Re: Publish America
I'm utterly desolated to have to say this, Poorboy, but you don't know jack sh*t about publishing. For starters, there's no such thing as a "standard 3 months promotion package." Every house is different, every book is different, every promo campaign is different.
Having a book -- any book -- published by a reputable trade house gets you more marketing and promotion than you're going to see from any e-, POD, subsidy, or other euphemistically nonstandard publisher. A conventional publisher's investment in a given title goes far beyond the advance paid to the author. Some of that goes into making it a better and more attractive book -- that's editing, design, art direction, copyediting, proofreading, etc. Even more of it goes into selling the book, repeatedly, at many different levels and through many different channels.
Getting published by iUniverse, Xlibris, PublishAmerica, etc., is only publishing in the most nominal and minimal sense. If you're an unknown, especially a first-time fiction writer, it will do absolutely nothing for you. If you want to throw your work away, it's your lookout; but you should know from the start that that's what it is.
If scuttling around distributing bookmarks and talking to your local bookstore managers and getting interviewed on your local 0300 radio talk show were enough to sell a book, the industry would be selling books that way. Those things do help, just a tad. But if your publisher doesn't have little extras LIKE A SALES FORCE, your efforts aren't enough and never will be.
You will not make money.
The way to get published by a real publisher is to write a book they want to publish. If you're a writer, you should be staying home and working on writing that book, not running around in an futile effort to hand-sell an unsuccessful early work.