Other than "Where do you get your ideas" the questions any publishing writer hears most frequently from those who want to publish are "How do you get an agent" and "how do you make contact with people in the world of publishing?"
The tone in which these questions are asked is often bewilderment, and sometimes chagrined, and frequently angry. There is a commonly-held suspicion that most newcomers who actually succeed in getting their books published broke through because they had an in, a contact, a rabbi in the business. The underdogs assumption is that publishing is just one big, happy, incestuously closed family.