The manuscript of your novel is very precious, even though if it is published it will represent the lowest paid hourly rate you have ever earned in your life (until you write the next one).
Those 200 – 300 pages contain a world that didn’t exist until you invented it. You may have written about the street outside your front door, but it is still a new world because no one else has written about it in the way you have. And no one will.
A novel grows out of imagination, frustration and sheer bloody-minded won’t-give-up-ness.

So, with all that invested in it, you want to find it a home. You want to see it in print. But there are publishing enterprises in existence with the sole aim of exploiting that need and writers have good reason to be wary of a company they have never heard of who appear…