Now, down to business. I can’t help much when it comes to publishing companies ripping the idea off, but my best piece of advice is to not mention it online AT ALL. If you have to say something, say you’re working on an idea, but don’t tell anyone about the plot, the characters, or anything of that sort. That’s the way things get stolen all the time.

Secondly, when it comes to real life, try to tell only your cloe friends and family about what you’re writing. Most of my friends are writers also, and more than one have borrowed my characters for their own stories, without even asking my permission!

Just play it safe, and you should be fine. I think I’m exageraing a bit on how much you should keep it a secret, but honestly, I would guard my ideas like a jewel, unless I was asking for help with plot or character quirks.

Have fun, and good luck! Maybe once your book is published I’ll go out and buy it! ^_-
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I have posted this here probably hundreds of times but I guess I have to go through it once more. Persi’s Law #2 – NO Copyright is worth a darn without a badass lawyer to back it up. There are no Copyright Police. If your work is plagiarized, there is nobody at the Copyright Office who will help you. Your only choice is to hire a very expensive attorney. And that is assuming you even KNOW who the plagiarist is and where they are. Suppose all you have is their screen name? Suppose they are located in China? Then what? There is absolutely nothing you can do.

And as for the so called "Poorman’s Copyright" where you put your work in an envelope and mail it to yourself and them leave the envelope sealed, it is useless. All it proves is that on that date, you were in possession of those pages. It does not prove that you are the original author. I could put pages from Old Man and The Sea in an envelope and mail them to myself, but it doesn’t make me Hemingway. NO judge on earth would accept that as evidence. It is not worth the stamp. It is an URBAN MYTH made up by rank amateurs and spread by kids who do not understand copyright laws through sites like this. It is totally useless. Save the stamps.

There is only one safe copyright. Write your book, back it up and keep it in a drawer until you are through the rewrite and edit processes and ready to do something with it. The moment you post anything online, all bets are off. They are target for plagiarism. Anyone who wants to can steal them and unless you are willing to sue at great expense, you are out of luck.

As for your distrust of agents, that is completely amateur and unprofessional. Assuming you have gone through the standard Writers Beware channels, and know the agent to be reputable, accusing them of stealing is absurd. No reputable agent would do that. And to send them copyrighted material is terribly bad manners. It says to them "I want you to help me, but I don’t trust you." It annoys agents to no end, and they wouldn’t even bother to read your work.

You must also remember that the book most likely will be sent to many agents before one takes you on. Rejections are common. Then getting an agent is no guarantee of a sale. That agent is going to show your work to many people – editors at publishing houses – in order to get a sale. So a lot of people are going to look at your work. You have to put your trust in all of them. That is just the way it is.

In short, you have to advocate for yourself. You have to seek out agents and do the research to ensure yourself that the agent is reliable and reputable. The rest is a little bit of luck and a lot of faith. Quite honestly, the best agents generally deal on referral from other authors they represent.

If you go to my profile, you sill see I star all good Q and A on writing and publishing. Several very successful authors have posted here. Feel free to skim through and read.

Hope that helps. Pax-C
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Author of 5 novels, ghostwriter of several books – many for major sports stars all sold to a top 2 American publisher.

The last thing you need to worry about is someone stealing your idea when you’re submitting to an agent. If your novel is good enough for publication, there is absolutely no point in an agent rejecting you, only to pitch it to someone else to represent. They would make the same amount of money representing you as they would representing someone else.

Also, the likelihood that your idea is 100% original is unfortunately unlikely. There have been so many stories written and there are so many ideas out there that complete originality is all but obsolete. The story you write is and will always be unique to you – no one will ever write exactly the same story. But I would recommend against using ‘no one has written a book like this before’ in your query letter. It’s off-putting for the agent, and it lowers your chances of being represented.

What you want to do when you submit is send a query letter only, along with a short one-page synopsis and a SASE to the agents in question. If they like your idea, they will ask to see more. But no one will ever pluck a synopsis or query letter out of a pile and hand it to another writer for them to rewrite, don’t worry.

Best of luck to you!
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Your only other option is to self-publish, but you won’t go very far though that route unless you have a lot of cash to invest in the marketing business. So it’s either that, or you must learn to trust agents.
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