Are publishers more useful to fiction authors? There is a great deal of work to be done in turning what the author creates into something the public buy and I s

Are publishers more useful to fiction authors? There is a great deal of work to be done in turning what the author creates into something the public buy and I suspect it may be qualitatively different for technical manuals and fiction. Charles Stross (of Laundry Files and Merchant Princes fame) has some excellent words about this on his blog (www.antipope.org, look over at the right sidebar on his blog) where he describes and discusses the significant amount of work done by his publishers.