Ghostwriting is a frustrating racket. But it must be particularly galling when the person whose name appears on the cover of the book you wrote is, like American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino, quite literally unable to read or write.

After holding her tongue for the past year, Kim Green, the ghostwriter of Barrino's "autobiography," is demanding some recognition for her role in bringing the illiterate singer's life story to the world. "I want people to know that I wrote that book," she says.

Barrino's Life Is Not a Fairy Tale, published in October 2005, sold more than 48,000 copies and made the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. But Green, who was paid only $45,000 for her efforts, has received no credit for it, nor for the Lifetime movie it inspired, which aired on the network last month. She even had to buy her own ticket to a concert Barrino gave in Atlanta recently. "I just think it's a terrible statement about the entertainment business," she adds.

Green says she learned of Barrino's illiteracy only after the two had been working on the book for some time. When Green handed her chapters in progress to review, "She'd say, 'Oh, it's great, I'll read the rest later,'" Green recalls. After Barrino finally fessed up, Green took it upon herself to inform Simon & Schuster, Barrino's publisher. Though she had signed on as a ghostwriter, she suggested they list her as co-writer—to avoid the inevitable questions and jokes about, well ... how an illiterate woman wrote a book, she insists.

"I went to them and said, 'I don't want credit, but I don't want [Barrino] to look dumb, and I think strategically it's not going to be wise for her to pretend to have written this book.'" But the publisher refused, and she let the matter drop, keeping her silence even after the nondisclosure period mandated by her contract expired. "I didn't want to seem like a troublemaker, and didn't want to burn any bridges of my own," she says.

But Green's reticence reached its limit last month, after she learned about the Lifetime movie. "Nobody even called me to say 'Do you have any insights? Do you want to tell us some anecdotes?'" she says. "I found it to be so appalling that nobody thought, 'Oh, we should call Kim Green.'"

Green doesn't blame Barrino for shutting her out, though she does question whether the singer, who is reportedly receiving tutoring, will ever bother to read the book she purportedly authored. "I'm really grateful for the experience, but I was a little soured by the process," she adds. "Publishing is the last art form that doesn't give credit to the people who do the work."