From Trader Joe’s to Zombie Apocalypses: The Born to Write Interview | With Azul Terronez

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on the Born to Write podcast with host Azul Terronez, recorded September 11, 2019 and released November 29, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Off-air production chatter before and after the episode is omitted.

The tiers of ghostwriting

Azul Terronez: For people who don’t understand the world of ghostwriting, paint the picture. What does a ghostwriter do, and how many books do you think are ghostwritten?

Richard Lowe: There are several kinds of ghostwriters. Start with celebrity ghostwriters, which is not what I am: they make $150,000 or $200,000 to ghostwrite a book, they look for celebrities, and one or two projects keeps them busy for a year or two. Those are a lot of the autobiographies you see on newsstands. What I do is look for people trying to create themselves in their space: a CEO, and I pitched two CEOs today, a mid-level manager going for promotions, somebody starting a business. Their objective is a book they can hold and say: this is my book, I am the expert. The goal isn’t Amazon sales, though they usually make a few; it’s a marketing tool. Then you have ghostbloggers, and fiction ghostwriters: some of your more popular authors, especially the ones with many, many books that read slightly differently from book to book, hand a pile of notes to a writer who finishes the book. And at the bottom, the inexpensive ghostwriters on the freelance sites and Fiverr, where you usually get what you pay for.

From Asimov at six to the 4 a.m. cliff jump

Azul Terronez: It’s a huge leap from director of computer operations to ghostwriter. Where did the journey begin?

Richard Lowe: When I was six, I was reading Isaac Asimov, then another book, then another. His goal was to write 500 books before he died, and he hit 501, some outrageous number, on everything: science fiction, hardcore science, even Shakespeare. At six or seven I thought: I want to be just like him. Then I kind of forgot, because I was a kid. My mom was a library person, so we were at the library constantly, the sticker programs for books read, and then life got in the way and I shelved it.

I dropped out of college and got hired as VP of a computer consulting company back in the 80s, soon making good money managing computer projects. That company changed direction, so I became VP at another. Then I was senior designer for the North Las Vegas water district’s systems control and data acquisition system: any time a gate opened or a tank filled, that was my software, and that was 30 years ago, so I’d hope they’ve replaced it by now. Then I wandered into Trader Joe’s and became director of computer operations and technical services, and stayed 20 years.

That position was 24 by 7, literally. When my wife was very sick and in a coma, I was still on call; I took calls sitting by her bedside in the hospital. That became normal for me. The stress built and built, because we weren’t allowed to hire as the chain grew; we absorbed it into existing staff, and I got very good at hiring consulting help, because otherwise we’d have drowned. Then my manager retired, and the new manager had a whole different style and big plans, and still no staff coming. I took that opportunity to look at my body, my mind, and my emotions, none of which were doing well at that stress level, and decided it was time. I had money saved, so I jumped off the cliff and became a freelancer. I moved from California to Florida, about as far from California as I could get, and I like Clearwater: moderate, and genuinely diverse, whatever you hear on TV.

Eli, the wrestler, and the Afghani who ran

Richard Lowe: I started writing my science fiction book, which I’d been writing for a couple of decades, and went to a writing critique group, where I ran into a guy named Eli starting a ghostwriting company. He said, I could use a writer, and I said sure, not really knowing what ghostwriting was. A thousand bucks to write a book: wow, I thought. Little did I know.

The book was in worse shape than you can imagine. Eli did the initial interviews and barely took notes, then hired a rather famous female wrestler, who is also a ghostwriter, to continue it; she took her $700 and left, and we never heard from her again. I eventually contacted her; she’s a nice lady, and I got photos of her in wrestling gear, because I’m a photographer too. Then I took it over: a book about an Afghani man in the 1970s, just before the Soviets invaded. Talk about jumping into the deep end with lead weights, into a pool with sharks: I had to learn Muslim culture and Afghan culture, interviewing a man who barely spoke English and wanted to hand me everything in a single day of interviews before rushing back to Afghanistan.

One story from it. He was part of the government, and after the coup, he was under house arrest. He thought he’d wait it out and go back to work; he had no political aspirations. Then the phone rang, a voice he didn’t know: leave now. He said, I can’t, there are guards at the door. The voice said: take my word for it. Run as fast as you can, take your family, get out of the country. So he did. At the bank, the teller told him: don’t withdraw everything, they’ll know you’re leaving and arrest you. Take a thousand and go. He traveled down and out of the country. Years later, when the Americans arrived in Afghanistan, over 15,000 skeletons were found at the prison he’d have been taken to. He would have been one of them. That’s the kind of story you find when you ghostwrite.

I did two more books for Eli, then did the math: a thousand dollars a book is about two dollars an hour, or less. I told him I was leaving, and the very next day I picked up a $10,000 book, and the day after that, a $15,000 book. Two days. Okay: I can make it as a ghostwriter.

Since then, the interesting projects keep coming. One client wanted a book about Agile, a management style for development groups I’d never heard of, written as a novel: a consultant’s before, during, and after. Three quarters of the way through, he took a full-time job and was done with the book, and I got paid for the whole thing. That happens in ghostwriting, and it’s fine. The books I’m ghostwriting now tend to be artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and the quantum computing one especially is: oh my god, this is interesting.

The 4 a.m. schedule and the promotion ratio

Azul Terronez: Your bio says 5,000 to 10,000 words a day. How do you keep up that pace?

Richard Lowe: That pace is for a novel or a straightforward business book. On the AI and quantum books, I’m lucky to get a thousand words a day, and it’s a struggle, because I’m looking things up as I go. Here’s the day: I get up at four in the morning, because mornings are my most productive time. Morning chores, and by 4:30 I’m writing, for a couple of hours. And when I say writing, I mean writing, not editing. That’s the key to pace. Most writer’s block, at least mine, comes from writing a paragraph, fixing it, fixing it again, and again, and: stuck. Don’t. I call it vomiting on the page. Just vomit the words; you’re going to come back and edit them later, and you’d better, because they’re not going to be very good. In those two hours I get 1,000 to 1,500 words. Then a walk, then another sprint, maybe three sprints total, which brings me to about one o’clock.

Then the afternoon: promotion, three hours of it, heavy. Messages on LinkedIn, Twitter, emails, videos, all of it, promoting myself as a ghostwriter. Here’s the ratio for freelancers: if you work an eight-hour day, spend three of it promoting, every single day, or you’re not going to make it. They don’t come to you if they don’t know you exist. I do get people stumbling across my website and LinkedIn, because I rank decently on a few things, but you can’t depend on that. Last week I lined up 15 interviews with potential clients; this week I’ve been conducting them, finding out what book they want and what they’ll pay. All of those people are now off deciding whether to spend the money. If I hadn’t done the legwork, none of that would exist.

Ten copies, then ten thousand

Richard Lowe: My first own book was the passion book: computer security, my forte at Trader Joe’s. Audiobook, paperback, hardcover, Kindle. It sold about ten copies, and I wasn’t discouraged, because I didn’t know how to promote and it was something I had to do. Then more books, which kind of sold. Then a company called LinkedIn Makeover hired me, and for about two years I optimized LinkedIn profiles, around 300 of them, and wrote Focus on LinkedIn, still on Amazon. When it reached about 2,500 copies with 77 four-and-five-star reviews, someone told me: you need a BookBub advertisement. BookBub accepted me, which was hard then and is harder now, and the book went on to sell 10,000 copies and became a Kindle bestseller.

My real passion book is still the novel I’ve been working on forever. And the two little ebooks I sent you are passion projects too: I train people to write quick Kindle ebooks, 6,000 to 10,000 words, read in an hour. Write 500 words a day and you finish one in a month; if it doesn’t sell, you lost a month, not a year. There are one-page Kindle books, even three-or-four-line ones, that sell very well because they answer a question everyone wants answered. And my anecdotal feeling is that past 40,000 or 50,000 words, readers want paperback; the short ones they want on Kindle, ninety cents to $2.99, an afternoon read, a throwaway. But short means tight: a novel gives you room to be sloppy, and a short read gives you none.

Where the ideas come from

Azul Terronez: How to Create Your Own Zombie Apocalypse, The Unlikely Hero: where’s the inspiration, and how do you filter?

Richard Lowe: Walks. I walk around and look at things. I look at a building, maybe I watched CSI that day, and think: what if there was a murder in that building? Before long I’m building a mystery. I walk to the zoo: what if aliens landed and concluded apes were the intelligent species on this planet? They land in a zoo, try to talk to the apes, and let’s see what happens. It’s letting the mind go free. If ideas won’t come, prompt books exist, including mine: they start you off, and some are very good. Or use TV: you’re bored by a romance, so ask, what if there were a crime running underneath this? What would make this not boring? What about that side character who gets no airplay: what if Littlefinger had a son, how would that play out? You can’t publish in other people’s universes, generally, though Amazon has a program licensing fan fiction for some properties, and fan fiction is honestly a great on-ramp: the Twilight author started there, and you fall in love with writing because the characters are already built. And YouTube: the alternate-history channels like Alternate History Hub. What if Napoleon had won? Fine: what if Napoleon fled to America and started a revolt there? What if the American Indians had captured Columbus? History, your parents, your family: stories everywhere.

The editing system: out loud, then backwards

Azul Terronez: What does your editing process look like?

Richard Lowe: Since I vomited on the page, it’s rough. I make three passes through the book, front to back, reading it out loud, with a few days between passes, changing and shuffling. For complicated plots, like my 120,000-word novel, half done after 20 years, I’ll draw the timeline out: this character is here, then here, then here, so I don’t get the teleport problem you saw in the later Game of Thrones seasons, where Littlefinger is here and then suddenly there, like they have jet planes. That’s developmental editing: does the story actually work? Find the plot holes, the red herring that petered out, the subplot that needs finishing, the two-dimensional character who needs an arc. And the show-tell balance: when you’re throwing words on the page, you tell, “it was hot in here,” and one editing pass converts tell to show in the right places. Not everywhere: too much show is tedious, too much tell is uninteresting. You want the mix.

Then, at the end, I read it backwards: last paragraph out loud, then the one before it, then the one before that. Not for the story, for the errors. Reading backwards breaks the circuit in your mind, because you wrote it, you know what it says, and your mind glosses over the missing words and the wrong “there.” You’ve seen it: you self-edit, you’re absolutely sure it’s clean, and a month later the Amazon review arrives: “There are four grammar errors in here. One star.” And they never tell you where. Help me out, man. For a 60,000-word book, about average for my ghostwriting, the three passes take a week or so of reading aloud, and the backwards pass a few more days. Tedious, not hard.

Getting past the finished manuscript

Azul Terronez: Books go to die at the finished-manuscript stage. What’s your experience coaching writers past it?

Richard Lowe: First-book writers are focused on making the first book perfect, because everybody’s going to judge them on it, and one critical comment devastates them. First: lighten up. Second: it’s your first book, it’s not going to be good, just accept it. You’ll come back in three years and go, ew. So run the experiment under a pen name: make up a name, publish, see how it works, and if the book isn’t good, forget it; you didn’t write that. And keep genres under separate pen names. Westerns and romance need two different brands; I made that mistake, and a western-plus-romance brand does not work. The readers will find out. Plenty of successful writers started exactly this way and then kept the pen name because it got too successful to drop.

By the second book it’s a little better, by the third it’s starting to look good, and if you’re writing short Kindle ebooks you can buzz through a dozen while debugging your writing. Take a few classes. And I highly, highly recommend writing critique groups: get on meetup.com, and any city of size has at least one; if not, start one, like I did, and mine is still going four years later without me. What you get is specific, actionable critique. “The book sucks” is useless. “That character on page 43 acted completely out of character” is actionable: go to page 43 and fix it. Eight people is ideal, a dozen at most, or nobody gets time. Libraries have them, and libraries also have reading clubs where six people just read to each other around a table, no critique at all, which is a great unblocker. And yes, I hear all the introverts saying no; I became a computer programmer so I could be in a computer room. Look at me now.

The first rule of writing is: to be a writer, you actually have to write. And really there’s a second: you have to publish. Writing without publishing, so what? Get it out there, then write the next one, and the next. And start short. Don’t start with the great American trilogy; very few people have the discipline for that as a first act.

The closing: passion points

Richard Lowe: My two websites: thewritingking.com/ for services, ghostwriting and coaching, with a blog of about 200 articles, which exists partly to teach and partly because clients want samples, and there they are. And fictionmasterclass.com for the training packages: the four genre courses, from idea to selling ebook; show versus tell; the promotional courses, including using video and your smartphone to promote books; and the five prompt books.

And I’ll finish with this. You need to work, pay the bills, maintain the family. But find your passion point and scope out a little time for it. Writer, sculptor, photographer, and I was a professional photographer for many years, so I know that one, artist: squeeze out time and figure out a way to sell it. Handicrafts on Etsy, collections on eBay, phone photos as stock photography. Then expand: ebooks on weekends, and maybe eventually you don’t need the full-time job, or at least you’re having fun while you’re not having fun at work.

Azul Terronez: Writing is transformational work, and it’s been such a joy, Richard. We wish you much success, and everything we discussed goes in the show notes. Thank you for being on the show.

Richard Lowe: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.