Second Thoughts About Signing a Contract

All the way back in October, I got an acceptance for one of my stories to be published. But since then there have been problems. For one thing, the publisher kept pushing back the dates when we would receive our contracts (You'll have them by Halloween, You'll have them before New Year's, You'll have them the second week of January). In the mean time, the publisher also announced that this would be the last anthology they would publish, and have since shut down their website and stopped updating their Facebook. About a week ago, I started looking into other publishers, because I felt this one had gone dead.

And now, four months later, I finally have a contract. However, sent along with the contract is a request for the authors to do their own promoting for the anthology, because the publisher is "too burnt out" to do it herself. I was always under the impression that part of the deal with going with a traditional publisher was that they were the ones promoting your work. Otherwise, you might as well go with the self publishing route.

This is all beginning to seem like a riskier and riskier deal.

So I have been thinking that I am just going to send a letter to the publisher saying I changed my mind about having my story published in this anthology. But I was hoping to get the opinion of some other authors before I do.