Find a way to drum up interest in your game before launching it. If you can get press and fans and buzz publishers will come to you or you won't need them at all. There are many examples of this including Kickstarter, YouTube, press blogs/sites etc.

Don't worry about competing with studios or being cloned, those are just fantasies.

Brace yourself for the extremely likely possibility that you're going to have to make a lot of games, each of which you think are "The One", before you make one that anybody cares about at all.