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Originally Posted by Nate the great
And there is a good chance he would have refused. He had a dedication to the story that came before profits.
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Maybe he'd have refused. He was writing for a living. There will be the battle between what the author wants to do and what the publisher wants to do, and sometimes the publisher wins. The author wants to sell the book...
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One of my copies of "Podkayne of Mars" is a paperback, and it includes both the ending he wrote as well as the ending that was originally published. Did you know that he killed off Podkayne?
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Yes. I've known that for a long time, from well before the revised edition came out. Scribner's asked the ending be revised to have Poddy live, because they though her dying was too dark for the audience they aimed at. RAH grumbled, because he thought having Poddy live undercut the point he was making, but he complied. He
was writing for a
living, and wanted to sell more to that publisher.
Very few authors are in a position to reject an editorial request for changes. They
can, and then try to sell the book elsewhere, but it might not sell elsewhere, and might PO the editor and make it harder to sell to that house again.
The trick is to make sure you and the editor are on the same page about what the book will be, so nothing in the revision letter will come as an unpleasant surprise like "Change the ending!".
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The book also has a personal letter in which he explains why he killed her. I'd quote it to you, but I don't have it (my teenage brother is reading it).
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I suspect you have the Baen PB release, where they garnered a fair bit of criticism by having their readers vote on which ending they should use: the one Heinlein originally wrote, or the one that got published.
Mind you, Heinlein brings Poddy back (though he doesn't name her) at the end of _The Number of the Beast_.
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Dennis