·         Are they reputable and well-established?

·         Offers fair terms for sales, warehousing, and shipping costs.

·         Has a decent track record for selling similar books in your genre.

·         Will represent one-book authors and not just small publishers of several titles.

When you work with a distributor, follow their timeline of when they plan to launch the sale of your book. They may need several months to get your  book in their system and to allow time for their sales reps to pre-sell it. Many distributors have various fee-based marketing programs, where they will charge you for any number of services, including telemarketing stores, mailing galleys to stores, advertising, or scheduling book signings. They will do other things for free, such as include you in their catalog, create a sales sheet for their sales reps, or list you in various databases and online commerce sites, such as www.amazon.com

If you are published by a traditional publisher, your success will depend, in part, on how big the publisher is and how active they will be in marketing your book. University presses and small publishers have very limited budgets to promote, so don’t assume they will do much for you. Mid-size and larger publishers may do some basic things for you, such as sending out a few dozen advance copies to select reviewers. If you are lucky and your title is seen as one the publisher wants to support they may assign an in-house publicist to work on your book for six to eight weeks — along with a zillion other titles.