Grief, Belly Dancers, and Taking Control: The Full Life Story Interview | Live Your Life with Chris Baker

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on Live Your Life with Chris Baker, broadcast on W4CY Radio and iHeartRadio on January 24, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Pre-show and post-show chatter is omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction

Chris Baker: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Live Your Life with Chris Baker. You’ve been listening to me talk for four or five months, and over the next few weeks I’m bringing guests onto the show. Today I’m pleased to introduce Richard Lowe, a ghostwriter and blogger. Richard, welcome to the show.

Richard Lowe: Thank you. I’m happy to be here; this should be fun.

Chris Baker: Our audience is used to me talking about how we can choose our lives and control our own destinies by understanding our why. Tell us a little about you and what you do for a living.

Richard Lowe: I’m a freelance writer, a ghostwriter, a blogger, and I do LinkedIn profile optimizations. I started about five years ago after a different career, and it’s been very successful so far. It’s certainly a lot less stressful than working for other people, although there’s a different kind of stress.

The journey: from startup VP to Trader Joe’s

Chris Baker: First question from the chat: what brought you to writing? Give us the summary of your journey, successes and failures.

Richard Lowe: I’ll give you the story of my life, so to speak. I went to a junior college for about a year, and then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, as the Godfather liked to say: somebody doing a computer startup in the eighties offered to make me vice president. So I moved to LA and became a vice president of a company. That sounds really impressive, but it had four people, so it wasn’t that impressive. I moved on to another company, again as a VP, and at the same time I worked on the water systems for the Las Vegas valley, Ojai, and New Haven, Connecticut: I managed the projects and programming for those water systems. And then I settled in at Trader Joe’s for 20 years, and got married.

Grief is not a good friend

Richard Lowe: Then life changed, and this part should be inspirational to some people: how I came out of it. I married a wonderful lady from Guatemala. She got sick, and she was sick for eight years, and then she passed away in 2005.

I believe grief is not a good friend. Grief is somebody you do not invite over for tea, and you get rid of it as fast as you can. So in 2005 I asked myself: what do I do now? My entire life for eight years had centered on keeping this lady I loved alive, and working. Half of that was gone. I’m a creative person, so I went out to photograph: nature, shows, Renaissance Faires. And at the Renaissance Faire, I started photographing belly dancers, of all things. At a Renaissance Faire, belly dancers are fully covered, long skirts, traditional Moroccan or Tunisian style, very formal and conservative.

One of the dancers, a dear lady named Marjani, came up to me. She’s covered in tattoos, and I was this conservative guy, and she was one of the strangest-looking women I’d ever seen. She put her arms around me, and I thought: oh my God, I’m going to die. And she said: we’ve noticed you taking pictures of us, and thank you for putting them on the internet. We love them, and we’d like to invite you to join our group as our official photographer, and to introduce you to other dancers and entertainers.

That was my entry into becoming the belly dance and Renaissance Faire photographer for Southern California, all the way up through Northern California. For the next eight years, I worked at Trader Joe’s and photographed: weekends flying somewhere, evenings at shows, always front row center. Big names: Egyptian dancers, Tunisian dancers, wrestling matches, rodeos, everything. And then one day I realized I hadn’t felt any grief in a long time, and I decided I didn’t need to do that anymore.

I still wanted to be creative, but here’s the thing about photography: everybody has a camera now, usually two, since phones have a front and back. Everybody thinks they’re a photographer, and you basically can’t make money at it. I tried a few weddings; they’re very hard to make a living at unless you dedicate your life to it. So I was thinking about writing, and then things changed at Trader Joe’s, and I decided maybe it was time to pursue the dream I’d had since I was six years old and read my first book: to be a real live writer. I quit Trader Joe’s, jumped off the cliff, and moved from California to Florida in a matter of two weeks. Set up house and started writing.

From $4 an hour to a real business

Richard Lowe: I became a ghostwriter to begin with, and wrote three ghostwritten books for almost nothing: $1,000 for a 30,000-word book works out to about $4 an hour. But I got the experience, and I had a cushion, so I wasn’t going to starve. I wrote 63 books of my own [113+ as of 2026] and published them on Amazon: 27 nonfiction, available in paperback and audiobook, plus coloring books, puzzle books, and quite a few fiction books. Then I went deeper into ghostwriting, and since then I’ve written 23 ghostwritten books [54+ as of 2026], none with my name on them. A couple have become very popular, in the tens of thousands of copies range, on subjects from artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things to cleaning supply companies and dentistry, plus memoirs; there’s lots of room for memoirs. I enjoy getting to know someone, learning their message, learning to write in their voice instead of mine, and making something they like. And getting paid for it, which always helps.

The self-publishing walkthrough

Chris Baker: Questions from the chat: was it hard to get published, and how does one get published best these days?

Richard Lowe: Self-publishing, other than the technical aspect, is really simple. We’re at the beginning of the golden age of writing: you can write something, publish it, and people will read it. Sometimes one person, sometimes tens of thousands. One of my books sold almost 10,000 copies, several thousand of those in three days. Traditional publishing is a whole different ball of wax: much more difficult, much slower. I have a client going through it now; he was accepted almost a year ago, and it’s only now about to be published, and he had an in. If I have a finished manuscript, I can self-publish in two hours.

Here’s the process. You write a manuscript, get it proofread, run it through beta readers, and make sure it’s quality. A manuscript can be three pages, believe it or not, and a three-page ebook will sell if it’s the right subject, or hundreds of pages. You research Amazon first to see what sells. Then you log into KDP, fill in the fields, upload the manuscript and a book cover, and submit. More than likely they’ll say it doesn’t meet their standards, which are technical standards: the cover’s the wrong size, text runs off the edge, weird characters in the file. You fix it; the first time, you’ll go around two or three times. Then voila, you’re live on Amazon.

The first time is a hellacious process because you don’t understand anything: what’s an ISBN, what does this field mean? Once you know, it’s easy. And the really cool thing: other than paying somebody to make the cover, it’s absolutely free for paperback and ebook. A hardcover runs about 40 bucks. An audiobook, you can do free on a 50-50 royalty split with the narrator.

Chris Baker: Elaborate on the money, because people might think it’s free and they keep all the profits.

Richard Lowe: Depending on your price and how you publish, you get a 35 or 70 percent royalty, and that’s one of the huge advantages of self-publishing. Traditional publishing pays 5 or 10 percent if you’re lucky and have a name. Amazon subtracts a few fees, like the Kindle download fee, which grows if your book is full of pictures. But sell a book for three bucks and you’ll net roughly a buck and a quarter, a buck fifty. You get real money, if your books sell.

Snoopy, Heinlein, and Asimov

Chris Baker: You said you dreamed of writing from age six, when you read your first book. What was it?

Richard Lowe: It came from the Scholastic Book Club; growing up in the sixties, the schools had these book clubs where you picked out books and they billed your parents, and I got truckloads. The first was Peanuts: Snoopy and Charlie Brown. Then when I was about 10, I found a book my grandmother had stored in the basement: Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein. Very adult, not explicit, but adult themes. It took me a while, but I read it cover to cover, and I was hooked: whoa, a whole new world. Then I read Isaac Asimov, and I wanted to be just like him, because Asimov could write about anything: science, Christianity, Shakespeare, you name it. He published on the order of a hundred books, and his goal was 500 before he died.

The AI book and the dentist who said “just write it”

Chris Baker: From a listener: what’s the most interesting subject you ever wrote on as a ghostwriter?

Richard Lowe: Artificial intelligence, and I can only be vague, because it’s ghostwritten. The book is about the effects of AI on humanity: five, ten, twenty, a hundred years down the road. Will it be like the Terminator, or something much more benign? The author wanted to show it will be benign and helpful, and that book was amazing to write.

Here’s how ghostwriting works: the person who hires me is the knowledge expert, or they give me one, and I’m the writer. Generally I don’t know the subject going in. When I wrote a book about dentistry, I knew nothing about root canals; I learned. I couldn’t perform one, but I know a lot more about why they’re needed and how to prevent them. That project was interesting: I interviewed the client for two hours, got her life story, and then she said: write the book. I said we need more interviews. She said: nope, I’m done, you just write it. So it was Google research all the way down, and the clincher is always: will she like it? She liked it.

The biggest lesson: take control

Chris Baker: What’s the biggest learning from your life so far?

Richard Lowe: To take control, and not give in to the concept that you are controlled. When my wife passed away, the temptation was to give in to grief, let it wash over me, experience it the way some therapists and books say. You don’t have to do that. You can take control of your life. When I left Trader Joe’s, there was a lot of fear: I’d worked for corporate America my entire life, and suddenly I was on my own as a freelancer, which is a scary thing. The lesson: whatever your position in life, take control.

A small recent story. About a month ago I was feeling down; December is typically slow in freelancing. And I saw a video about a guy who baits scammers. A Nigerian scammer sent him the typical scam email, and instead of deleting it, he got into a conversation and said: tell you what, I’ll send you a camera, and if you take some good pictures, maybe we can make something of it. He taught the man remotely, 6,000 miles away, how to use a camera. The guy took some genuinely good pictures, and they published a book that made a thousand bucks on Amazon. And the photographer made him promise to spend half on his community: he helped build a school, bought backpacks for the kids, put in a pump to draw water from a well. And here I am with my first-world problems, and this man makes a dollar a month. I make a lot more than a dollar a month, I have my own place, I have clean water. I don’t need to complain. He took control of his life, and now they’re working on a second book together.

And there’s a quadriplegic man who runs a company built on blogging that makes tens of millions a year. No arms, no legs, speaks through a machine, runs the company. There’s no reason to sit back and let things happen to you. Take control.

Chris Baker: There’s a speaker, Nick Vujicic, born with no arms and no legs, who talks to millions of people a year, married with kids, and does enormous good through his foundations. And listeners, note: I haven’t primed Richard with any answers. In previous shows people have asked whether we’re really able to take control, because the conventional thinking is we’re controlled by others.

Richard Lowe: And these days, with the government shutdown and the news blah-blahing frantically about everything, it’s easy to think everything’s caving in. But if you look at the data, we’re in the most peaceful time the planet has ever known. Crime in the United States is down enormously from decades past; I had to research those figures for a computer security book I wrote, and the FBI publishes the papers. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to walk anywhere at night; it means the statistics show crime is down. We just don’t think we’re doing well. Turn off the news, go out there, take control of your life, and be something. If you fail, do something else, and if you fail at that, do something else.

Chris Baker: Failing is essential if you’re going to grow, as long as you learn from it. Fail, learn, regroup, go again.

What’s next, and the second lesson: get out

Chris Baker: From a listener: what will you be writing next?

Richard Lowe: For myself, I’m getting more into fiction. The way I like to learn is to write a book about the subject I want to learn, fully researched: so I wrote how to write a mystery novel, a romance, science fiction, and fantasy. Now I’m going to write novels in each of those areas. I’ve written four novels so far, one published, plus several shorter published books, and I’ve got a space opera: outer-space shoot-em-up, like Star Wars, Westerns in space. I want to write some romances too. And I did an interview series of my own with 20 or 30 authors, one a week for a while, learning their writing styles and how they learned; I think I’m going to pick that up again.

Which is the second big lesson, and you didn’t ask: get out and talk to people. You can get out virtually or physically. I tend to be very introverted; I know you can’t tell, but I was painfully introverted growing up. Photographing dancers broke a lot of that; they don’t let you be introverted, believe me. But I still hold back on public speaking and large groups, so what do I do? I joined Toastmasters and learned to speak. I go to networking meetings where business people get together. I interview authors and entrepreneurs, no charge, just to find out what they know, like you’re doing with me now. And it underlines something: most people aren’t dangerous. When you’re an introvert, the underlying thought is that people are dangerous, undefined why: maybe the parents taught it, maybe school, maybe the news. They’re not. I’ll go up and talk to a biker gang member; I don’t care. It’s fun finding out people’s cultures and how they think.

Chris Baker: So it’s about moving out of your comfort zone.

Richard Lowe: Several points there. One: have a code of ethics, boundaries you won’t cross. If somebody offers me a book promoting illicit drug use, I won’t write it. Part of being happy is having a code of ethics that works. And two: any box you’re in, you put there. You can blame your parents, and believe me, I know how that is, but that was years or decades ago, and it’s irrelevant now. The bars can look like metal, and they’re not. Getting out of the box can be really scary, like making friends with Marjani and the dancers: all different cultures, all different beliefs, and they’re all just people, and the differences are fascinating and wonderful.

The biggest influence: his sister

Chris Baker: Who’s been the biggest influence in your life?

Richard Lowe: Possibly my sister. She has five kids, and the third, a young man named Carl, is autistic. The system wanted to put him on drugs; she said no and homeschooled him. She loved being with children so much that she started her own school, and now she owns a nonprofit school in California with thousands of students going through every year and 22 teachers. She’s epileptic, and it doesn’t matter. Her kids are all in universities, all at or near valedictorian. She’s a role model for me. And Carl became one of the best digital artists I’ve ever seen; he’s an incredible person. I’m just glad he dodged the bullet of the drugs.

Chris Baker: That’s influence coming through adversity: taking a life-changing event and building a positive future from it. From the chat: can everyone find a purpose?

Richard Lowe: Of course. Everybody has a purpose, and they can pursue it, and it doesn’t necessarily mean quitting the nine-to-five. One of my best friends in California decided her purpose is her children, and they’re growing up wonderfully: respectful, with their own minds, disciplined without ever being hurt.

My purpose took me a while to figure out, and it’s actually not writing. It’s getting a message to other people. I like communicating: on a podcast, in writing, even in photography. When I photographed dancers, I communicated color and swirling capes and beauty, and the dancers saw that it wasn’t just a picture; it was a communication. As a ghostwriter, you can hire me to deliver your message, whatever it is, as long as it doesn’t cross my ethical boundaries. That’s my purpose: delivering the message.

Goals, giving, and advice to a teenage self

Chris Baker: What are your dreams and aspirations for the future?

Richard Lowe: My goal this year is to ghostwrite 24 books; production-wise, I can do that. I want to become a ghostwriter people seek out in the industry, and I’m on the way. Some people have approached me about turning a couple of my shorter stories into movies, so I want to see where that goes. And basically, to help people and help this planet get better, through writing and delivering messages. The message I most want to deliver: the world is not nearly as bad as it’s portrayed by the media, the politicians, and the people with vested interests in making it appear bad. Ignore that. You don’t have to give in to it.

Chris Baker: I love that it’s about other people. There’s a Zig Ziglar line: help other people get what they want, and you’ll get what you want.

Richard Lowe: I wrote a book on networking, and one of its biggest rules: you have to give, and eventually it comes back around, though not from the person you gave to. It creates a vacuum, and something flows in. With one caveat: don’t let yourself be taken advantage of. There are people who will use you until you turn into a mummy, and I’ve had it happen more than once. Give without expecting, spot the users, and be cautious. I’m giving to this podcast; maybe something comes back, maybe not, and I won’t be disappointed either way.

Chris Baker: Be go-givers, not just go-getters. Last question: if you could go back and talk to your teenage self, what advice would you give?

Richard Lowe: Don’t waste so much time being stupid. Everything felt important when I was a teenager: I had to have this thing, that material thing. None of it was important. What’s important is latching onto the goal, the dream, and moving toward it: building yourself up, getting educated, and not falling for the conventional dream of a bigger house and a better car. Pursue your dream and include other people in it, because you can change the world, even your little piece of it, and you don’t have to be obnoxious about it. I was a pretty obnoxious teenager. You don’t have to preach at people or wave your finger in their face. You can just talk to them.

Closing

Richard Lowe: You can find me two places. Fictionmasterclass.com has 14 training classes on writing, inexpensive PDFs, 50 to 100 pages each: how to write a romance, the difference between show and tell, which I had to hit my head with a brick to understand, so I wrote a book about it. And thewritingking.com/ is my services site: if you want a book ghostwritten or blogs written, that’s where to go, plus over 200 articles of mine. The “the” is important; put in just “writing king” and you’ll probably get Stephen King, a very great writer, and I aspire one day to be a tenth as good as he is.

Two philosophies I follow. I believe in human rights: humans have natural rights whether or not they give them up, and it’s up to you to keep yours. Go to humanrights.com, run by Youth for Human Rights International; there are 30 rights listed with little videos on each. And I follow an ethical code called The Way to Happiness: 21 common-sense, non-religious precepts, like don’t kill, don’t steal, and one that’s interesting: be competent. Whatever you’re going to do, make the effort to be competent at it. And I believe in granting other people their own beliefs. I can listen to somebody who believes differently, understand where they’re coming from, and not have to accept it. Some of that is slipping away nowadays, and it’s important to allow other people to be themselves.

Chris Baker: Richard, it’s been a pleasure. Everybody listening: fictionmasterclass.com and thewritingking.com/. And remember: don’t live in fear of failure. Live in fear of regret. Bye for now.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

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