Here are some examples of executives acting as editors.
- The Adventures of Pinocchio: The book was supposed to end with Pinocchio getting killed off for being a "bad little boy". Carlo Collodi's editor forced it so that Pinocchio was saved from death, and 20 more chapters were written.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses received this in regards to the marketing. Sarah J. Maas stated in a 2019 panel that she never really intended for the books to be labelled Young Adult, especially because of the sexual content, but that at the time the series began publication the New Adult labelnote hadn't really caught on and so the books were published as YA. Maas said she agreed to this on the condition none of the sex scenes would be censored. From A Court of Silver Flames onwards, the books are no longer marketed as YA (although they do still pop up in the teen section from time to time).
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Spoofed In-Universe. Greg's comic strip Creighton the Cretin is edited so that instead of the character eating his math test, Creighton the Curious Student is asking the teacher a math problem and staying to visit during office hours.
- Flowers for Algernon: One editor demanded of Daniel Keyes that the story have a happy ending. Every writer Keyes asked about it told him to refuse.
- Forgotten Realms is an extensive setting full of characterization and many-layered intrigues clashing with each other. So of course, it needed editors acting like hippos in a glass shop.
- Spellfire became infamous for editor-carnage, leaving many plot threads ripped apart and dangling and characters looking like idiots or jerkasses.
- Double Diamond Triangle Saga: The idea of nine books that can be read in different orders was interesting, but ran into the ground at supersonic speed. How long do you think authors were given to sync all possible criss-crossing plots and write it? Read a little revelation from Ed Greenwood's spokeslady
. And if he is given this much care... - In an odd case, TSR told R.A. Salvatore to bring back Wulfgar or they would do have someone else do it for them. What makes it odd is that Drizzt was clearly the breakout hit character, with Wulfgar as a mostly unneeded sidekick. Salvatore did the best he could, though, and in the end got some good stories out of it and wrote the character out again (this time much as he had written out the barbarian tribes the character belonged to shortly after the character's "death").
- In another case, Salvatore was told that he would have to kill off Artemis Entreri, as the game was eliminating the assassin class and all assassins in the setting were going to be killed off as part of a ritual to empower the dark god Bane. Salvatore, not wanting to lose a good character, countered that Entreri wasn't an "assassin", but a fighter/thief who killed people for money. TSR backed off. (Later, Wizards brought back assassins as a prestige class for 3rd Edition. Entreri had one level in it.)
- Thornhold was supposed to be the first book of its own series, not glued to Songs and Swords on the side. So when it was shut off, many a Sequel Hook was left dangling in midair and readers screamed "Arr!" Elaine Cunningham later used short stories for "Best of the Realms" to close at least a few of them.
- Neil Gaiman:
- "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" is about executive meddling, plus truly epic amounts of Adaptation Decay. A writer is called in to Hollywood to work on a film adaptation of his hit novel, Sons of Man, which is a speculative story about Charles Manson being possessed by a demon, and the children he sired of the women in the Manson Family coming under the power of said demon, with a sole daughter he had trying to stop them. By the time the ever-changing Hollywood executives are done with it, it's a slasher plot called When we were Badd about a serial killer named Jack Badd who possessed a video game after execution and possessed the kids who played it, with the now-male protagonist saving the day by burning the electric chair the killer was executed in.
- It ends with the writer's offhand quote of Nick Lowe's song "I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll" being taken out of context and used as the plot for a completely different movie about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. At that point he gives up and goes home.
- Gaiman has a long history of Hollywood stresses: in addition to the Jon Peters run at Sandman (resulting in what Neil described as "the worst script I've ever read"), he was approached with regard to an adaptation of Anansi Boys. Y'know, the book where the main characters are the children of African deity Anansi, and thus they (and a lot of their acquaintances) are black. The first question asked was apparently: "Is there any way we can make them white?"
- Writers in the Star Wars Expanded Universe have editors going over work and vetoing what they don't think fits into canon. Some of them... aren't all that bright. Timothy Zahn, in a panel summarized here, complains about editors claiming that R-2 can't fly Luke's X-wing in Specter of the Past."So," Zahn said, with absolutely the driest expression and tone of voice you ever saw, "I pointed out that way back in Heir to the Empire , Artoo flew the X-wing to Coruscant on his own. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.' Okay, in ESB, one of your own movies, Luke's X-wing was inside the Hoth base, but Luke meets it outside. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.' Then later in the movie, Luke tells Artoo, "No thanks, I'll keep it on manual for a while." Manual indicates that there must be an automatic. 'But Artoo can't fly the X-wing.'"
"Finally," he said, "I figured out what it was that bothered them. It wasn't Artoo flying the X-wing; it was his docking the ship with the Starry Ice without the aid of tractors." He added exactly three words to the existing scene, with Faughn now telling Luke that the Starry Ice had a pair of half-ports "with tractor assists". The editors were happy, and all was well.- One that did work out was that Lucasfilm shot down Timothy Zahn's original name for the Noghri which was Sith, to explain why Darth Vader was known as the Lord of the Sith. The reason, of course, was that Zahn didn't realize that George Lucas already had something very different in mind for the meaning of that title.
- In the New Jedi Order novel series, Anakin Solo was killed halfway through at the insistence of George Lucas. Lucas had decided that since there were prequel-era novels starring Anakin Skywalker being published at the same time, and Anakin Solo was set to be the main hero of the second half of the NJO story, readers would be confused by both eras having a main character with the same first name.note
- Legendarily, Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land was pared for both size and content to meet publisher demands. Thankfully, the editing was done meticulously by Heinlein himself, so the novel came out more or less as intended. Following his death, the unedited version was released by Heinlein's widow.
- During his years of writing "juveniles" (what we'd call "young adult" novels) Heinlein had to put up with endless meddling from his editor, Alice Dalgleish. She was concerned that his books wouldn't sell to librarians, and made endless unwanted requests for changes.
- Harry Potter:
- The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was retitled ... and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States. Executives argued that kids "wouldn't want to read anything with 'philosopher' in the title". Some even argued that Americans wouldn't know what a philosopher was.
- The British publisher did their own meddling on the first book. They were the ones who insisted the author go by J. K. Rowling since it was felt boys wouldn't want to read a book written by a woman. They also wanted to cut the troll scene where Harry and Ron save Hermione.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was originally meant to have more information on Voldemort and his past as Tom Riddle to help set up later books. Rowling's editor had these sections removed. While this information was eventually delivered in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it resulted in COS having the least connections to the series' Myth Arc while HBP was very heavy on the exposition.
- Lindsey Davis's Falco novels suffered similar fates of Americanization, or would have, had she not been adamant. See here for her very funny article about it all. Read "A Gentle Corny Rant" on this page.
- Terry Goodkind's book Wizard's First Rule had at least one instance of the use of the titular rule scratched out by the editor. Maybe it was for the better, since we all know where it went from there...
- The final book in the third Warrior Cats series had its name changed from Cruel Season to Sunrise because HarperCollins felt the original title was too sad and not appropriate for the younger readers. Not only does this cause a lot of confusion with the final book of the second series (Sunset), but changing the title still doesn't change the fact that the book is sad. Not to mention how earlier books have dark names like A Dangerous Path, The Darkest Hour, and Long Shadows. To make things even more mindboggling, the authors were allowed to use the phrase "cruel season" in the blurb of the very next book.
- In something of a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, the Andalites of Animorphs were originally Rubber-Forehead Aliens, to make it easier on the inevitable TV series. However, Scholastic asked for a more imaginative approach, resulting in this design.◊ It also led to just about every alien looking bizarre. Unfortunately, Applegate was proven right, when the TV series only featured Andalites a few times a season with laughably bad animatronics.
- Umberto Eco once wrote a humorous piece, "Editorial Revision", about (fictitious) editorial changes for the better in famous literary works; for example, "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot originally started like this: "April is the cruellest month. And March isn't all that great, either." note
- In a minor example, Jim Butcher originally wanted to call the first book of The Dresden Files Semiautomagic. For whatever reason, the editor or publisher didn't like it, and so he called it Storm Front instead, creating the trend of two word titles with each word having the same number of letters.
- His original proposed title for the thirteenth novel was Dead, but this was rejected on account of being a Spoiler Title. He eventually went with the more ambiguous Ghost Story instead.
- Book fourteen was originally going to be titled Winter Knight, echoing book four, Summer Knight. Concerns of potential confusion between the two books as well as the similarly named White Night led to the title being changed to Cold Days.
- Butcher had initially planned for the necromancers of Dead Beat to show up in the 8th novel, after the events of Proven Guilty. As the 7th book was the first to be released in hardback, his publisher strongly urged him to include something "truly spectacular" in it, so he switched those two novels' events and brought the zombie tyrannosaur out early. A rare case where Executive Meddling delighted the fans.
- This also led to Waldo Butters becoming an Ascended Extra. As originally planned, Molly Carpenter would have been Harry's sidekick in Dead Beat, having been apprenticed to him at the end of Proven Guilty. With the two books being switched around, there was no way to work Molly into the plot, so Butcher brought in Butters to fill the role of well-meaning but inept Action Survivor Harry has to look out for and explain things to. Butters would go on to become an important character and fan favorite in later books.
- Isaac Asimov's "What Is This Thing Called Love?": Word of God comes from Nightfall and Other Stories, that the last three paragraphs of this story were written by Cele Goldsmith, the magazine editor. Since they were improvements over his original lines, her lines are kept for future collections. (Her title, however, wasn't kept. Dr Asimov usually hated the Publisher-Chosen Title whenever they were changed on him.)
- Jules Verne is often said to be actually created by his publisher and editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne struggled for so long to find someone willing to publish his work that he originally eagerly agreed to most of Hetzel's requests — of which there were a lot, because while Verne was deeply convinced that Humans Are Bastards and tended to write bleak, somber works, Hetzel was an equally firm believer in that Rousseau Was Right and reedited them (or at least required Verne do do it by himself) to be Lighter and Softer. Just compare Verne's early novels, and his later output after Hetzel died and he got Protection from Editors.
- In another example, Verne initially planned for Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to be a Polish aristocrat who was fighting Russians after his family was killed by Russian soldiers during the ill-fated January Uprising. Hetzel feared that this might cause diplomatic problems because Russia was allied with France at the time, not to mention the potential loss of profits, as Verne was HUGE in Russia at the time.note With the Franco-Prussian War looming on the horizon, Verne was persuaded to make Nemo a mysterious stranger fighting the British and later, in The Mysterious Island, he revealed him to be an Indian prince while retaining the same motivation (family lost during the brutal quelling of Indian Uprising). Of course, future readers have had no problem with this change, and as Britain and France were natural enemies at the time, Verne was not afraid of offending British readers.
- The German publisher Aufbau Verlag loves meddling with their translations of classics. Most glaring example is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables - from somewhat about 1400 pages (in original length of the German translation) they left about 900. They cut out Valjean's theft on Petit Gervais, several of his My God, What Have I Done? moments, a good chunk of Marius's backstory, the characterization of several important minor characters... and also quite a few of Hugo's Author Tracts.
- The Twilight Saga was originally supposed to be two books long, going straight from Twilight to Breaking Dawn, which at that time had the working title of Forever Dawn. It was Stephenie Meyer's editor who suggested that Bella's senior year be drawn out, resulting in New Moon and Eclipse. (It was also suggested that Forever Dawn was "inappropriate" for Young Adult audiences.)
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was subjected to this by Doubleday. The original edition published by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason was singularly focused on the hell the main characters, an immigrant family, go through because they are poor, are not fluent in English, and because the businessmen run everything and was obviously meant to make readers see the horrors of wage slavery. Doubleday, however, was a corporation, and it therefore didn't take too kindly to The Jungle's criticism of corporations and the ways in which they exploited their workers. They forced him to make the family less ethnic, amend some passages so that their lives were not so unfair, and make the passages about the tainted food more graphic. Most people read Doubleday's edition and they were singularly focused on the unsanitary conditions of the factories making food products and the book is now taught as an exposure of the corruption that led to tainted food. The only hint that American history textbooks will give as to the disparity between Sinclair's intentions and the public's response is his quote "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach."
- In probably one of the most heinous examples, L.J. Smith was fired from writing her own series. The article speculates that this was because they didn't like the romantic pairing she was planning on going with in the ending, but no reason has been officially given. Shipping: Serious Business.
- This is why there are two versions of Stephen King's The Stand. The publisher thought it was too long and asked him to cut it down. Granted, a few scenes, like 'the Zoo' and the gay rape scene between The Kid and Trashcan Man would never have flown in the seventies, but other stuff was just seen as making the story too long. He put back much of the cut material (save a few parts he thought belonged cut) back in for the Complete Uncut edition.
- King's Night Shift anthology was a collection of 21 short stories when it was submitted for publication. King's publishers told him the collection was "too unwieldy" and insisted that one of the stories be cut. King took the advice of his editor and eliminated "Suffer the Little Children." (Legend has it that "The Cat From Hell" was also originally a part of Night Shift, but this is apocryphal.)
- James Gurney's third Dinotopia book, 'First Flight', is different from the others because the publishers wanted it targeted toward younger children than the other books. It didn't go over well with the fans and had some plot problems.
- Weirdly there was a reverse when Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was released in America. The publishers removed the final chapter when Alex redeems himself and decides to "grow up" and changed it to a much darker ending. They believed it would be more realistic and that US audiences would prefer that. So in this case it was a happy ending being changed into an unhappy ending. This has led to endless debates over which version of the book is better (the one with chapter 21 or the one without it).
- Ender's Game provides an in-universe example: in order to train Ender to be an excellent commander, his teachers slant the odds against him in every single way possible. They start by making him commander of Dragon Army, which had been discontinued due to how awfully it did in the games, and give him an army of total newbies who have never fought before in their lives. To add on to this, they give him a mere three weeks to train his army instead of the usual three months, and once training is over, they make him fight a battle every day instead of one every two weeks, and when that doesn't break him, they give him two battles every day. Ender, being who he is, manages to overcome every obstacle and even top the leader boards with standings never thought possible. This hits its peak when they put a giant barricade in front of his entrance into the battle area (preventing him from seeing the rest of the arena) and pitting him against two armies at once. After he manages to beat that, they transfer every single toon leader (leaders of mini armies inside the main army) to another army. This doesn't matter, as Ender was transferred to command school directly afterwards.
- In a case of executive meddling gone right, editors persuaded Derek Landy not to kill off Tanith Low in the first Skulduggery Pleasant novel due to her further potential as a character to develop and to act as a mentor to Stephanie in ways Skulduggery perhaps couldn't be. Landy got his revenge, agreeing to keep her alive for book 2 on the condition that for every book she lives he gets to torture her.
- The Lord of the Rings was actually the result of Executive Meddling. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien was asked to write a sequel. His first choice was the tales of the Elder Days he had been working on in various states of development since World War I, and would eventually become The Silmarillion. His publisher, however, insisted that the new story have more about hobbits. The end result was reediting The Hobbit to fit it into Middle-earth and connect it to the larger Legendarium, and the writing of the defining work of modern Epic Fantasy.
- Editors also broke up Tolkien's original single massive work into three volumes for economic reasons. Three-volume novels date back to Georgian times, but these were single novels broken up due to technical limitations regarding the physical thickness of books.
- Editors were frequently trying to correct the language used by Dashiell Hammett and Black Mask were actually censoring perfectly innocuous phrases like "Gooseberry Lay," which meant something like stealing washing from washing lines.
- Hammett put that phrase in on purpose, guessing - correctly - that the censors would zero in on it and overlook "gunsel", which means a gay man.
- Alfred Knopf kept trying to change Raymond Chandler's titles, Farewell, My Lovely in particular.
- James Ellroy's publishers asked to cut his 900 page White Jazz in half. Their intention was, presumably, that he cut a couple of subplots, and not, as he did, take out pretty much all words that weren't absolutely vital to understanding the sentence, resulting in a quick, telegraph-like staccato style, for example, "Time revoked/fever dreams-I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget. Pictures keep the woman young. L.A., fall 1958. Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events-so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down-the story stays dispersed.".
- The reason they wanted Ellroy to cut down his page length was because they felt he, with eight books and high praise for The Black Dahlia, wasn't a big enough name to justify a 900-page book.
- Mare was written due to the Norwegian tax system giving Eliassen 2 million Norwegian kroner in taxes. Due to executive meddling the first book was split into 3 (as the best book series are trilogies apparently), as well as a more rushed story ending with an Cliffhanger, unresolved sub plots, and a balant self-insert Author Avatar who works as a Deus ex Machina as well as reminding the reader what happened in the previous book. The story is pretty much an allegory for the poor treatment Norwegian authors receives.
- Executive meddling helped authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for the better. The two had presented their publisher with an alien invasion novel in which the invaders strike Earth with an asteroid in order to soften up humanity. The publisher insisted that the asteroid impact would make a great story all on its own and that while alien invasions were a dime-a-dozen, he'd pay big bucks for the asteroid story. So they went back home, removed the alien invasion, and came back later with the novel Lucifer's Hammer. They eventually published the alien invasion story as Footfall.
- Publisher Scholastic Books forbid K. A. Applegate from explicitly stating that Tate was lesbian in Applegate's Remnants.
- John W. Campbell Jr, editor of Astounding/Analog SF magazine, was famous for working with his authors, often demanding full rewrites that even the authors had to admit improved the stories.
- Campbell pointed out to Isaac Asimov that some of his stories implied the Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov hadn't actually realised himself.
- He also pointed out to Robert A. Heinlein that his stories formed a "Future History," although Heinlein didn't care for the term as a label for his work. It probably helped as well that Campbell was an established sci-fi author himself, having written Who Goes There? (the basis for The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter's The Thing), and therefore knew what he was doing, making this something like an Averted trope.
- Campbell's most infamous author-editor exchange was The Cold Equations. He wouldn't publish it unless it ended with the girl's death.
- He was also famous for not allowing blacks to be main characters in any story he published, refusing a story by award-winning Samuel Delaney (who is black) on the grounds that it had an African-American hero, and blacks are naturally mentally inferior to whites. He also would not allow any work which showed a woman being mentally superior to a man, or aliens (from other planets) being superior to humanity.
- Donald Hamilton wrote a thriller in which the protagonist was killed at the end. His editor suggested revising it so that the character lived, and making a series out of it. The book was Death of a Citizen, and the protagonist was Matt Helm, which became a successful long-running series.
- Papillon first draft was a compilation of tales about inmates trying to escape the French Guiana penal colony during the Thirties and The '40s. The publisher convinced Henri Charrière (former prisoner of the French penal colony himself) to rewrite the text as an autobiography, making him becoming an Unreliable Narrator.
- The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant experienced some of this, as outlined by the author in various questions on his Gradual Interview. Much of it turned out positive; some, not so much.
- Donaldson's original title for the first book was Foul's Ritual. At the prompting of his editor Lester del Rey, it was changed to the more striking Lord Foul's Bane.
- Initially, the second book (The Illearth War) contained a lengthy section from the point of view of one of the Bloodguard. Del Rey told Donaldson to remove the section, as such a substantial subplot from the viewpoint of a native of the Land wreaked havoc with the ambiguity of whether the Land was real or not. When he realized what he'd done, Donaldson apparently agreed wholeheartedly (though the cut section remains available on his website).
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant was originally supposed to be four books and the title of the first was Sunbane. Del Rey convinced Donaldson to cut it down to a trilogy (like the First Chronicles) and came up with a new title for book one (The Wounded Land).
- A case of executive meddling that failed involved Del Rey becoming upset that the Second Chronicles were revolving less and less around Covenant's own POV and more around new protagonist Linden Avery's. When confronted about it, Del Rey's reasoning was that you couldn't do good worldbuilding with a female narrator... for some reason. Considering that Linden's arc was at least as important (if not more so) than Covenant's in the Second Chronicles, Donaldson fought for this one, and ended up getting moved to another editor who let him keep Linden as the primary POV character.
- When A.S. Byatt's novel Possession was brought to the U.S., her publisher insisted that she cut sections of description and poetry and asked her to add sex scenes. Byatt refused, giving in to only one demand: a longer and more effusive description of the hero, intended to make him more attractive to American readers.
- That story also has an In-Universe example of this: Mortimer Cropper's biography of R.H. Ash reads more like Cropper's own autobiography. And averted: James Blackadder, as a young man, was trained by a spiteful English professor to believe that his own ideas and opinions were worthless. As the editor of Ash's Complete Works, Blackadder allows only background information that can be reliably sourced.
- Also from the literary-fiction field, the first version of Raymond Carver's short story "A Small, Good Thing" was heavily edited by Gordon Lish (infamous for this sort of thing) to a shorter version with much sparer prose and an Ambiguous Ending, then published as "The Bath." Later Carver's original was published. There's an ongoing debate as to which version is better.
- Justified with Toni L.P. Kelner's Where Are They Now? Mysteries. The original book was released in hardcover by one publishing company under the title Without Mercy, but when she switched publishers to Berkley Prime Crime for the paperback reprint and sequels, they'd recently published a different book under that name and, to avoid confusion, retitled Kelner's book to Curse of the Kissing Cousins.
- Happened a few times with The Railway Series:
- Publishers Edmund Ward agreed to release the first book The Three Railway Engines on the condition that Rev. W Awdry add another fourth story, that would not only offer a Happy Ending for Henry where he is unbricked from his tunnel but also have him interact with the two engines from the other stories. This was a positive case of the trope, as this not only gave the young children's novel a far less startlingly bleak climax, but also set up a consistent railway for a lot of Worldbuilding in future entries.
- Naturally following the popularity of its adaptation Thomas & Friends, later publishers urged Christopher Awdry to make more entries revolved around Breakout Character, Thomas. Awdry sometimes loopholed around this by giving Thomas title billing but only giving him a slyly minimal role, though some entries such as More About Thomas the Tank Engine were made specifically so the TV series had more Thomas-centric material to adapt.
- We have a Sandokan saga instead of a Tremal Naik saga because reprints of The Tigers of Mompracem had outsold The Mystery of the Black Jungle by a fair margin, so the publisher asked Salgari to bring Sandokan back.
- Monster of the Month Club: Positive example - book 1 was originally intended to be a standalone, but the publisher asked for sequels, enough to cover the complete year.
- Even novelizations of lowbrow films can be afflicted by this, as told by Yvonne Navarro: in her website's excerpt for the Species II novel, she says some "television exec who thought (emphasize that word, please) she was a writer" decided to fiddle with the manuscript, adding typos and awkward sentences that in spite of Navarro's protests ended up in the published book, though she notes that the editor only had time to tamper with the first half of the novel.
- In the original ending for Fantastic Mr. Fox, the animals got their food by robbing a local supermarket. The publishers refused to use this ending and Roald Dahl's assistant suggested that he change it, so they instead get food by stealing from the farmers who tormented them throughout the novel, a suggestion which Roald agreed was better than his planned ending.
