This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don

This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don't actually read most of the books they're paid to talk about) and the major reviews. It gets a lot worse. Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers and which ones are there just to make the lead titles shine by comparison. Reader word-of-mouth doesn't really get a voice in the traditional book world, because it's slow, because reading takes time... and it's not publishers who started this fire, but the chain bookstores who abused the consignment model (Great Depression hangover) and invented the 8-week rotation. Publishers actually do care about the future of literature and being decent to the authors they're publishing... but these days if the chain bookstores don't like your numbers, you're dead after two months on the shelf (and will be difficult for publishers to place in the future)... and the economics of the whole system follow from that. If you're not going to be a lead title--and that depends on who your agent is, not the quality of your book, and your odds of even being read (let alone represented) by that kind of agent are less than 1% no matter how good your book is--then you're going to find traditional publishing experience extremely disappointing. The current system is based on selling huge numbers of copies (or not) in the first couple months, not on producing evergreen titles or building audiences. That said, reader word-of-mouth does get a voice in the long term, and self-publishing is a better option if you can afford it. (It costs about $20 per kiloword to do it right, though; you have to hire at least one editor, preferably two, as well as a cover designer.) You won't get reviewed by famous people, because you don't benefit from the network of "Do X or the next call is from my boss to your boss" phone calls that run NYC publishing, but you'll have more creative control and probably make more money in the long term.