It was every author's dream - sending a book to a publisher and getting an enthusiastic response.

But what happened next was, until yesterday, beyond almost any author's worst nightmare. The managing director of the publishing firm liked the idea behind the book so much that she "took it over" and sold it at the Bologna book fair as her own.

Writers all over the UK are to be warned about this and other horror stories about publishers. The stories emerge in a survey reported in the Society of Authors' forthcoming spring newsletter.

The survey, the first of its kind the society has conducted for six years, looks at the experiences of 954 writers who have between them published 15,000 books.

With "considerable dismay", the survey author, Michael Legat, a specialist in relations between writers and publishers, reports that publishers earn poorer marks for almost every category of their work than they did in the last survey in 1997. In the interval between the two surveys, more small publishers have been swallowed up by multinational conglomerates.

Authors are guaranteed anonymity in the society's research. The title sold in Bologna is identified only as "a picture book".

But among other bitter complaints to Mr Legat were:

· A publisher who lost 100 illustrations and substituted pictures from another author's work, which had already been published

· A publisher's editor who told an author "on many occasions that she hated me and hated my books".

Mr Legat comments: "These are only three of the complaints at which you begin by saying 'you must be joking' and end by crying because it isn't a joke at all."

Another author called a publisher "a sinking ship with a rat for captain". Others complained of "a complete rip-off" and "bullying, bluster and personal abuse". Publishers were found to be "evasive, patronising, inattentive, unresponsive", with "a prodigious amount of material lost in the post".

Mr Legat says that, when an editor leaves a publisher, "management often makes no effort to ensure that editors who take over books are capable of seeing them through with as much care and devotion.

"Another infuriating problem is those copy editors who believe it is incumbent on them to rewrite books which don't need rewriting, and worst of all to change technical matters of which they have no knowledge."

However, Mr Legat says that some 70% of authors would recommend their publishers to others.

Publishers rated as "poor" in the survey include HarperCollins trade publishing, Macmillan Academic, Reed Elsevier, Thorson's and SPCK. Among those classed as "good" are Faber and Faber, John Murray, Oxford University Press and HarperCollins Educational.