This is one at a biggish publisher, but since a publisher's first duty to literature - let alone business - is to stay solvent, essentially the same data is needed, and the same analysis is needed, before they can reach a decision, whether it's MegaBooks or The Mini Press...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-zacharius/to-publish-or-to-pass-the_b_4542548.html?utm_hp_ref=books

Note how

"a lot of background homework often takes place ... researching past sales from a previously published author ... even looking at sales provided by a self-published author who previously was only sold digitally.

and

The P&L process involves an intricate spreadsheet analysis where we estimate gross distribution and projected final sales by the few remaining large accounts. These numbers are plotted against the variable costs of manufacturing and marketing a book.

comes long before

Once we've looked at the numbers and done all of the analysis that we can, we discuss what platform the author might have available to promote their book.

So, don't kill yourself working Twitter to the max, until you've written a book which a publisher is going to think will get enough "gross distribution and projected final sales" to make more profit than loss.

So, don't kill yourself working Twitter to the max, until you've written a book which a publisher is going to think will get enough "gross distribution and projected final sales" to make more profit than loss.

Amen. Promoting yourself anywhere is distasteful - at least for me. And especially, why bother if you haven't got quality goods? (Think: Del Boy and Rodney.)
 
Anyone who reads this article should carry on to investigate the deep-water fish on the same page. Look at the blobfish. Who does it remind you of? Does it inspire you?
Edited by AlanH at 14:51:00 on 09 January 2014

Promoting yourself anywhere is distasteful

Well, yes, it is to many of us. Though you don't have to promote yourself: it can work just as well - perhaps better - to promote a topic that fascinates you. Essie Fox's Virtual Victorian blog is a standalone project, but no doubt very valuable to her in getting and keeping book deals, because it drew in and continues to draw in readers who might also like her fiction. And there are all the review blogs and the like. Lots of different ways to work the online world without promoting yourself. My blog, fundamentally, is outward-focussed, on writing and the writers who read it. Its function isn't to "promote" me as a personality at all.

Besides, although there's not much point in spending time on Twitter etc. if the book's no good, the opposite, as it were, is also true: that if all the sums and spreadsheets and P&Ls only just about add up, what tips the balance into an offer is, exactly, what platform the writer has already ...

So if you DO have an excellent book, doing something to give yourself a bit of platform (marrying your sister to the heir to the throne is not obligatory, but a nice little blog about the topic your novel's rooted in is a good thing) it's well worth trying to give it that extra edge.