Cornelia Amiri GhostWriter

I submitted my first book to Awe-Struck eBooks in the year 2000. I decided to go to the Predators and Editors list of publishers and submit to recommended sites only. That means the authors that wrote for them thought—the contracts were good, they paid on time, were easy to work with, knew what they were doing, etc.   
 I started at the front of the directory at A. Awe-Struck was the first on the list that was recommended and open to submissions for Historical Romances. Plus, they were interested in unusual time periods and mine was set in the dark ages, at the onset of the Saxon Wars. Awe-struck, the first publisher I submitted to, accepted my book and I signed a contract with them. The Fox Prince, later retitled The Celtic Fox, was released in January 2001. It came out in eBook format at that time and in print later that year.  
 The eBook could be downloaded anytime, anyplace to be read on a Rocketbook reader, a palm pilot, a laptop, or d...

Readers are sometimes surprised to discover as much as half of all books traditionally published today are created with the help of ghostwriters or developmental editors. Even more so for self-published books. In fact, when you look at any nonfiction best seller list 50% of those books were ghostwritten. More and more fiction books are being ghostwritten as well. Plus, the majority of celebrity memoirs and biographies are ghostwritten. For example, John F. Kennedy’s classic Profiles in Courage  was penned by his speechwriter Theodore Sorenson.  Ghostwriters have been around for a while. Did you know that H.P. Lovecraft was Harry Houdini’s ghostwriter for Imprisoned with the Pharaoh, published in Weird Tales in 1924? Lovecraft also ghosted The Curse of Yig  authored by Zealia Bishop.   A nd, when H. P. Lovecraft died of cancer at 46 he left notes on a work he’d barely begun, The Lurker At The Threshold. August Derleth completed it, in other wor...

Self-publishing starts with distributors. The way distribution worked with publishers is they downloaded my books to distributors like Amazon.  When Amazon and other distributors sold my books, they took out their fee and sent the publisher the rest of the money. The publisher then sent my portion, my royalty amount, 40% of what they got from the distributor.  In 2007 Amazon did something new, they allowed authors to download their books directly to them, the distributor, without having to go through a publisher. So, when you download your book directly on Amazon or Kobo, or Apple, or B&N online, etc. you’re also publishing it at that time. That’s Self-publishing. That move by Amazon totally changed the publishing industry.  Once I got the rights to all my books back from publishers I'd sign contracts with, I stopped submitting to publishers, and now I Self Pub only. There are many advantages of self-publishing for authors, including: 1...