I appreciate what you're saying.
For house # 1, what they sent was the budget. She went over some of the plan. Targeting local bookstores in my area, as well as some print adds when that happens. Social media buzz, blog tour, interviews. The two owners have been in the business 5-10 years. The one book I mentioned has maintained decent sales from what I can gather.
A budget is just an amount of money written down, perhaps split into parts. It's the plan you want.
Targeting local bookshops isn't going to be nearly as effective as targeting bookshops nationwide. Print ads aren't terribly useful at selling books either, unless you're using them in trade publications in order to get bookshops to order it in--and that's only going to work if they have full distribution. Have you checked who distributes their books? It's worth doing.
Which publishers have they worked at before now? How did sales go there?
House II has some ny times best selling authors behind the scenes. I'm not sure what they do beyond their unconventional marketing. They may do conventional as well. I have yet to speak to them.
What do you mean by conventional and unconventional marketing?
House III is recommended by P&E and won best publisher polls by them too. My issue there is sales. I'm just not seeing it with all of their titles. Some have done well. But as a house they've been around just under 10 years.
I've seen lacklustre publishers do well in P&E polls because they got their authors to vote them in. It's not necessarily a good thing.
Their having been around for ten years is good: they've had time to make their mark. I'd expect a few best-sellers in that time, and for them to have a solid reputation and some stand-out books.
I understand what you're saying, but I feel that there are 3 opportunities in front of me and I have no way of knowing that another one will happen.
You can always get an opportunity to publish: send your work to PublishAmerica.
"Opportunity" is not good enough on its own. What you need is the opportunity to be published well. If you aren't convinced that these publishers are going to be able to publish a book you'll be proud of, and sell it in decent quantity, then you'd be better off self publishing.
How do you check on the sales of titles beyond Novel Rank?
You could contact some of their authors and ask what their sales have been like.
You could ask the publisher how many copies of your book they think they'll sell.
You could Google their name and see what appears.
There are all sorts of ways you could find out.
