. I chose 20 books already in print at random from their list. (MANY of their books are not yet "in print." Although the stated print date for many has already passed by months, and you can find the books by searching specifically with title and author name on sites like Barnes and Noble and Amazon, both B & N and Amazon note the books are not yet available)
I checked the sales rank and reviews. 16 of the 20 had no sales rank. Only 2 of the 20 had any reviews at all (posted by "readers"), and only 2 of the 20 had a book description, and in both cases it was a short, single sentence that did nothing to pique interest. Simply saying "inspirational poetry" ain't gonna convince me to buy a book. Evidently, Tate frequently can't be bothered to give a description of the book. The only way readers are going to find these puppies and possibly buy them is if they're told to do a highly specific key word search and if they already know what the books are about.
I then googled the 20 books using title and author last name. The
highest number of hits I found was 89 -- a significant number of these hits were the Tate website itself. The lowest number of hits I found was 9, for a book that had been released almost a year before. 6 of the 9 were Tate. In most cases, the hits numbered in the mid-20s, and in those cases, I found no press releases, book signing notices for bookstores, publicity pitches, etc. In one of the higher hit tallies, I did find one link announcing a book signing at a local church, and another hit from a church newsletter where the author herself submitted to the newsletter notice of her book and requested that parishoners pray for its sales.
I then went to 5 small presses that don't charge the upfront fees for services that Tate does. I deliberately chose presses with much smaller lists and less marketable niches than the Christian market. I picked 4 books already in print at random from each press and went through the same process.
14 of the 20 had sales ranks. All 20 had reviews posted by readers, and useful book descriptions from the publishers. 12 had excerpts of reviews published by outside sources such as newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.
Googling the books resulted in a high number of 892 hits and a low number, for a book released two months ago, of 50. All of the books googled had press releases, hits advertising book signings in bookstores, publicity pitches, and 17 had at least one review in a newspaper, magazine, journal etc.
Tate does not appear to be actively marketing the books on its list to the general populace.
Okay, how about the Christian populace? I checked four major online outlets for Christian books. I only found 4 of the 20 titles listed, and not on all the outlets.
None of the 4 had a book description -- not even a one-liner, or book reviews of any kind.
The small presses that don't charge an author $4,000 to print a book seem to be doing much better marketing and, with the exception of the 40% royalties return on sales
*, offering the same, if not more services.
* Please note: Tate only gives that 40% on sales that originate from Tate's own website/catalogue. If it's not bought directly from Tate, the author ain't getting 40%.