As an aside, I find that thanks to online web fiction and self publishing I found some works I really enjoyed but probably would never have been published by any publisher... I think that whenever you have gatekeepers like this, they can get a bit too conservative and tend to only accept work that is similar to successful works.
For example,
An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom http://www.meilinmiranda.com/intimate-history An erotic (but not the main focus) coming of age story in a victorian world.
It's really good and original, but it mixes so many genres and is so different from what I'm used to that I wouldn't expect any mainstream publisher to publish it...
The other big example of this is some works of fanfiction like Eliezer's Yudkowski Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is popular here... It would never be published because it's fanfiction but it's original and is quite different from what I'm normally used to by mainstream publishers...
For example, An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom http://www.meilinmiranda.com/intimate-history An erotic (but not the main focus) coming of age story in a victorian world. It's really good and original, but it mixes so many genres and is so different from what I'm used to that I wouldn't expect any mainstream publisher to publish it...
The other big example of this is some works of fanfiction like Eliezer's Yudkowski Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is popular here... It would never be published because it's fanfiction but it's original and is quite different from what I'm normally used to by mainstream publishers...