What is a good publishing company in or around Florida?

If you work for a publishing company, can they fire you for publishing a novel with another publishing company?

• So, if you're employed by one publisher and you submit a novel, short story, etc. to a different, competing publishing company, and they decide to publish it, could the company that you work for fire you because you're sort of helping out the competition?

• Answer:

  In theory, I suppose that could happen, but I've never heard of it. Whether they could do it depends on your contract of employment and the relevant laws where you work. Some states or countries allow employers to fire workers without notice, for any reason, or no reason at all. Other places are a bit saner. Some employment contracts say that the employee isn't allowed to work for anyone else, or not without the employer's permission. Some contracts say that anything the employee creates while working for the company belongs to the company, but usually this is restricted to stuff that relates to the company's current or anticipated future business. (So if the company publishes only school textbooks, and you write a crime thriller, it's no good to them, so you couldn't hurt them by publishing it somewhere else.) I suppose if what you've written is something the company might be interested in, it would be courteous to give them first refusal. Note that authors are not normally considered employees of the publisher, and so cannot be fired in the conventional sense. The interaction between the author and the publisher is governed only by the contract between them. If the author's contract doesn't forbid him from sending a new book to a different publisher, he can do that. (It's not recommended, though, because it will annoy his current publisher.) Now, if the company *can* fire you, *would* they? Possibly not, because if you were clever about it, you could turn it into free publicity for your book - thus helping their competition even more.