Leonard, this is going to be hard to hear, but 1: they probably already did everything they "promised" you to do and 2: I'm pretty sure the content of your book is part of the reason you're seeing so few sales.
They said they would put my book in the big book chains in the US and internationally,
[
Here it is on Barnes and Noble], and [
Walmart], and [
Books-A-Million], not to mention Powell's, Valore, Blackwell, Biblio and Book Depository. And all the marketplace sites, like Amazon, Alibris, Abe, and eBay. So they did what they said they would do.
What I IMAGINE you think they would do, though, is have it be so that you can walk into your neighborhood Barnes and Noble and see it on the shelves. Did they explicitly say they would do that, in writing?
The pipeline is not always publisher ==> book store ==> customer, with lots of books sitting in boxes in the back. A lot of titles you see available online do not physically exist until an order is placed, so a printing press prints 1 copy and then mails it to the customer. It costs money and resources to make physical books and ship them around. A company like BN and Walmart and Amazon gets to have, literally, tens of millions of titles available to purchase and 0 risk of unsold stock when they use this print-on-demand model. The fact that they list "Ingram" as a "bookstore" implies as much.
Also, your BN listing doesn't have an image, which is not helping to convince people to buy your book. Nor is the $28.99 MSRP.
talk to Hollywood about a movie/TV deal
I can DM my friend on Twitter who is an actress/production assistant and talk about how funny it would be for one of my fanfics to be made into a The CW show, and that would count as talking to "Hollywood" about a TV deal. Because Hollywood isn't a specific company, it is an industry, with people in it at all levels, the vast majority of whom have no influence as to what deals are made.
and try to get a big book publisher to take over my book under their label
And they are going to say no. Publishers, with VERY rare exceptions, want unpublished works. They will only pick up a self-published work if it has crazy-high sales. Eragon is an older example, with Fifty Shades being a much more recent (and well-known) one.
and I would get 80% of the profits.
Profits. If I make a statue out of solid gold that cost $999 in total and sell it for $1,000, and if I give you 80% of the profits, you are getting 80 cents because there was only $1 of profit. Printing a book on demand is much more expensive than mass-printing a book, due to economies of scale. The editors and people who work on a book deserve to get paid for their time and expertise, and the company needs to make money to keep the lights on. The more people you involve in a book, the more of that MSRP has to go into paying them, which means less profit margin, period. This is why print-on-demand is favorable for book stores, they are not paying for warehousing or shipping from warehouse to store or a guy at the store to put it on a shelf.
My national radio interview was at 11:00 PM in Tucson on Christmas Eve, which no one had heard.
Did they specify what radio station or time slot?
Maybe I got 10% from Amazon, and the checks stopped after 90 days.
Amazon, and most people, have a minimum payout threshold. They are not going to send you a check for 12 cents. Also, if no books are selling, there is nothing to pay you.
Now here is the part you are probably going to hate to hear the most: I honestly think the content of your book is hampering your sales.
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If you look up "Deep State on Amazon], you get a TV show, a book by a major publisher with a best selling author, the second season of the show, a movie, another book by a major publisher with a best-selling author...you are competing with a LOT of other people on this subject matter. Many of them are "subject matter experts." People are going to trust what Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson or whoever about the deep state, because they have a large following and people know them for knowing so much about the subject. When you write a nonfiction book, you need to be an expert on the topic, otherwise, why should someone listen to you?
Also...there is not much appetite for this kinda stuff. After Jan 6, anything that had to do with Q-Anon was removed from pretty much any and all marketplaces, even if there were never physical books sitting on any shelves, they didn't want to promote those beliefs nor give customers the impression that they are giving money to those authors. So the chances that Barnes and Noble would have this book on their shelves, regardless of the subject matter, is closer to 0 than it's not, but it is now 0 because it's about the deep state.
America is a free country where you can say whatever you like, and the government isn't going to stop you from turning it into a book and selling it. And companies also have the right to free speech, and choosing what to sell is protected speech, so Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc have the right to not put your book on shelves or even to de-prioritize it in their search algorithms. This isn't a government/big tech/leftist conspiracy thing, it's cause SCOTUS decided it's okay for bakers to not make gay wedding cakes because that is a form of speech, so you can blame that baker for all of this
