Last week, I spoke to a publisher who recently won the National Book Award for one of the novels he published. He used the word "dinosaurs" in describing publishing houses and the publishing industry.
He also said, 'We know it's important to use Twitter and Tumblr and all this new media to get our books out there and make sure people know about them. We just don't know how.'
And yet I now build my reading list almost exclusively through the recommendations I get from Twitter. Publishers seem to be using it to promote their books very effectively to me.
In other words, anecdotal evidence only proves the point of the person providing it.
I'm not saying publishers don't get behind books; of course they do. They want their books to sell just as much as the authors want them to sell.
But you did.
In your earlier comment you wrote,
People can say that you will get more marketing help from a big publishing house, but the truth is actually closer to this: the big publishing houses have a larger budget for marketing. But typically, this budget is not allocated to a book until it has sold at least 5,000 copies
So which is it? Publishers don't provide any marketing budget for their books until they've "sold at least 5,000 copies", or "publishers get behind books"? You can't have it both ways.
But what percentage of novels actually make a profit?
Much depends on the specific publisher but on average, between 70% and 90% of the books from trade publishers turn a profit.
Don't you think that number would be higher if publishing houses were able to throw the full force of their marketing department behind each and every book they published?
If publishers were to add further costs to the budget of every book then more books would lose money, not make more money.
Not every book is suited to heavy marketing and promotion. Some books sell regardless of such activities, such as directories and classics; some books benefit more from one particular marketing push, others from a different sort of attention. Books signings tend to work for established, well-known authors but not so well for debut writers; reviews in the national press are brilliant for novels, but pretty useless for textbooks; and so on and so forth.
You seem determined to prove that publishers are doing things wrong: what you're ignoring is that they've been publishing books for a long time and know what's worth spending money on, and what gives the best return.
I also recently spoke to a woman who had one novel published by Penguin Putnam and two others published by small presses. She said she had far more marketing help from the small presses than from Penguin Putnam.
More anecdotal evidence. What were her sales like in each case? Isn't that the most important thing here?
I know a writer who has been published by both small and large presses. She's had huge amounts of both marketing and promotional support from her large publishers. See, I can play this game too!
Again: I'm not saying publishing houses don't want their books to sell. But I am saying that an author who has a good marketing plan on their own - who knows what they can do to help their book sell - will get more help from the publishing house itself in the long run. All things equal, new books will all get the same amount of help early on, but if one book starts selling better than others, the publishing house is going to give this book more attention in order to capitalize on the momentum.
Except that all things aren't equal. All books don't get the same amount of help early on because some books are more important to the publisher than others, and so get a bigger push; and as I've already said, different books require different sorts of marketing and promotion.
It's rare for a book to be assigned an extra chunk of marketing money as you describe. It does happen, but not often. There's a long lead-time involved in much marketing activity, such as buying ad space, which makes "capitaliz[ing] on the momentum" as you suggest very difficult.
True, but being active in the writing community can make a huge difference in how much help an author has in getting the word out there about their book. If an author is an integral part of the writing community, after all - and the writing community is excited about the book in question - these other writers will want to make sure all their fans and readers know about the book as well.
When I was editing full time I only ever signed books because I thought they were well-written, entertaining, and appropriate for the market. I didn't ever sign an author because he knew lots of other authors, online or anywhere else.
All this is getting a little off-topic, I think. Shall we see if we can get back to the discussion in hand? Thanks, all.
However, she also wants a bio and a marketing statement. I've never been asked for those before. Is a bio like the generic one they have on Amazon, which appeals to readers? Is it more detailed, listing all my groups and pubbed stories (which was mostly already covered in the query)? 
