I wanted to follow up on what Andrew said about the book publishing industry. I also kind of hate traditional publishing, for my own selfish (but still valid!) reasons. I wrote a book a few years ago that was basically a comical gay travel memoir of Tokyo. After finishing a first draft of the manuscript, I jumped through all the typical hoops: got an agent, wrote a fat book proposal, revised till my nose bled, this, that, the other. Ultimately, after several years of trying, my agent was unable to sell it because, even when editors were interested - and we did have a few big pubs on the line  -the marketing departments would always veto its acquisition because they didn't know how to market the thing (which I found completely laughable). Basically I needed to already be famous, then marketing could work its magic.

My agent - who did yeoman's work on the manuscript and really functioned more as an editor - finally gave up and I moved on to my next project, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there definitely was an audience for the book, so I self-published.