@Fyrius: I know several published authors and several editors. Your advice presupposes that quality is the reason books get published. Frankly, it’s not. The book has to be good enough, but it also has to come to the attention of an editor who likes it enough to finish reading it and thinks it will sell more copies than all the other books that s/he has liked enough to finish reading.
And then there’s the crapshoot of just getting an editor to notice it in the first place. Google for “slush pile photos”—each one of those manila envelopes has a book in it that someone thinks is good enough to submit to an author, and the editor or the editor’s assistant needs to evaluate each and every one of them. Nine-tenths are going to be sent back with a form letter saying “This does not meet our needs at this time, but please try again!”—not necessarily because that is true, but because that also covers “I’m swamped and don’t have time to read this” and “We have already found all the books we can afford to publish next year, and we don’t have time to spend second-guessing our decisions.”
I have already found several published books about which I can say “This is complete crap. I can do better than this.” That doesn’t make me any more realistic about the chances of a hypothetical novel actually making it to an editor’s desk, let alone getting considered for publication.
And I’m glad the work itself is motivation for you. It isn’t for me.