Freeshadow: lol! Yeah, that's one way to sell poo with good marketing.
mcrow24: Yeah, I went small press and am doing pretty well. Would I like to get picked up by a big house? Sure, I think it'd be fun. The catch is, if I do get picked up, either the book goes as is, or they don't get it. Period. I will not have any publishers telling me how I'll write my story. That may sound arrogant, but given the butchering I've seen happen to some really great stories, I'd rather go without than have my story destroyed by some hack wanting to make it a formula novel.
Either the story stands on its own, or it doesn't stand. And I'm one who'll stand 100% behind his stories. If people think they suck, or it's got issues, I have no problems fixing it, because I don't claim to always be right. But I'm not going to have someone hack up my story just because they think it'd be cool to see the main character as something entirely different than I designed them to be. It's one thing to fix issues with a story. It's something entirely different to have someone make you rewrite the story in their image.