Contractual niceties

...So I've been working hard to finish the weddings book early, as I've got several new projects coming up soon - Nano being not the least of them. The deadline for delivery of the ms is the end of November, but it's all now pretty much ready to send off to the publisher.

And then I got a letter from the publisher yesterday in which he informed me - first I knew of it - that he's sold the publishing company to somebody else as of now.

Luckily, the new owner still wants the wedding book - in fact, he wants to make it bigger and better. Which means, on the plus side, it will have a higher cover price so I should get higher royalties. On the down side, the publication date had been put back from February to April - so there are two months fewer potential sales.

I have not been paid any advance at all and royalties are only paid twelve months after the book is published - so that's a long while before I see any return.

I signed a contract when they agreed that I should write the book, which specified delivery date of the ms and asserted their right to charge me financial penalities if for any reason it was delivered late. And yet it seems they can alter their side of the contract with impunity. I wonder what my legal position would have been if the new owner had decided he didn't want to publish the weddings book. Would I have done a year's unpaid work for no return at all? Could I have claimed compensation? It yet remains to be seen whether this 'bigger better' version of the book will require me to write any more text for it - this again would alter my contract, which specifies my ms should be of a certain length. Could I claim a payment for any extra work they want me to do?

I'm fairly confident that these worst case scenarios won't occur - but it has alerted me to some potential pitfalls of publishing which I have not encountered before.