Dean Wesley Smith is an incredibly prolific writer. He writes with his cats. I write with my pooch. Dean is adept at writing into the dark at speed. In other words, he does not outline his work before writing and sets for himself some remarkable word—count challenges. In a book of his I recently read, Writing With the Waltese Falcon, he shows us how he wrote three books—one in ten days, one in seven, and one in five while traveling on vacation. That’s incredible. In a column I share on SleuthSayers, the mystery blog, this week, I do a quick overview of the book and then share the story of my one and only experiment writing at speed. I’ve shared that story on this blog a few years ago.

Every couple of months I get a letter from someone asking if I’ll ghost-write their book. Typically, my correspondents are white, wealthy, business dudes. They’ve made something of themselves, and they want to share their hard-earned wisdom with the world. They think a book is the ticket, but they have no idea where to start. Someone told them they need a ghostwriter, and they start writing people like me. I got one of those emails recently, but this time it had a more interesting wrinkle. Besides asking about my services, the guy also wondered aloud if he should just self-publish the damn thing, and not bother trying to get a “real” publisher. This was a switch. Here’s why…

I’ve been ghostwriting so long that I often feel like I’m living inside the sausage factory that is modern American publishing. Unless you’ve spent time inside the machine, you are likely to think that it’s a really big deal to get a book deal. It can be, but if you spent any time with authors you’ll quickly find that most of them hate the way their publisher handled their last book. Not enough promotion. Not enough support. Not enough…anything.

A few months ago, I told the story of the most egregious example of publisher-fail I’d ever seen. And this was for a book that the publisher paid six figures for…