Thread by @Delafina777

There was at least one, and IIRC multiple, freelancers we stopped using at Paizo because they didn't understand this and went on public rants about how the developer changed their Precious Words.

https://twitter.com/bananachangames/status/1396852821958475778

That's how work-for-hire works. You write a thing, you get paid, and then the company that paid you gets to (more or less) do what they want with it.

Tangential to this is that you're not actually directly supporting the author when you buy a book that's been written as work-for-hire (as most freelance writing in TTRPGs is). They've been paid already, and aren't getting royalties.

It can be indirectly helpful to them in that if their book sells well, the company is likely to keep giving them freelance, but it's not putting money in their pocket.

If you're really upset with changes the company made to your writing, you can sometimes have your name pulled from the credits, but that can be hard. Often you don't see what changes were made until you get your contributor copy, at which point it's in print already.

And the publisher often makes significant changes for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.

At Paizo, we had really strict templating for books. A book had a certain number of full-page pieces of art (usually maps), a number of half-pagers, and...

...a number of pieces of spot art. Each of those came with a templated word count for that page, and the number of pages was already set.

So if you got assigned to write, say, a castle for the Castles book, your word count was very set. It's going to be this many pages, it's going to have one half-pager and one piece of spot art, so this is how many words.

*However* there's still copyfitting. Paizo's style was that unless it was a final column in a chapter/section, all the text had to go all the way to the bottom of the page.

And sometimes that required significant tweaking, especially around spot art.

So developers end up spending a significant amount of time either deleting anything from a few words to entire paragraphs, or adding them, to make it fit.

Which means your favorite little writerly detail might get cut just because a monster used as spot art had a long tail that extended into the text column.

Or, sometimes, a piece of art comes back and isn't what the developer wanted, and it's too late to get another. So art gets shifted around. So your section might lose a half page, or gain one.

And the developer cuts or writes to fill.

Sometimes the developers have to change direction on one section, which means significant changes to others that are connected to it.

Sometimes the art comes back and is completely different from what the developer expected, but they still have to use it, so your monster gets rewritten to be completely different.

Heck, entire sections of adventures can be created to explain art.

There are a million reasons why developers might change your writing after you turn it in, and only some of them are commentary on the quality, and whether you like it or not, that's how work-for-hire works. You don't own your writing.