Are publishers interested in picking up self-published books?

Yes they are. Walk a mile in their shoes for a moment and think about it from their perspective. Every author they sign is a risk. Each book they develop takes investment. Anything that will reduce that risk a little is worth doing.

So let’s say I was acquiring for a fiction house, and I had a manuscript in hand from a first time author whose writing I thought was great. If I give them a contract, I have to pay them an advance, then persuade the boss to fork out many thousands of dollars to finance the editing and production of the book, the marketing and the promotion. Then that book could sell nothing and we lose it all.

Now, if I have in the other hand a self published book that’s not as good, that I don’t like as much, but it has a thousand people who already paid good money to read it, then I’ll always be tempted to go with that. Why? Because if before I got to it, it sold 1000, then after I’m through with improving it I’m sure it will sell 10,000, and that’s all I need for it to have covered costs. In other words, the risk is gone.

Business success is reached as much through minimising risk as maximising return on investment.

“What if you self-publish your book for FREE, though? Are the amount of reads/reviews still indicative of potential profit for publishers?”

All the information on the internet is free, yet we make decisions on popularity by how many views a page or a blog post has had. There is a rough correlation between how many times a page is viewed for free, and how many people might be willing to pay to read something similar.

Let’s say your thesis gained 10,000 reads. You then put this into book form, and advertise it on that self same web page. A percentage of people would buy it. Perhaps 1%, for argument’s sake. 1% of 10,000 is only 100, so that would give you an idea of how many sales you might get. As you can see, the popularity of a free book needs to be very significant before the numbers become meaningful for publishers.

Generally publishers prefer to see evidence of money changing hands.