Amazon closed my KDP account overnight for following its own instructions to change a subtitle. I was furious, and I’ve never gone back.
These days I publish through IngramSpark, and I’d still choose self-publishing over a traditional deal for nearly every ghostwritten book I write. A platform took my account away for doing what it told me to do, and I’m still telling you to publish independently? Yes, because the traditional alternative takes control away from you on purpose, in a signed contract, before the book is even printed.
Think of the choice as selling through a department store versus opening your own shop. A department store takes your goods on consignment, decides whether to accept them at all, sets the price, puts them on the floor when it’s ready, and keeps most of every sale. Your own shop costs you rent and fixtures, and you keep the margin, set the hours and decide what goes in the window. The landlord can still evict you, so keep a lease in more than one building.
Should I self-publish or traditionally publish a ghostwritten book?
Self-publish, unless you have a reason that outweighs time, money and control. I don’t recommend traditional publishing to my clients because of the delays, the much lower royalties and the loss of control, and none of those three get better because a ghostwriter wrote the book.
Look at why most people hire a ghostwriter in the first place. Executives, coaches and professionals want a book that builds their business. Families want a memoir in the hands of the people it’s for, while those people are still alive. Handing the book to a department store that will put it on the floor next year, at a price you didn’t pick, serves neither goal.
A fair number of my memoir clients are in their nineties. A year or more of publisher scheduling is time some of them don’t have, and I won’t gamble a client’s chance to hold their own book on a department store’s calendar. Would you?
Families have a simpler need too. Print-on-demand lets a family order copies for every grandchild, a reunion or a memorial service, and order more when they run out. No traditional publisher is going to take on a book whose whole market is thirty relatives.
Traditional publishing does make sense for a narrow group: an author with a large platform who wants national bookstore placement and can wait, or a book whose credibility depends on a well-known imprint. If that’s you, go after it. A traditional house brings an editorial team, a sales force that pitches bookstores, and an imprint that some readers and reviewers still take more seriously.
Those are real advantages, and for a small number of authors they’re worth the wait. For a coach who needs the book at a conference next spring, or a family that wants a grandmother’s story printed while she can hold it, they aren’t. The department store’s floor space doesn’t help a book that needs to be in one room on one date, and the wait can cost that book its whole reason for existing. My comparison of traditional, self-publishing and hybrid lays out the models side by side.
How long does a traditional publisher take to release a ghostwritten book?
Longer than most clients can stand. Three of my clients’ books went to traditional publishers, and each one took 12 to 18 months to reach print.
Those months aren’t idle on the publisher’s side. A house slots your book into a publishing season, runs its own editorial passes, designs the cover it wants, and sells the title to bookstores well ahead of release. Your book waits its turn in that line with every other book on the list, and nothing you do speeds it up. A finished book sitting in somebody else’s queue while the reason for writing it slips away is the part of this business I’d change first, and it’s why I steer clients away from that queue.
Before that comes the hunt. A traditional nonfiction deal starts with a proposal, and most big publishers want it to come through a literary agent. Finding an agent who’ll take you on is its own campaign, and my piece on whether you need a literary agent covers that stage.
Hard deadlines are common in my work: birthdays, conferences, industry events, startup launches. My fastest book was an 80,000-word communications book written in three months. Put a traditional schedule on top of a deadline like that and the book arrives a year after the moment it was written for. That’s the delay I hate most, because it costs the client the very thing they paid for.
Will a traditional publisher take a book written by a ghostwriter?
Yes, and they have for a very long time. Celebrity and sports memoirs are the famous examples. Publishers care about the book and the author’s platform. Who typed the chapters doesn’t change the contract they offer.
Whether you tell an agent or publisher that you worked with a ghostwriter is entirely your call. Some clients do, some don’t, and my article on telling your agent or publisher about a ghostwriter walks through both choices.
What a publisher will insist on is that you own the book. A traditional contract makes you warrant that you hold the rights you’re licensing. If your ghostwriting agreement doesn’t assign you the copyright in writing, you can’t make that promise truthfully, and a publisher’s lawyer will catch the gap. Have a publishing lawyer read both contracts before you sign the second one.
If you self-publish first and then try to sell the same book to a traditional house, the early sales record can work against you. My piece on why self-publishing first can kill a traditional deal explains how.
Is hybrid publishing worth it for a ghostwritten book?
Yes, if the hybrid publisher behaves like a publisher. The Independent Book Publishers Association defines a hybrid publisher as “a publisher utilizing an author-subsidized business model for the majority of its business,” and its hybrid publisher criteria set out what a legitimate one does.
The criteria include vetting submissions, providing a negotiable contract that’s easy to understand, publishing under its own imprint and ISBNs, publishing to industry standards, providing distribution, and paying authors a higher-than-standard royalty. The IBPA’s point is that the publisher stays responsible for quality and distribution even though the author pays.
Plenty of companies wear the hybrid label and meet none of them. They’ll take any manuscript with a credit card attached, print it under an imprint no bookstore has heard of, and bill you for “marketing packages” that amount to a press release nobody reads. In shop terms, that’s a store charging you rent to put your goods in a back room. I have no patience for those operations. They prey on people who just spent real money on a book and want someone to tell them it’ll sell.
Test any hybrid offer against the IBPA’s list, clause by clause, and have a publishing lawyer read the contract before you pay anything. If the company can’t show you its distribution and its authors’ sales, walk away.
Can I self-publish a ghostwritten book on Amazon KDP or IngramSpark?
Yes, on either one, as long as you hold the publishing rights. KDP’s intellectual property FAQ says its terms and content guidelines “require that you hold the publishing rights to any content you upload,” and it tells anyone publishing content someone else created to gather their documentation before submission in case KDP asks. For a ghostwritten book, that’s your signed contract with its copyright assignment.
IngramSpark is where I publish now. Its distribution page says books reach over 45,000 bookstores, online stores, chain stores, ebook retailers, libraries and universities, with Amazon and Barnes & Noble among them, through print-on-demand. My guide to how I publish with IngramSpark covers the setup.
Print-on-demand also solves the box-of-books problem. You order author copies when you need them, for a keynote, a client dinner or a family reunion, and nobody ends up with a garage full of cartons from a print run that guessed wrong. You pay for copies as you order them, and you never pay to store a book nobody wanted. I’ve got no love for the outfits that still talk first-time authors into printing thousands of copies up front.
KDP puts your book straight into Amazon’s store, and plenty of authors use it. You’re renting shelf space from someone else. My piece on why Amazon KDP terminated my account overnight tells the whole story. A publisher who keeps every book on one platform is a shopkeeper with one landlord and no lease elsewhere. Buy your own ISBNs, keep your own files, and make sure your book can reach readers through more than one door.
Will I make my money back selling a ghostwritten book?
Almost certainly not through book sales, and I tell every client so. The return comes from what the book does for you: speaking engagements, consulting contracts, courses, a promotion. One client’s book, written for a Fortune 50 executive, went on to help raise venture capital. Book royalties had nothing to do with it.
A business book belongs in a briefcase. You hand it to a prospect after a meeting, send it ahead of a keynote, and stack it on the table at a conference where the organizer put your name on the program. None of that needs a bookstore chain. It needs the book printed, on time, with your name on the cover.
That’s the strongest argument for self-publishing a ghostwritten book. If sales royalties aren’t the point, a traditional deal’s biggest selling point barely matters, and its biggest costs, the delay and the lost control, hit exactly what you care about: a finished book in your hands when you need it, with the cover, title and price you chose.
What happens after the ghostwriter hands over the manuscript?
You become a publisher, or you go find one. I deliver a solid manuscript draft, and I refer clients to trusted editors for editing, proofreading and formatting. I don’t do covers. Those are separate jobs, and the people who do them well are worth hiring.
Self-publishing means you hire that team yourself and own every decision. You’re the publisher of record. You choose the editor and the proofreader, approve the cover, set the trim size and the price, write or approve the book description, and decide where the book is sold. You can change any of those choices later. A traditional contract locks them. My article on what happens after the ghostwriting ends walks through the steps from manuscript to published book.
Don’t skip the last two hires. A proofreader works on the final text and catches the typos, dropped words and inconsistent spellings that slip past the editor and the author after the tenth read.
A formatter turns the manuscript into a print interior and an ebook file that meet each platform’s specifications, with the margins, running heads and page breaks readers expect without noticing. A reader who trips over three typos in chapter one stops trusting the author, and it makes me wince every time I see a good book sabotaged that way by someone who saved a little money at the end.
Open your own shop and keep a second lease
Before you sign with a ghostwriter, decide how you’ll publish, because it changes the schedule and the contract you need. Confirm the contract assigns you the copyright in writing.
If a traditional deal is the goal, have an agent or a publishing lawyer look at the plan before the first chapter. If you’re self-publishing, set up your IngramSpark account, buy your ISBNs and line up an editor while the book is being written. Keep the final interior, cover and ebook files on your own drive, so no platform ever holds the only copy of your book.
The publishing industry sells authors on prestige and then makes them wait a year and a half for a smaller check and a cover they didn’t choose. Vanity presses dressed up as hybrids sell the same dream for cash up front. And Amazon will cut off an author for following its own instructions. None of them get to own your book.
If you’re ready to get it written, my ghostwriting services are the place to start, and the Book Discovery Intensive is a shorter first step. If you’d rather write it yourself with guidance, look at my book coaching. The Ghostwriting Hub has everything else.
Build your own shop, put the book in the front window, and keep the spare key where no landlord can reach it.
