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?

>>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.