teach me how to publish

It is a dream of mine to one day see my work bound in print. I am working on what will, one day, hopefully be my first novel. I have but one problem; I don't know shit about publishing a book. Please, if you have any knowledge on the subject, tell me everything I need to know about making a real book. My plan was to just toss it up on Lulu.com and eventually pay for an ISBN number, but I beyond that I really don't know where to go. Can you help me realize my goals?

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>>1
Publishing your stuff is very easy.

1. FINISH THE BOOK. Finish it to the very last letter, faggot, and take your time editing it until you think you worked just enough and it's done. You heard me, bitch.
2. Go send it to all literary agents (in America; in other countries publishers often work directly with authors, though that's less convenient to both) you could find - send simultaneously to as many as you could.
3. Get published. Nothing can go wrong. You will get published.

NOTE, though:
Make sure your agent/publisher never EVER takes a penny from you. Remember this. Never, ever. If they say: sure, great book, now please pay editorial/reading/evaluation/whatever fees - even if it's a laughable few dozen bucks, tell them to immediately fuck off, and don't deal with them anymore even if they say your book is perfect - get away from them. Also, don't bother with publishers that advertise is a sense of "we need writers!" Real publishers don't advertise their "services" at all - as in, never, because they don't offer nos ervices, they're only doing business, and if publisher doesn't have good business, they wouldn't make any good of your book anyway, and thus you don't want them.

>>3
Oh, forgot to mention: never sell your rights to the book. You only sell PUBLISHING RIGHTS, not the authorship rights. Never ever, okay? If they offer that, that must mean that they really like your book - like it enough to try to steal it from you forever. Publishing rights are sold for a period, and you still can do wahtever you want with the book itself, or especially characters, names, etc.. Sell your rights - and it's as if you never wrote the book at all.

Again, unless you're writing, like, a Batman novel, you never sell your rights. Publishers sometimes try to buy those from novice authors only because those easily might be inexperiened enough to not understand the consequences.

>>3
>>4
you are some rare scientific case study and you have some undiscovered neurobiological abnormality.

>>5
What? Why? Could you perchance be talking about questionable english or something? It's not my first language, you picky fag.

>>3
>>4
OP here. It all sound good so far. The book is nearly finished, and this is the sort of advice I was looking for. In dealing with ownership rights, is there anything I need to do to protect my work before I take it to a publisher? Aside from not selling authorship right, do I need something akin to a copyright or something like that? I want to make sure to protect my work as best I can.