There's one other thing they do. While they don't market books to readers, for the most part, they do market them to bookstores, who can be awfully picky about

There's one other thing they do. While they don't market books to readers, for the most part, they do market them to bookstores, who can be awfully picky about what they put on the shelves. If you want to get books available on the shelves in Borders and B&N (which dominate retail in the U.S.), it helps to have a sales guy in your corner with the buyers for those chains in their rolodex. FWIW, here's an author talking about that stuff: http://www.iantregillis.com/index.cfm?blog=164 His books aren't being advertised to readers much at all, that I've noticed, but the publisher is going to considerable effort and expense just to get them on the shelves. Reviews were good, and readers who could find the first book in the trilogy liked it --- but "folks working on the procuring/selling side of the industry don't know what to do with these books", so they weren't doing anything, and so readers couldn't find it, because it literally wasn't on the shelves. The upshot: they're delaying production on the sequels to repackage the first book with new cover art that will hopefully confuse the chain buyers less. For fiction, for the moment, this stuff still matters. For technical books, enough of the order stream may have moved online that it's not worth thinking about. (A harbinger: I was saddened to learn that Powell's closed their physical tech-book annex last spring, due to dwindling sales.) So, consider your market: YMMV.