Writing Is a Business: The Common Pitfalls That Sink Most Authors

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins Biblio Files, hosted by a longtime friend and fellow author whose own book series features a ghostwriter protagonist. The conversation covers Richard’s path from self-publishing into full-time ghostwriting, the discipline behind writing ten thousand words a day, the real causes of writer’s block, and the two walls that stop most writers: marketing and getting clients.

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books under his own name and ghostwritten over 54 more for clients. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

From self-publishing to ghostwriting

Host: Welcome back to Biblio Files. I’m so excited about my guest today. I’ve known Richard for a while and I’ve always been fascinated with what he does. In fact, the main character in my book series is a ghostwriter who makes her living writing for other people and not taking credit for it. Richard also coaches people on how to get their books done. Richard G. Lowe Jr., welcome. First of all, you didn’t start out as a ghostwriter. You started by writing your own books.

Richard Lowe: I left Trader Joe’s and was wondering what to do next. I’d always wanted to be a writer, and I’d always written technical manuals and stories, so I just started writing books. I ran into a webinar where a woman was offering a series of courses on writing nonfiction books, so I joined and wrote several. One became a bestseller in its Kindle category, not a New York Times bestseller, but it sold about 10,000 copies, which jazzed me up. I wrote a bunch more; the first was Focus on LinkedIn, and a second Kindle bestseller was How to Sell on eBay.

Richard Lowe: I started working for a guy who was starting a ghostwriting company, a nice guy who didn’t really understand business. We went our separate ways because I realized writing a book and getting paid just a few thousand dollars wasn’t worth it. The same day I left, I pulled in a $15,000 book contract, and within a week a second $10,000 contract. That’s when I realized there was no way I’d make a living as a self-published author, but I could easily make a living as a ghostwriter. So I decided to do both.

Eight books at once, and finding the passion

Richard Lowe: Writing my own books makes some income and it’s fine, but I found writing for other people was my passion. Then a Chief Marketing Officer at a Fortune 50 company in France hired me to write a book about artificial intelligence, and it was loads of fun. I started pitching for those kinds of jobs, and now I’m writing eight books at the same time, all on AI, digital transformation, robotics, cybernetics, advanced subjects, plus a young adult novel I just finished and a contract for children’s books. My career’s going very well. I can make a living as a ghostwriter full time and write for myself as a hobby.

Writing 10,000 words a day

Host: You’re writing over 10,000 words a day, where most writers don’t write that in a week. How do you produce so much?

Richard Lowe: I turn off social media, cell phones, all distractions, and I’ve built the perfect writing environment. I make sure I walk, stay healthy, and get my sleep. I only got three hours of sleep last night, and my writing went down to nothing, beyond writer’s block, just because I didn’t get enough sleep.

Host: So your level of health directly affects your writing.

Richard Lowe: Your health, your mental environment, the people around you, whether they’re encouraging or discouraging, all of it. One of the things I coach my clients on is writer’s block, usually a two- or three-hour session figuring out exactly what’s causing the block and working out solutions.

The real causes of writer’s block

Host: What are some of the causes you’ve discovered that keep people from writing at their best?

Richard Lowe: Number one is not considering writing as a profession. People treat it as something creative they can do when they feel like it. But if you’re an accountant, you go to the office and do accounting whether you feel like it or not. If you’re a writer doing it professionally, you just do it. Today I have a bit of a migraine and it’s a grind, but I’ll still grind out a couple thousand words after this. Treat it as a job, a fun job, with set hours, set times, and set goals: how many books do you want to write this year?

Richard Lowe: Another technique: if you get blocked on one book, work on a second one, in a different genre. If you’re a mystery writer, try a science fiction book at the same time; the mystery is your primary and the science fiction is more of a hobby, and switching loosens the creative juices. Taking walks is a big one. So is the fixed distance between your eyes and the screen, especially during this pandemic when you stare at a screen all day; it hypnotizes you. Get up every hour or two, walk five minutes, look at the walls, talk to somebody. And turn off every piece of social media and every phone. When you’re writing, you’re writing. You tell your family that unless the house is burning down, and it better really be burning down, you don’t get interrupted.

An appointment with yourself

Host: I always tell people who work from home that they need to make an appointment with themselves. These are my office hours, and I’m available to chat and play at these other times. You have to train the people around you to respect that.

Richard Lowe: Exactly. When somebody asks me to do something during that time, I say I have an appointment, and it’s true, because I write it down. It’s an appointment with myself, and I have to stay in integrity with myself and my goals to accomplish anything. I use Google Calendar with alarms, and I have my client names up so I switch between them during the day. The idea is to make the perfect writing environment.

Covert comments that lock you up

Richard Lowe: Another cause of writer’s block is covert comments, negative comments that aren’t actionable. You give your book to somebody and they say, it’s okay, or it wasn’t my genre, or I think you need to fix the main character. Those are general and not actionable, so your mind spins: what’s wrong with it, why didn’t they like it? You grind and grind until you’re locked up. You have to ignore non-actionable critical comments.

Richard Lowe: An actionable comment is great: John is acting out of character in these three paragraphs in chapter three, you can fix that right where it is. But you’re a terrible writer, you had grammar errors, is useless. I got an Amazon review saying I had grammar errors, so I sent the book to a proofreader: three errors in a 400-page book. Big deal. Even Stephen King has grammar errors.

Host: Professional writers, years after being accepted as brilliant, still have errors in their books. I don’t think it’s possible to write a perfect book. With my book I did nine complete edits, and two weeks after I sent it out I found an error I had to correct. Probably nobody else caught it.

Mercedes Lackey: don’t read your reviews

Host: Thanks to something you and I did together, I interviewed Mercedes Lackey, and she gave me three pieces of advice. The first was, don’t ever read your reviews. She said Hemingway gets bad reviews, Dickens gets bad reviews, Tolkien gets bad reviews. Write the best story you can, and let the ones who like it love it and leave the others alone.

Richard Lowe: I don’t read mine either. That was really good advice.

The wall of marketing

Richard Lowe: The biggest wall writers face, and what I have to coach almost all my clients on, is marketing. A lot of people go into writing because they tend to be introverts; it’s easier to talk to a computer, and they don’t always interact with people well. But marketing requires a lot of extroversion. When I left Trader Joe’s and started writing, that was something I’d never done. I was a computer geek and a manager, but I didn’t have to deal with the social nature of marketing at Trader Joe’s, and I had to spend more time on that than anything.

Richard Lowe: I can write 10,000 words a day, do interviews, all kinds of things, but the marketing took me a while. Bonnie was helpful with that, because she’s a marketing expert. The important thing about marketing is you can figure, figure, figure all you want, but you have to actually do it, and do it regularly.

Getting clients: what trips up most ghostwriters

Host: I know you’ve got a whole system, which is a show for another time.

Richard Lowe: I have a system for getting ghostwriting clients, which is what trips up 90 percent of ghostwriters. They don’t know how to get clients, and that’s the most important thing about being any kind of freelancer. A ghostwriter is just a type of freelancer. For a fiction writer, a client is the person who buys your books; for me, a client is somebody who’s going to pay me to write them a book or an article.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

How do you write 10,000 words in a day?

By removing every distraction and treating the writing environment as a system: social media and phones off, good sleep, physical health, and encouraging people around you. It also depends on treating writing as a profession with set hours and goals rather than something to do when inspiration strikes. Health matters directly; a bad night’s sleep can drop the output to nothing.

What actually causes writer’s block?

Most often, not treating writing as a job, so it loses to whatever else comes up. Other causes include staring at a screen at a fixed distance for hours, which is fatiguing, and non-actionable criticism, vague comments like it wasn’t my genre that set the mind spinning. The fixes are set hours, regular breaks and walks, working on a second book in a different genre when stuck, and ignoring feedback you can’t act on.

Should you read your book reviews?

Many working authors say no. The advice Mercedes Lackey gave was to never read reviews, because even Hemingway, Dickens, and Tolkien get bad ones. Write the best story you can, let the readers who love it love it, and don’t let the rest occupy your attention. Chasing every negative review is a fast route to writer’s block.

What stops most writers and ghostwriters from succeeding?

For writers in general, it’s marketing: many are introverts who’d rather talk to a computer, and marketing demands extroversion and consistent action. For ghostwriters specifically, it’s getting clients, which trips up an estimated 90 percent of them. A ghostwriter is a type of freelancer, and the core freelance skill is a reliable system for finding the people who will pay you to write.