> Cons of a publisher: [...] they actually do little to no marketing of your book.

Unless the publisher has already written off a book, don't they have incentive to market it?

There are some low-cost things you can do to market a book, and they reportedly make the difference between no sales, and some or many sales.

And a publisher can learn the currently effective marketing methods, and then apply that skill across books of many authors.

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levocardia 10 hours ago | parent [-]

No, their incentive is to wait and see what books are taking off, then pile on the money when they know it's already a winner. Today, unproven authors are expected to do their own marketing.

	▲	neilv 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For the marketing that has significant costs (e.g., paying for ads, paying for show appearances, paying other influencers to plug, making quality videos for social media, travel for events). But it costs almost nothing to do ARC readers for reviews and ratings, and it's free to time things for the Kindle store algorithm. You just have to know to do it, when. And there's some other "free" marketing that publishers should have automated by now, because they can amortize that across many book releases.