Well… This is going to veer sharply off-topic, but I see no other way to give an honest and complete answer.
I think you’re being a bit self-contradictory here. On the one hand, you’re de-emphasizing sales as a measure of literary success. Then you seem to turn around and consider sales very important indeed when it comes to your own work.
So, what is success, and what is quality?
For my part, I measure both quality and success in two very different ways. There’s the work I’m truly proud of as a craftsman, which almost never sells well, and the work that sells in quantity, which I’m usually proud of to a degree but often less so than when I shoot for literary merit. Please note that I don’t consider the one achievement to be “better” or “higher” than the other-- most readers buy books to divert the tedium of their existences and if I can write a wild and flashy piece that does that for them then in my own opinion what I’ve created is every bit the equal of an “artsy” piece-- certainly it does greater service to humanity as a whole than an “artsy” piece that has no appeal to the masses and which remains unread except by a handful of literati who appreciate having this sort of button pushed. And if it does greater service… Well, in the world of the free market in theory at least that means it makes more money.
Don’t get me wrong-- I cherish a powerful symbol-set and spectacularly well thought out setting as much as the next pretentious literati-- I did very well in my literature classes back when. If I want to feel a powerful sense of self-fulfillment I spend a bit of my writing time trying (always in vain) to equal the efforts of the masters of the craft. Every once in a while I even actually sell one of the resulting books or stories, and I’m most pleased of all when I meet the rare fan who has actually read and loved one of these works and recognized it for what it was. But commercially the results overall are pitiful. On the other hand, if I want to sell books in volume I write an action-based series with a youthful protagonist who defends what is Good and Right and blows lotsa stuff up along the way in new and different (but not too different) ways. People-- especially the young males who make up the bulk of my audience-- tend to buy this sort of thing in volume; it’s very good for diverting tedium. I certainly still read it, despite being far older. I’ve sold plenty of this kind of work…
Despite the fact that I’ve just about never self-promoted it.
What I did do was build up a core readership by posting my work as serials on a couple furry-related mailing lists-- the TSA_Talk list and furry-lit. This wasn’t-- and isn’t, as I still do it several times a week-- self-promotion. It’s sharing my stuff with good friends who were patient with me as I slowly learned the art of writing and who today after so many years are in many cases like family. While this arena certainly brought me to the attention of several publishers and to some degree got me going as a selling author, what really worked was pricing my common-man stuff so low on Amazon that people were willing to take a chance, and then kind enough to leave good reviews there and elsewhere. I’ve never lifted a finger to promote myself to 99% or more of my reader/customers.
In the end my work–though far from perfect, I’ll point out, as I’d benefit greatly from the services of a pro editor but am too cheap to pay one what he’s worth-- spoke for itself once I could persuade the public (via low price) to take that first look. I firmly believe that self-promotion probably would’ve done more harm than good in getting them to take that first vital step. Self-promotion looks… Desperate. Like you have something to hide, or want others to buy your book as a favor. Customers are notoriously cold and unforgiving, nor are they stupid.
As an aside…
During the period when my books were selling at their hottest a friend of a friend heard about it and wanted to buy me dinner and ask questions. It turned out that he was a professional book marketer fresh out of college on his first job, promoting a well-known local author’s self-help books online. He wanted to know what I’d done to produce my sales. When I told him nothing at all, I expected him to consider me a fool. (And I felt rather like one, too.) But he laughed instead. He told me that no one in marketing today understands why some books sell and some don’t, or even which online ad strategies work or why. This is because there’s no known way to match efforts with results; for all anyone knew, the advertising money was totally wasted. He admitted that he felt like a complete fraud with every ad buy, and that only the fact that he’d told his employer the author the truth up front kept him going.
Since then I’ve felt even more certain about not self-promoting stuffs being the right way to go. Even traditional-type promotion seems futile. One of my publishers has purchased ads promoting my work now and again. Sales go up a little while they run, but never by enough to break even. It’s all about the freely-given reader reviews in my opinion. And that’s all about quality, however defined, speaking for itself.
But it’s not nearly as offensive, to me at least, as other forms of self-marketing are.