Writing

It's my experience that those authors who are most paranoid about someone "stealing" their ideas are the ones least likely to be taken seriously by publishers and agents.

Publishing is not Hollywood. I've never heard of a single "idea" being swiped, and then assigned to a professional writer who must then devote the next year to writing an entire novel based on an idea that's not even his own. Most novelists have more book ideas than they have time to write; the last thing they want is to be "assigned" an idea made up by someone else.

When an agent/editor gets a manuscript with the "copyright" symbol on the front, they know from the get-go that the writer is a rank amateur.