I think it's natural to be scared. If nothing else, it's pretty obvious that you have an excellent command of spelling and grammar. I know that sounds minor, but IMO, that's a huge head-start and becoming an increasingly rare skill these days.
Something that I now realize gave me a head start (aside from my writing background) is that I've always been a huge fiction-reader. If you've read a lot of books, and have a certain genre you favor, this can also be a head start for you, too, particularly if your favorite genre is hot. If you're not a huge fiction fan, that's definitely not a deal breaker though. Our very own @Held for Ransom, who started it all, wasn't a big fiction fan, and he's been our trail-blazer and role model.
About the ghost-writing model, I'm honestly not a big fan. And I mean no disrespect to those who are. There are some incredibly smart, nice, and hard-working people right here on this forum who have taken that route, with positive results. When I'm out from under this writing deadline, I might start a thread about it, but in the meantime, I'll say that a big reason I'm not a fan of the ghost-writing model is that every single writer has his/her own unique voice, a certain way of telling a story.
If you use ghost-writers as opposed to doing the writing yourself, it can be very hard to duplicate that experience for the reader, unless you either: use the same exact ghost-writer every time, have a team of incredibly skilled ghost-writers who are following a preset style, or you're one hell of a skilled editor that can make all your books sound like they were written by the same person.
If you're in doubt, though, just dive in! If you can just finish a novel, you'll be way ahead of those who only dream of of it. And if your results aren't what you want (as mine were under my first pen name), you can abandon that pen name and try something else.
Either way, welcome and best of luck to you!
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