I see a version of this every day on Substack and it’s all wrong. They pay you an advance (the median is $4-5K+) or you don’t take the deal. They don’t butcher your book; they don’t buy it if there’s too much work to be done on it because it costs them money. They generally don’t send you on tour for the reasons you outlined. They always promote you (at an absolute minimum, the book packaging and retail distribution is promotion you can’t afford on your own) and most of the time there’s a small media campaign. In my experience, they never talk shit to you when it goes wrong. They say other things (‘the market is hard right now’ or ‘people aren’t buying <insert>’) but there’s no blaming the author. They’d kinda have to blame you through your agent and they don’t want to talk to your agent when it goes wrong. On your last point, wut? The industry is FULL of authors who have failed repeatedly. Someone on here the other day had it right, you kinda have to sell poorly for 10 years before they cut you loose. Most of the time, if you’re willing to submit to writing your 4th low-selling novel, they’ll buy it. No one knows anything. Everyone is just putting bets on the table over and over again, and there are 500,000 bets placed a year.