That business of having a studio full of assistants to generate product goes back a long ways. I believe Michaelangelo and a host of other artists and sculptors operated the same way.
Same thing with books. The prime examples that come to mind are the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew stories. All written by ghost writers with strict plot lines and character backstories and published under the same pseudonyms. These ghost writers got paid pittances per book.
Franklin W. Dixon, the "author" of the Hardy Boys series, never existed.
Business is business, after all.
Terry, 230RN
REF (One example of how a lot of studio production works):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_SyndicateA quote from that article is significant:
Edward Stratemeyer aimed to produce books in an efficient, assembly-line fashion and to write them in such a way as to maximize their popularity.
<SNIP>
The ensuing case let the world know, for the first time, that the Syndicate existed; the Syndicate had always gone to great lengths to hide its existence from the public and ghostwriters were contractually obliged never to reveal their authorship.
Quite a business model, eh?