I asked authors to rate their experience with their publisher on a scale from 1 (terrible) to 10 (amazing).

Large house average experience: 7.4

Smaller houses with advances: 7.1

Small houses without advances: 6.2

Authors at larger and smaller houses reported about the same satisfaction as long as the publisher offered an advance. Authors at houses without advances reported a slightly lower average experience.

As for marketing assistance, authors at large houses reported slightly more marketing assistance than authors at smaller houses.

Did this translate into sales?

Here are the average (mean) numbers of copies sold by house size:

Large houses average debut copies sold: 22,200

Small houses with advance: 7,800 copies

Small houses without advance: 2,000 copies

I sliced the data a few different ways to see if a few runaway bestsellers were skewing the results (I checked the median and mode, too). The average for large houses is about 20,000 copies no matter how you look at it. The average for small houses is always about half of that.

3) How many drafts did you write of your debut book before it was accepted for publication?

Half of young adult writers wrote four or more drafts of their story before it was accepted for publication.