Will a Literary Agent or Publisher Steal Your Idea?

A pretty common fear among aspiring authors is that if they pitch their book to a literary agent or publisher, that person will steal their idea. They either avoid querying, or they write “copyright” all over their manuscript, which immediately makes them look like an amateur. (More on that one in a moment.)

There are plenty of things to worry about in this world, but this type of theft isn’t one of them.

I’m not going to say it could never, ever happen, but if you’re submitting to reputable companies, it’s extraordinarily unlikely.

If you don’t know who is reputable, grab my free Epic Guide to Literary Agencies and Publishers.

Here’s why reputable agents and publishers are not going to steal from you.

They can’t steal it wholesale because you can show that you wrote it and submitted it. By writing it, you automatically own the copyright to those words. (Not the ideas, that would require a patent.)
Even if they loved your idea, why would they want to steal it? If they like the book, it would be far easier to just buy it from you. That’s the business they’re in. Penguin Random House doesn’t write books, they publish books by authors.
No, they don’t want to steal your book and have someone else rewrite it. If they loved your story but didn’t think your writing was up to snuff, they’d encourage you to team up with a ghostwriter. There’s a whole business around that, and in fact, there are agents who only represent ghostwriters because publishers come to them with books that need writing or rewriting.
If you’re worried that agents or editors are aspiring writers themselves, which is occasionally the case, you definitely don’t have to worry about them stealing your idea. The first reason is that if they’re at all worth their salt as a writer, they have far more ideas than they’d ever have the time or energy to write themselves. Second, it takes a lot of time, heart, and passion to write a good book, so if they’ve been in this business for five minutes, they’ll know they couldn’t do as good a job with someone else’s idea as they could with their own.

Where there is room for concern

Freelance writers can get burned

What is true, is that unfortunately this occasionally happens to freelance writers pitching articles, but even then, it’s rare enough that not pitching stories because of it would be like never leaving your house because you might get into an accident. To make a living as a writer, you’re going to have to put your ideas out there and trust other people to help on their end.

Pirates gonna pirate

If you publish a blog post, article, book or anything else, whether through a big media company, traditional publisher, or your own blog or self-publishing company, the pirates will likely find you. These may be individual people stealing your book, changing a few words and republishing it under their name. Or it might be a site that gathers everyone’s books and claims to give them away free as PDFs. They’ve done this with my book! The goal with that scam is really just to install a virus on that person’s computer. Well, they deserve it if they’re trying to steal our books, right?

Why writing Copyright on your manuscript won’t help (and could hurt).

You already have the copyright to your words, even if you don’t announce it
Your ideas alone don’t fall under copyright laws anyway
Agents and publishers will see you as an amateur
Using those words won’t stop pirates, especially because most won’t be in your home country’s jurisdiction