With the large increase of books being published by self-publishers, and the up-rise of print on demand, there is still a lot of death taking place in the publishing industry. In the United States, over 291,920 books were published in 2006, per Bowker.
The business of publishing is old world, mature, and has changed only incrementally over the past fifty years. One thing that can be said about publishing is that the biggest companies lead and the rest tend to follow.
Before you write your first sentence there are a number of important decisions that you must make. You can still start off by asking yourself what kind of book do I want to write? And what category or genre will it fit into? If you are not sure about where you want to go with your book it may be a good idea to obtain a list of subjects that are available and popular
In the years since I've been in publishing I can't even count on one hand how many myths I've heard or how many of them have been pushed on unknowing authors.