Most of the people who hire me around here are sitting on a life story they’ve told at the dinner table for forty years and never once written down. They’re older, they live in Safety Harbor or Clearwater, and somewhere along the way they figured out that if they don’t get it on paper, nobody will. I’m Richard Lowe. I live here, I’ve authored 113+ books under my own name and ghostwritten 54+ more, and a lot of those local books start at a table a few minutes from my house.
Why hire a ghostwriter in Safety Harbor?
Because you can sit across a table from the person writing your book, and for a memoir that’s the most important thing on this page. A lot of my local clients can’t stand Zoom. They want to look me in the eye before they tell me about the marriage that fell apart or the job they got fired from, and I don’t blame them one bit. National agencies can’t offer that. They’ll paste “Safety Harbor” into a template and hand you to whoever’s free.
I know this town because I work in it. I’ve given a talk to a women’s group at the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center, I’ve spent years photographing its streets and its chalk festival, and I’ve shown up at more writing groups around Pinellas than I can count. None of that makes me a better writer. It does mean that when you mention the pier or Philippe Park or the old spa, I know exactly what you’re talking about, and we don’t lose twenty minutes of your interview to directions.
“When Richard steps in, I know he’s not just ghostwriting. He’s writing with my heart. He gets me. That’s rare.”
Gerry Mecca, memoir client
How would a Safety Harbor book project work?
It starts with a conversation over lunch, and you pick the place. Some people want something easy and close, so we meet at Poblanos Mexican Grill (2451 N McMullen Booth Rd, Clearwater; book a free call to set it up). Others want the nicer setting of the Safety Harbor Resort & Spa. Either way, it’s a relaxed first talk about your book: what happened, who it’s for, and whether we’re a good fit. About half my local clients want that first meeting in person. The rest start by phone.
The real interviews happen at the Safety Harbor Public Library, right across the street from the resort. I reserve a meeting room ahead of time, either the one with a big table or a smaller room with two chairs, and we talk for an hour or two. I record every session on my tablet, every time, because your exact words are what I build the book from. After each session you get a written summary, and the chapters come to you one at a time so you can tell me what I got wrong.
People cry in these sessions. It happens all the time, and it’s nothing to apologize for. I’ve started bringing tissues. We take a break, talk about something easy for a few minutes, and come back to it when you’re ready. The hardest material can take several passes before it’s all on the table.
If getting out is hard, I’ll come to you. Home visits add my travel time and expenses, and we work that out up front. Most memoirs take four to eight months, and your share of the work is roughly 20 to 40 hours across the whole project. For the full picture, see how a ghostwriting project works and my memoir ghostwriting page.
Can a Safety Harbor ghostwriter handle a technical book?
Yes. An art town still has engineers, retired executives and people who built things for a living, and I spent 33 years in enterprise IT, 20 of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s. If your book is about software, security, systems or the company you ran, you won’t be explaining the basics to me. See why technical books need a ghostwriter who gets tech.
What does Safety Harbor give a writer?
A reason to stay put. I write about this town as well as in it: where to write in Safety Harbor, from the library to the pier to the oaks at Philippe Park, and a longer piece on the library itself, the best free workspace in town. There’s the bookshop across from the gazebo, five hundred years of selling the same spring water, and the Tocobaga mound under the picnic tables.
Plenty of people here arrived after the part of their life that makes the book. They built careers up north, raised families somewhere else, and retired to a place where nobody knows any of it. I wrote about that in retiring to Florida with a life behind you. Your neighbors have no idea who you were. Your grandchildren barely do. That’s the gap a memoir fills.
Everything else I’ve written about this area, the libraries, bookstores, writing groups and local history, is collected in my Writing in Tampa Bay hub.
Frequently asked questions about working with a Safety Harbor ghostwriter
Nearby and related
Local clients come to me from all over north Pinellas. You might also be looking at Clearwater, right next door, Palm Harbor to the north, Tampa, across the bay, or the wider Pinellas County area.
How do you start a book with a Safety Harbor ghostwriter?
Book a free call below. We’ll talk for half an hour about the story you want told, and if it makes sense, the next step is lunch. If you want to see my writing on your own material before you commit, the Book Discovery Intensive ends with a sample chapter in your voice.
Every year you wait costs you stories. The people who can confirm the names and the dates are getting older too, and I’ve written enough memoirs for clients in their nineties to know how fast that window closes. Book the call, and let’s get yours down while it’s still yours to tell.
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