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It's like job applications. If you're trying to get a job in a tough economy, you'll need to apply for a lot of jobs before you get one, unless you're lucky or really, really good (and also hit the right place on your first try). J.K. Rowling is like the person with the specialized skillset who has to apply to a dozen places before they find one that needs what they can do. Joe Schmoe shopping around his multi-hundred-thousand-word collection of conspiracy theories and strange injections of fantasy is like the guy with no marketable skills at all and questionable personal hygiene who keeps applying for executive-level jobs, and is never going to get one if he applies for a hundred years.
Vanity presses talk about how few books are ever published by the mainstream publishers, conveniently leaving out one thing: those books are not selected at random. The most important part is entirely under the author's control: writing a book that doesn't suck. Unfortunately, few people (and not even all of the pros all of the time) are capable of doing that.
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