SELF PUBLISH AND DAMN YOUR CRITICS!!

You can spend years and years trying to find a publisher who will accept your work; if like me you tend to write for a niche market (the lost and the klonely and the disaffected)you'll probably wait for ever and get more and more depressed with every new rejection you receive.
I walked down this lonely road for a long time until I discovered Lulu.com a couple of years ago and I've never looked back. (I've not moved forward either in terms of getting discovered, this is an ongoing process of self promotion and it doesn't come cheap.)
I'm very pleased with my Lulu experiences, I've self published all my work with them, their standards are very high and they expect yours to be also when it comes to presentation of your work. There were times when I could have seriously done with a helping hand from someone who's more technically savvy than me, but I managed it in the end.
The advantage of self publishing is that you can keep control of your content, you're not having to bow and scrape to editors whims, and if you do 'get lucky' then you get more sales profits back as well as royalties; unless you want to sell your soul to a publisher for a large cash advance (I would willingly do this.)
Also, if you can send out printed and bound copies of your work to publishers it shows them that you are serious about what you're doing and want them to take you seriously. I do long for fame and fortune from my writing but because I'm not prepared to compromise with the social mores of today's paranoid schizophrenic market, this is highly unlikely; especially as my work comes under 'poetry'.
Believe me if I could write Hollywood 'bonk busters' like Jackie Collins I would, and cartwheel (naked of course) all the way to the bank.
Incidentally, I have a blog on blogger.com called: FOR MISERABLE FAILURES EVERYWHERE, and I sign myself 'miserable failure.'