With publishing, whether or not you get accepted or rejected is often not at all based on talent, but on marketing. Publishers often won't take a work, even if it's wonderful, unless you already have a large audience of people who are guaranteed to buy it. Otherwise, the publisher is taking a big risk on you. Great things don't always sell well.
As someone from the writing/publishing field, I can tell you that people are often impressed by a work, but see that you don't have a large following, and decide, "nah."
So much of it is also luck - your entry may end up going to either someone who likes it or doesn't, contingent only upon which intern it gets sent to, who happens to be in the office that day, etc.
This is why the internet is wonderful. In the past, getting an arbitrary rejection would have meant "oh well, now it's over. Basically no one will see my work, because no one will publish it." That's no longer true. We live in a time where we can share our stuff with a few clicks.
Publishing here is a wonderful thing, and as you gather fans here on Tapastic or elsewhere on the internet, your odds of getting accepted by other publishers only go up. 
