Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: 2025.

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins The Art of Rising for a conversation less about the mechanics of ghostwriting and more about the human arc behind it: grief, reinvention, the slow death of a comfortable career, and finding your voice on the other side. He talks about leaving Trader Joe’s after 20 years, the ageism that met him in the job market, and how a camera carried a painfully shy man out of grief and into a community of dancers who adopted him. The craft and business of writing come up too, branding, target audiences, what AI can and can’t do, but the spine of the conversation is the courage to close one chapter and start another.

The Art of Rising is produced by The Omziel Healing Sanctuary in North Bergen, New Jersey, and hosted by Omar, who runs breath-work and ice-plunge work designed to push people into the present moment.

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Interview

Omar: Tell us a little about where you live and what you’re doing these days.

Richard: I’m in Clearwater, Florida, been here about 13 years. These days I’m a ghostwriter and a writer, and it’s a lot of fun and very fulfilling to help people get their message out.

Omar: You were working somewhere for an establishment, and then one day you said, I don’t want to do this anymore? Or was it a series of events?

Leaving a Good Job in His 50s

Richard: As with all things, it was a series of events. I was in tech for 33 years, first as vice president of one company, then another, then the Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s for 20 years. It was a good job. Made a lot of money, was fulfilled. But I got tired of working for other people, doing what they tell you. One day I decided I was done, had a big retirement party even though I was fairly young, took all my money and my time and moved to Florida, and said goodbye to all my dancer friends. I was a photographer, had a bazillion dancer friends. There was just a final straw that broke the camel’s back, and I closed that chapter and moved on to a new one.

Running Into the Wall of Ageism

Richard: It was tough at first, being a writer is not an easy career. I started by trying to find a real job, and the problem with real jobs is you run into ageism. I ran straight into that wall. There were always these invisible reasons why they couldn’t hire me. Ageism is invisible, it’s hard to prove, hard to pinpoint, and you just know it’s there. I was looking for a CIO position, and not having a degree got in the way too. My boss at Trader Joe’s had a music degree, what’s that got to do with computers? But because he had a piece of paper he got 30 years ago, that somehow made him better. I got tired of that attitude.

Omar: So tell me about the writing. Were you writing all the time, on napkins, on the wall, any chance you got?

The Grandfather Who Was a Hero

Richard: When I was 17, I finally noticed my grandfather. He’d always been around, but he was very introverted, a little curmudgeonly, that means grumpy. I decided I’d go talk to him. The family said don’t, you’ll get your head bitten off, maybe literally. But I talked to him, and what I found out was that he was a hero. He was in the Yangtze River Patrol before World War II, on a little boat in China. Then he was on Corregidor, where he was captured by the Japanese, and in the Bataan Death March, where 10,000 Americans and Filipinos were marched across the peninsula and half of them died. Then four years in a POW camp. I wrote a book for him, since lost, that was my first real attempt at writing. He liked it, and I got to understand who he was. One thing became clear: he could be as grumpy as he wanted. I hadn’t been through a prisoner-of-war camp. He had a license, not that he needed one.

After that I wrote little columns for news articles, then technical manuals, because nobody in tech companies likes to write. Even as a VP, I was writing. Finally it was time to turn it into a career, which I couldn’t do before because I had a family and had to make a living.

Grief, a Camera, and the Dancer Who Pulled Him Into the Tribe

Richard: While I was Director of Computer Operations, I was married for 12 and a half years to a Guatemalan lady. She got sick, I took care of her, and she passed away. I didn’t like grief, and I realized I was super introverted, which made it worse. So I decided to fix it. I picked up a camera and started taking pictures, first wildlife, all the national and state parks in the Southwest, then the Renaissance faires. I took tens of thousands of pictures that first year after she passed.

One day I’m photographing a belly dance show from the back row with a telephoto lens, very conservative, the way I dressed and carried myself. The lead dancer, Marjani, piercings everywhere, a tattoo on her arm she’d done herself, walks up to me. I’m thinking, oh my God, what’s going on. She puts an arm around me and says, Richard, we love your pictures, and we love you. We want you to sit in the front row, center, from now on. One thing: we like the photographers who sit up close, not the ones who sit back with a telephoto lens, that weirds us out. You’re an honored guest now. You’re part of the tribe. You’re one of us.

Before I knew it, I was photographing dancers all over Southern California. About 1,200 dance shows and 300+ Renaissance faires, hundreds of photo shoots. And at one point I realized I didn’t need the camera to talk to people anymore. The shyness was gone. As you can tell, I’m not shy anymore. Still introverted, but not shy.

The Drive to Florida

Richard: When I decided to leave, one of my dancer friends, a Bharatanatyam dancer, that’s a very traditional classical Indian dance with bells on the legs, trained by a classical master, didn’t want me to drive alone. So for three days we drove to Florida and she helped me put everything back, then flew home. On Thanksgiving she came back to show me what a vegan Thanksgiving is. I wasn’t thrilled, I’m not a vegan, but it was okay. As she flew home, I was thinking, boy, this shy kid sure has become unshy. Then I picked up my computer and started writing books.

Omar: How many books have you ghostwritten?

Over 100 Books, and the Difference Ghostwriting Makes

Richard: I’ve ghostwritten 54+ and written 113+ of my own that I’ve published. Of course, like most writers, I’ve started a lot more and discarded them along the way. The ghostwritten ones don’t have my name on them, you’d never know I wrote them or helped. Sometimes it’s coaching where I help them write their own, sometimes it’s ghostwriting where they say, here’s the topic, go write it and give it to me when you’re done.

Omar: One of your books is Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author. Tell us about that.

Richard: It walks through the steps, not how to write, but how to take your writing skills and actually make money as a self-published author: how to build a brand, promote yourself, put a book together, whether an audiobook helps. A book isn’t worth much, unless it’s a vanity project, if you don’t use it. Most authors hit what I call the wall of marketing. They want to write a book, they’re not marketers, and they hit that wall: how do I sell this to more than my mother, my father, and the six copies I bought myself? They have to learn to promote it and make a cover.

Omar: Tell us about branding.

Branding Is a Daily Practice

Richard: Branding is a constant process. You don’t write a book and you’re done. You do it every weekday, because people don’t remember you, new people come in, and LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t show your posts to everyone. You want to be consistent. My brand is this shirt: a bright, cheery, happy guy who knows what he’s doing and can write about anything, not a stuffy conservative guy. Then my colors, my website. I get enough customers from it to justify it, and the number of hits is a vanity metric, what matters is how many customers it brings.

Pick the social channel you actually like. If you like TikTok, that’s your channel. I use LinkedIn because I’m a business person, and I worked for a LinkedIn marketing company for two years and did about 350 profiles when I first got to Florida. Don’t depend on one platform, marketing changes fast, so be a little distributed and be ready to move. And a book is good for every brand. If there are 50 bazillion executive coaches, how do people find you and know you’re good? You write a book. It doesn’t have to be long, 75 to 200 pages, telling your stories, your motivation, and most of all what people get from you.

What’s In It For Them

Richard: The only time follower count matters is if you make money directly from it, like the so-called influencers. For people like us, followers are a vanity metric. The important thing is conversions, and conversions start with getting the right leads. You have to narrow down exactly who your target audience is. If it’s single moms over 45 starting a new career, that’s who you target, and that makes your brand obvious. If you don’t have that target, you’re marketing to everybody, which never works unless you’re Coca-Cola throwing away billions.

My friend Royce Blake, a great copywriter, keeps drumming this into me: you start with what’s in it for them. He’s nice, but he’s blunt, he’ll tell you straight. He looks at an ad and says, you missed the what’s-in-it-for-them. Most LinkedIn profiles are broken because they talk about the person. Nobody cares. Talk about what they get from you. The process, you do an ice plunge, that’s not what’s in it for them. What’s in it for them is the health they get from it. For a book, what’s in it for them is a bigger brand, paid speaking engagements, a TED talk, better engagement with the people they sell to, a place in libraries. Whatever their goal is, the book helps it.

Omar: Now they’re saying, I wrote a book with AI. It’s not that simple, and it’s kind of dry.

Why AI Can’t Write Your Book

Richard: If you want a book that’s passionless, obviously not written by a human, all information and no emotion, use AI. And if you don’t want to spend money, use AI. You’ll get a passionless book that reads like AI and does nothing for you. There’s a robotics term I apply to writing: the uncanny valley. You look at a robot that’s supposed to be human and think, there’s something off, but you don’t know what. Apply it to CGI, the new Lion King, all this realistic animation, but something’s wrong, the shadows don’t match the sun, the hair moves wrong. Your unconscious mind catches it. Writing is the same. I can look at AI text and tell you within two or three seconds it’s AI. Somebody sent me a book to review, I looked and said, that’s AI. He said, how’d you know? Uncanny valley. He did a solid edit, took out a lot of the AI, and it was much better.

What you do is write it yourself or use a ghostwriter, and use AI as a digital assistant: put a chapter through it and ask, does this say what I want, is it consistent, is there duplication, in fiction do the characters stay in character. Don’t have it do the work, have it make your work better.

Inside the Writing Process

Richard: My process is a pile of interviews up front, where I learn who you are, who your market is, what they want and why, what you want and why, and we mash them up so they match. Then I worry about emotions: what emotion do you want the book to leave people with? A political book, maybe fear. A science fiction horror novel, terror. A coaching book, hope, that there’s hope for them now. I find that out in the first few weeks of interviews.

Then we start writing, and it’s collaborative. I write an outline, send it, you say yes or no, and I write a little more. My pace is a steady few hundred words a weekday per book. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a good clip and the book gets done in a few months. Then one revision on the whole thing, then it goes to the editor, then the publishing process, traditional or self-published. The key to surviving this, to writing multiple books at once including my own, is to not procrastinate. The times I’ve procrastinated, I’m suddenly behind by a week and shoveling out thousands of words a day per book. Watch a marathon: the runners go at an even pace they can maintain, then sprint at the end. Writing works the same way.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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