Proposals -- Editorial Changes.

I work very hard on the proposals -- writing the chapters, explaining the world and plot in the synopsis.

Then comes the pitching and the selling and the negotiating, all taken care of my by wonderful agent, Deidre Knight.

But the last negotiations have made me skittish. I'm afraid I will sell my trilogy or series and then get into the writing of it and have it changed. This happens, and it happens a lot.

What do you do? You either go along with the changes or argue (have your agent argue hard) about the changes. If you can't come to an agreement, you give the advance money back -- and may get a reputation in the business for being hard to work with. In the best of cases, the changes will make a better book/series, sometimes they don't. In any event, when requests for changes happen, they take time to process (at least for me) and work on, if you have to scrap what you've done and do something else...I had problems with the very tight deadlines the last few years.

I don't want to write proposals, sell them, then be told to rework the whole thing... in essence, give up my vision of the story.

So, my strategy now is to do the work, submit it to my agent to read and comment about (if she doesn't think it will sell, I'll just toss it and start over with something else). Then we will talk and I'll tell her of my fears, see what we can do to minimize my concerns.

But be aware this happens, and be aware how flexible you can be, and when/whether you are able to walk away from a project or publisher.

May you know your limitations,
Robin