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All of your life imaginary ideas have been floating around in your mind and one day you decide to unleash that creativity and write a book. What a wonderful thought. You go to the keyboard and put the first sentence onto a blank piece of paper. The first sentence soon becomes the first paragraph. The first paragraph turns into the first page in a short period of time. After that the first page becomes the first chapter. Several months later the first chapter turns into your first novel.

What a wonderful accomplishment! Congratulations! You feel as if you are the next literary heavyweight to explode onto the American market.

Not so fast. Let’s look at how the real world views your remarkable achievement.

If you’ve done your homework, then you know that the manuscript was written with twelve point New Times Roman type. The work is double-spaced. You’ve saved it on disc and probably printed it with the help of your desktop printer. Now what? After all, you feel as if this masterpiece is the next great piece of literary work in American culture.

Do you want to market the intellectual property? If so, how do you go about that? Virtually all literary agents and publishing houses will not accept unsolicited material. You ask what unsolicited material is and find out that it is a piece of literary work that does not have a referral source. In other words, you don’t know anybody that can get the finished piece of work through the front door. Now what?

You might ask around to see if you can get an intellectual property lawyer. What is that you ask? That would be a legal representative that can get the work copyrighted and protected from the people that you don’t know out there.

You may submit the piece to the Writers Guild and obtain a registration number. They accept downloads from personal computers and for a small fee can protect your work for a short period of time. But you wonder how that will help you. At least with a Writers Guild registration number the work is somewhat protected from anyone that might try to steal it.

However the question remains. How will either of those sources help to get you through a door? The only thing that I can suggest is that perhaps the intellectual property lawyer has some contacts in the literary agency field or the publishing business. After all, up to now the lawyer is the only live link into the industry.

But what happens if that fails? Then you might have to research self-publishing houses and self-publish your first novel. Things could be worse. There are many different packages available that range anywhere from around five hundred dollars up to twenty thousand dollars depending on what you want to try and accomplish and how extensive you would like to market the book.

If you choose to self-publish, then you’ll be able to decide whether or not you can design your own cover or pick from some of the generic ones that are offered. You’ll have an opportunity to pick the size type that you would like to use. Different formatting styles will be offered. Hardback and paperback editions will be offered.

But have you thought about proofing and copyediting? Will you have to rewrite the novel after it is looked at by an editor? What happens if someone that you have chosen to offer an opinion says that it is not worthy of being published in the shape that it is in? Your expenses will increase as the various jobs are performed.

Let’s assume that the manuscript needs some sprucing up and it is determined that you have to pay someone to read, review, and change the text. Is that an expense that you had budgeted into the project? The proofreader will need to be paid after the text is altered. After all the typos will need to be found and fixed; the sentence structure will need to be corrected. Did you plan on that expense as well? Now it is time to design your own cover. Did you leave enough money for a graphics design artist to assist you with that creative endeavor? You ask yourself if all of this is worth it.

Life is churning forward. You have written your first novel, but have finally admitted that writing the prose was the easiest part of the process. Not only that, but it is starting to get expensive and you still don’t have an agent or a publisher that is remotely interested in reading an unsolicited manuscript. You surge ahead because you want to show the world your wonderful achievement. Several expensive checks are written to the self-publisher, the editor, the proofreader, and the graphics design person.

Now what happens? The production people with the self-publisher carry out their duties. You become aware of all of the dates and deadlines for the production schedule. Final approval forms are signed. You wait your turn in line. Finally the date comes where the book is hot off the press and you are sent a hardback edition as well as a paperback edition. Finally, after all of the time that you have spent on this project you are a published author. Now what?

Have you thought about how you are going to tell the world that your masterpiece is completed? Have you budgeted dollars for marketing the creation? Have you thought about how the book was going to be distributed to book stores? What happens if it does get into the book stores but you find out that the world is not knocking the door down to buy the finished product? Have you decided to build a web site to not only market the book title but also the author’s name?

Now frustration sets in. Welcome to the world of unknown authors. You are not wanted by agents. Large publishing houses don’t want anything to do with you. The only people that really want to read your book are the small group of friends and relatives that are in your inner circle. You get discouraged. You throw in the towel. You’ve spent a ton of money and it has gotten you minimal results. What other suggestions are there?

James Ross, a University of Missouri-Columbia graduate, went to a keyboard and let the words flow through his fingertips. Lifetime Loser is his first novel. Consumed by the writing bug, he is working on more books. Visit James Ross.

If someone visits your website, the content on your website should say a lot about who you are, what you are selling and what you have to contribute to the prospect. A good article on your website can provide more information about your expertise and benefits that you can provide to the visitor.

Having good content on your website is a way for buyers to find you. People go to the search engines to look for information that they need and when your site comes up in the search engines, your link will be clicked and the person will end up at your website. So you want to make sure that you provide the buyer with exactly what they need.

Good content can also be used to lead people to your website from other websites. This increases traffic. How do you get that done, you may ask? Well, you can have others write the articles for you and submit them to the article submission websites. This is called outsourcing. Outsourcing your articles is a good way to free up your time and at the same time have someone else do the bulk of the work for you as you reap the benefits.

Using a ghostwriter is an easy and effective way to get your articles ranked high in the search engines. A ghostwriter will use keywords or keyword phrases in the article to have it picked up by the search engines and when someone searches using those keywords and keyword phrases, they fill find your article with a link to your website.

You can find expert writers who will charge you only a small fee to write your articles and possibly submit them to the article submission websites for more exposure. These writers can help you to promote your website and get a good spot in the search engines.

Writers will also write content for your website and this will let visitors see that you have great content. This will impress them to want to come back for more interesting articles. This will also create additional traffic for you.

Different writers have different writing styles. However, for the most part, writers can write articles on pretty much any topic as long as they have great research skills. There are many writers who charge top dollars and some who will work for a small fee. It depends on what they are writing about, how much research is involved and what the client’s budget is.

You can outsource your work to individuals who write from home full time. These are experienced individuals who offer their writing services as a business. So to the writer, this is a business where they are providing their services to you. Some of them work only as writers, so paying your writers well is a guarantee that they will work effortlessly to please you and produce a great article or articles.

You can search for websites that have great writers by going to writer’s forums, or just going to the search engines and doing a search. Use words or phrases, like, “content writer,” or “article writer.” You should be able to find a writer that you can negotiate and work with.

Ben Heart is one of the leading Article Marketing specialists from ArticlesBase. ArticlesBase.com is a free articles directory, ArticlesBase.com answers all your article submission needs. Learn more about Article Marketing from our eBook - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Article Marketing - http://www.articlesmarketing.info/

There are few things that strike fear in the heart of creative people more than finishing. Clients come to me and cite their biggest block is actually completing something. It makes sense. Finishing a project is like giving birth – the closer you get to the due date, the more things become restricted, the more you have to squeeze into the narrow confines of the birth canal to complete. You have to say no to distractions. You face the reality of your brilliant ideas, and it’s not always a pretty picture. Restrictions are much less sexy than the excitement of possibility at the beginning of the creative cycle. And creative types like the notion of lots of freedom and space to create and play. So it’s no wonder that creative people are known to harbor a closet full of abandoned projects.

Yet when we cycle through project after project and never bring any of them to completion, we rob ourselves of some very vital and powerful juju. Here are some of the gems that await you in the completion phase of any personal, professional or creative project.

You will gain confidence in your ability to stay with something. Staying with something, even when it is difficult, gives us extra karmic muscle. When we stay, we get to feel and experience our inner power. This confidence will extend to other areas of your life and will enhance all that you do.

Trust comes with the confidence of completing. As you lean into the final phase of creating, your trust in yourself builds. You learn to believe yourself when you say you are going to do something. With this trust comes self-respect and self-love.

You will glean enormous learning about your craft. What makes a completed piece is very different than what makes a fresh idea compelling. By completing, you delve into the very heart of what makes a piece good. And you want to be good at what you do, don’t you?

And, while you are there, in the heart of your craft, you will discover something else: yourself. The themes and questions of your life will emerge in the process. What you value and hold close to your heart will come forth in your work. I always knew that writing was an act of self-discovery, but it wasn’t until I was in the final laps of finishing my novel that I saw how true that platitude was.

These are some of the benefits that I have reaped from finishing. What might you get from completing? Ask yourself this question – What will be different for me when I finish ________? The answer might reveal a motivation and a reason for staying stuck. Don’t deny yourself the pleasures and benefits of completing. You and your great ideas deserve the joy and satisfaction that comes from crossing the finish line.

This article is excerpted from Cynthia’s e-book, Cross the Finish Line! Five Steps to Leap Over the Hurdles to Completion. Pick your copy up today and become a serial finisher.

Speaker, author and coach Cynthia Morris of Original Impulse helps writers and visionaries make their brilliant ideas a reality. Author of Create Your Writer?s Life and Cross the Finish Line! Five Steps to Leap Over the Hurdles to Completion, Cynthia and her clients have finished books, blogs, web sites, art pieces and more. Cynthia coaches from Europe. Follow her journey on her blog at Journey Juju.

There are times when life takes over and we’re forced to put our creative projects on the shelf. Visitors, illness, big life moves and other disruptions can lead to frustration on the creative front. Artists of all media and writers deal with this challenge of life disrupting our creative work.

I’ve worked with many clients on this. The biggest thing is to not beat yourself up or spend too much energy on being frustrated or angry. A better practice is to develop ways to keep a thread alive that connects you to your creativity. Here are a number of ‘threads’ that can keep your project alive when you can’t be as present with it as you want.

• Spend a few minutes with your project, just looking at it, reading it, being with it.

• Read relevant materials to stay inspired, but watch for ‘surfing’, where your attention wanders away from your focus. If you surf or read for longer than ten minutes, chances are you could be applying that time to your writing.

• Develop a new lens or antenna through which you see the world. Your project is the lens, and ideas and solutions will pop up when you keep your eyes open and filter life through your project. For instance, I was looking for ways to tighten up the drama and action in my novel. While watching the TV show LOST, I noticed that they ended every segment with a dramatic ‘bang.’ I went to each chapter’s end and trimmed away the last few sentences which were not adding to the drama of the book. With the lens of tightening up my writing, I was open to LOST as a teacher of good writing.

• Schedule time in your calendar to work on your project so you know when you will get to it. Just knowing you have a place for it can help ease anxiety over not being in your creative zone.

• Lean into your sense of trust in your own creative process. Remember times when you lost the connection and picked it back up. Use those memories to assure you that you will get back to your project this time.

• Make lists of things you are pondering or working on in your project. The bits and pieces that add up to the whole will help you stay connected and sort through issues you’re working on.

• Do a brief free write, sketch or mind map about your work. Sometimes stepping back and getting the big picture will help you connect to the project in new and useful ways.

• Connect with things that inspire you to create. Conversations with other artists, both in your medium and not, almost always spark your creativity.

Balancing life and art making takes effort for most of us. But don’t make yourself a victim of your circumstances. Instead, use these threads and develop your own ways of staying connected. Make space for the creative work you crave. If you find yourself avoiding or shirking your creative practice, that’s another story. Avoiding art making is more often due to fears rather than lack of time or life’s disruptions. You know the difference for yourself. Get clear on whether life is in your way or you are in your way. And then choose to do the art you love!

My favorite bumper sticker says Don’t Postpone Joy. I say Don’t Postpone Creativity. Keep the thread alive in whatever way you can.

Cynthia Morris of Original Impulse helps writers and visionaries make their brilliant ideas a reality. Author of Create Your Writer?s Life, Go For It! Leading Tours for Fun and Profit, and Cross the Finish Line! Five Steps to Leap Over the Hurdles to Completion, Cynthia coaches from Europe. Follow her adventures at JourneyJuju.com

Writing well is a skill which few people possess. Therefore others are happy to buy your writing skills and pay you when you ghostwrite for them. In this article, we’ll look at material you can write as a ghostwriter - and how you can get writing jobs.

If you’re not sure what a ghostwriter is or does, it’s simple. You write for others, and they take the credit. Your work appears under their byline, and all the benefits and rights in your writing pass to them.

Many books on the bestseller lists are written by ghostwriters - including books by athletes and celebrities and by health professionals.

What Can You Write As a Ghostwriter?

You can write books, ebooks and reports, articles for print and for the Web, newspaper and magazine columns, speeches, and much more.

1. Books - Publishers Will Approach You to Write Books

As soon as a publisher signs a celebrity for a book, the hunt is on a for a ghostwriter. The person who’s approached for this will usually have written a book or two for the publisher first. However, if no one is available, agents are approached to see whether one of their writers might do the book.

So if you’re working with a publisher or agent, you’ll be offered ghostwriting jobs. The job will either pay at a flat rate, or you’ll be offered an advance plus royalties deal as you would with any other book.

2. Ebooks - Look for Ghosting Jobs on Forums

Ebooks have become very popular, and they’re highly valuable properties. You can find opportunities to ghost ebooks on the many out-sourcing sites, as well as on forums. Another way to get ebook ghosting jobs is to offer these services from your own site.

You’ll usually be offered a flat rate for the ebook, and I advise you to negotiate for this service. I’ve seen many writers who charge much too little for ebooks. If you write well, your ebook will make many thousands of dollars for the person who buys your services, so don’t sell them too cheaply.

Remember that as soon as you’re paid in full, all rights to the ebook pass to the buyer.

3. Articles for Print and the Web - Offer Ghosting Services on your Own Site

Writing articles for others to use under their own name is very common, both in print, and on the Web. In print, you’ll often receive the entire amount a magazine pays for the article, the person who’s hired you just wants his name on the article for promotional purposes.

Offer article ghostwriting services from your own site.

4. Columns - Approach a Celebrity and Offer them to Newspapers and Magazines

Newspapers and magazines love having celebrities “write” for them. In these kinds of deals, you’ll need to approach the celebrity’s publicist yourself. You’ll be paid at standard rates for the weekly or monthly column, the celebrity’s people negotiate his deal.

5. Speeches - Offer this Service from Your Own Site

If you enjoy writing speeches, offer this service from your site.

6. Audio-visual Presentations - Another Service to Offer from your Own Site

Audio-visual presentations, that is, writing for DVDs, film, and other presentations is a service that’s in demand. You’ll find these ghostwriting jobs on the out-sourcing sites, and you can offer them from your own site as well.

So, now you have a glimpse into the fascinating world of ghostwriting. If you enjoy writing more than seeing your byline, you’ll enjoy ghostwriting. It’s a lot of fun, and is rewarding too.

Want to write more? Angela Booth’s writing class, “Write More And Make More Money From Your Writing: Develop A Fast, Fun Productive Writing Process” is based on lessons she developed for her private coaching students. Her ebook “Top 70 Writing Tips To Help You To Write More” shows you how to end procrastination for good and write more.