Vanity Publisher Warnings and What Writing Actually Pays | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 233

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s monthly third-Tuesday appearance on The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by callers Cane Spade and Sandra Wilkes, broadcast live on October 16, 2018, lightly edited for readability. The show’s later segments after Richard’s hour are omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction

Sage the Poet: Good evening, and welcome to The Exceptional Scribble Show. Tonight’s feature artist in the spotlight is an accomplished writer and published author best known as The Writing King, Richard G. Lowe Jr. His services include blogging, book coaching, book cover design, book formatting, copywriting, ghostwriting, LinkedIn profile optimization, branding, publishing, self-published author services, and technical writing. Rolling out the red carpet: welcome, Rich.

Richard Lowe: Hello. I feel welcome. Thank you.

Sage the Poet: We’re honored to have you every third Tuesday. There are so many newcomers on the scene as published authors, many publishing for the first time with no experience, and they can become prey to what they call vanity publishers. What would you say to prepare that group so that doesn’t become their fate?

How do you avoid vanity publisher scams?

Richard Lowe: First, understand that there are several kinds of publishing. You can go the traditional route, which usually requires an agent, knowing people in the industry, writing a proposal, and shopping it around; it’s time-consuming. Then there’s the totally self-published route, where you do everything yourself, and that can be intimidating: Amazon can be scary, there are lots of questions, and who knows the answers? So what people wind up doing is searching the web for publishing companies. There are some good ones and some bad ones, and it’s really hard to tell.

The problem with so-called vanity publishers, and they tend to call themselves hybrid publishers now, is that you pay for the publishing, and you pay a lot. It’s like the car dealer who wants to sell you the undercarriage coating and the chrome covers that cost him three bucks and cost you a thousand. Classic vanity publishing means you pay everything: you might pay five thousand dollars and receive a thousand copies in the mail, a pallet full of books in your garage, and now good luck, you get to sell them. You wander the neighborhood with a sales box. Don’t ever do that. Amazon does print-on-demand now; there is no pallet in the garage anymore. Never do vanity publishing. That’s my advice; I don’t even go there.

The hybrid or small publishers can be useful if you’re really intimidated and just don’t want to deal with it. You can get a publishing package; it should be a few hundred dollars, under a thousand, to publish on Kindle and paperback. BookBaby does it relatively inexpensively, and there are others who do the work for you.

And here’s the thing you’ve got to look out for most from a so-called book publisher: signing over all the rights to the book. If you do, you can’t do anything else with it without getting the rights back. You might have to buy them back. You might have to beg. You don’t want that.

The remote publishing walkthrough

Richard Lowe: Self-publishing is really not that difficult, and I have a service where you buy my book coaching and I actually connect to your computer and walk you through doing it. It usually takes a couple of hours. I’m there saying: okay, enter this, enter this, do this. No, no, don’t press that button. Once you’ve learned it, you do it yourself next time, or you hire me again for the second one, and by the second time it’s old hat. That’s very valuable to writers, because they don’t have to worry about it anymore, and it empowers them to do it themselves and not be at the beck and call of some publisher. If you use my service, it’s your book. We create your account together, I explain everything as we go, and when we’re done, you’ve got a book up and ready to go. You handle promotion yourself, and I can help you with that too.

Sage the Poet: That’s quite alluring: I can consult with you online, and you walk me through step by step. That service is best referred to as book coaching?

Richard Lowe: Yep. And my book coaching service can be anything. If you want to figure out how to write something, I can help. I’ve got one guy in Israel; we work an hour a week, I give him assignments, and he goes off and does them. One assignment might be: create this character and the character arc. We talk about what that means, he comes back, we fix it up, and we go on to the next thing. We can publish, I can help promote. You’re buying hours of my time, and I help you the best I can. I’ve done everything from ebooks to paperbacks to hardcovers to audiobooks, fiction and nonfiction. You name it, I’ve done it. I can almost certainly help you; in fact, I can say I can really help you.

Sage the Poet: We have many university students who have to write term papers: they’ve done the research but aren’t sure how to structure the format their professor requires. Do you provide that service?

Richard Lowe: That’s not generally something I do: writing tutor for a very structured academic format, dependent on the school. I tend not to do that. Though if somebody needs the service, they shouldn’t hesitate to call, and we can talk about it.

Sage the Poet: Do you do referrals if you can’t provide the service yourself? Is there a fee?

Richard Lowe: If I know somebody who will do it, there’s no fee. I’ll just refer them. It’s part of being in business.

Should new authors write what’s trendy?

Sage the Poet: If an up-and-coming writer wants to appeal to a younger audience, say 15 to 35, and stay with what’s trendy: would you recommend urban fiction, or something more autobiographical?

Richard Lowe: Autobiographies are very hard to sell. Use caution: unless you’re famous, who’s going to be interested? Your family, maybe your friends, and that’s it, unless there’s something very significant about you. It can be fun and fulfilling to write an autobiography; I’ve written one, and I didn’t publish it. But it’s a tough sell.

Fiction has a much bigger audience and market than nonfiction, depending on the type. I’ve been leaning more heavily toward fiction lately, and I do short fiction: eight to twelve thousand words, something I can write in a week or two, publish, and go on to the next one. I’ve got customers doing full-length novels; one is up to 50,000 words, and we get together every single day, an hour before this show in fact, writing it together. Another is writing a science fiction book from Israel. Another starts tomorrow: she doesn’t know what she wants to write yet, only that she wants a book, and she’s already paid for the service.

You have to do research. Look on Amazon at what’s selling and whether a niche is saturated. You might look at dystopian urban future novels and find that millions have been published: there’s no way your book climbs those charts, so skip it. Or you might find a niche with very little in it, and that can also be a bad choice, because people aren’t looking for it. Eventually you find one in the middle: selling well, but not saturated, and there are tools to help you do that. Then you write the novel in that area.

The other way is to write what you’re interested in. Interested in romance? Write a romance novel. Your first one isn’t going to sell. Your second will sell a little. Your third starts to sell, and your fourth sells more, because you have to write a series. Never count on your first one selling. Ten thousand books are published every single day on Amazon. You have to build up loyal readers who like your stuff, and that’s building the platform: Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, loyal followers who love your work and tell everybody about it. Then you become more known, and your books start to sell.

That’s why, when I coach authors, I tell them: don’t agonize over your first book. Get it proofread, make it as professional as you can, but don’t agonize. It’s not yourself. Just get it out there. And here’s the beauty of self-publishing: when you publish your third or fourth book, you can go back and fix your first one, and republish it. You’re all set.

Cane Spade’s question: how do I monetize my writing?

Sage the Poet: We have a caller: he is the CEO of DSR Fire Ink, a member of the literary artist community, and published author of Awaken the Poet.

Cane Spade: Good to be back; I’ve been out of the radio scene. As far as the Writing King: what can he tell me about monetizing my writing? What writing jobs are out there?

Richard Lowe: The most important thing is to promote yourself and your brand. First, figure out what you’re selling. Second, figure out who you’re selling it to, and make it very precise, like auto parts stores in midtown LA. The more precise, the easier it is to promote, because you can’t promote to everybody: you don’t have the money, and not everybody cares. Then you build a platform. I use LinkedIn a lot: build a LinkedIn page, find blogs related to you, create your own blog, and start creating a presence online. You can do all of it for free or hire people. And then you promote. Barnum said, and I’m paraphrasing dramatically: without promotion, nothing happens. That’s what 99% of authors have trouble with: they have to build their name, not their books. Who are you, and why do I want to buy a book from you? I have to trust that if I spend my $12.99, the book does what you promised.

That’s how you monetize a book you’ve written. The other thing you can do is use a book to monetize you. When people hire my ghostwriting services, they’re not looking to sell the book on Amazon, although they do. They’re looking to use the book to sell them: to get speaking engagements, to speak to the media, to open doors, because an author is looked up to in society. My ghostwriting isn’t cheap, and they won’t make back what they pay me unless it happens to become a bestseller, and they don’t care, because they’re not doing it to sell the book. They’re doing it to sell themselves.

Cane Spade: Did you ever write for any magazines? Paid articles?

Richard Lowe: I have not written articles for magazines. That’s really not my interest. The reason is that you usually get paid something like six months later, and as a freelancer that doesn’t work well; you’ve got to build up that stream of money coming in. As a consultant, I typically get paid right away. It’s simply a matter of economics for me.

What kinds of writing pay best?

Cane Spade: What do you consider the most profitable in your field?

Richard Lowe: Ghostwriting is by far the most profitable. Somebody comes to me wanting a whole book; that’s a couple of months at least, with a large sum of money associated with it. I do a dozen of those a year, and I’ve made six figures in a year. Blogging is probably the least profitable, and I don’t do many blogs anymore, because it’s become a commodity: people want to pay five, ten, twenty bucks for a blog, and it’s not worth the time. LinkedIn profiles have been pretty good; I do a lot of those, because the work is fixed and stable and I’ve done it many times. And I do training packages that teach writing: how to write science fiction, how to write fantasy, little packages around 25 bucks each. They sell well on the affiliate side, and the cool thing about affiliate marketing is there’s really no limit; it depends on how big a list you’ve got.

Cane Spade: I know a ghostwriter, and he was making some nice money from it. I’m thinking if I can get into ghostwriting, I wouldn’t mind getting paid for it.

Richard Lowe: The hard part about ghostwriting is finding clients. That’s the hard part of any business: finding clients willing to pay enough to make it worth the time.

Cane Spade: These job websites, though: some of them want you to pay to be on the listings. I didn’t like it. I thought it was some kind of scam. If you want a job, why do you have to pay to get a job?

Richard Lowe: They have limited value, if any, and they’re borderline scams. You would never, ever pay them for that possibility. They pay you. The way those should work: say you charge $100 an hour; they take 20% of that to refer you to customers. There are no upfront charges at all. If you get an upfront charge, you’re getting scammed. Just don’t do that.

You can put up your shingle on Contently and the other websites; those just shop work out to customers who need it. You look through the list: this guy wants a paper for a hundred bucks, this guy wants a blog for twenty, you decide if you want it, you bid, and you get it or you don’t. A lot of people do that to build a portfolio. They don’t pay well, but while you’re building the portfolio, that’s fine. Then you contact bloggers once you have a portfolio and a presence, and you network. Go to the local networking groups, like BNI, and meet people who need writing.

Articles for magazines are a hard market with a lot of competition until you have a name, and you get paid after publication, which can be months down the road. That’s difficult when you’re trying to pay the rent.

But your most lucrative form of writing besides ghostwriting is going to be copywriting. There are classes on the web, and if you learn to be a copywriter, you can pretty much get whatever fee you want. Copywriters write advertising copy, websites, things like that, and a good copywriter can command 200 to 500 dollars an hour. Ghostwriting is hard to get into because you have to find the clients; if you want to make a living, jump into copywriting.

And on the low-paying article work: when you’re talking 30 bucks for an article that took you four to six hours minimum, once you take taxes off, you’re talking two or three bucks an hour. Go work at McDonald’s and make more than that.

Sage the Poet: I’ll say from my own freelance background writing for local papers and an online magazine: I started at maybe thirty dollars per article and it grew to fifty, and what I liked was that I didn’t stop at one. I went from one newspaper to another, then a magazine, and then they started coming after me. The name builds a buzz in that circuit, and when their staff writers were away, I’d get the call: we’ve got a celebrity red carpet at the Ritz-Carlton, come cover it. Keep knocking on a lot of doors.

Richard Lowe: That’s it exactly: you’ve got to hustle, and you’ve got to network.

The Yeadon library booking moves forward

Sandra Wilkes: Good evening, everyone. This is Sandra Wilkes calling in. I apologize for missing the beginning; I’m just coming from a funeral. Mr. Lowe, I have been talking about you for the last month. Do I have it right if I’m saying 63 books published under your name?

Richard Lowe: I have published 63 books under my name and about 20 more under pseudonyms [113+ authored as of 2026].

Sandra Wilkes: That’s exactly what I’ve been relating to people: you need to speak to this gentleman. And the ghostwriting?

Richard Lowe: Correct. I’m a ghostwriter primarily.

Sage the Poet: Sandra, I told Rich you were interested in booking him, so something can be established at the Yeadon public branch library by way of the internet: a writers’ conference with him as keynote speaker via webinar. He’s open to that; he’s not traveling physically at this time, but he does conferences by way of the web.

Sandra Wilkes: That would be fine, and I would like to speak with you directly. Give me a day or two, maybe Thursday; I can share names of authors who may be interested in speaking with you as well, and I’ll call the library for the director’s availability so you can connect and he’ll have your information. Maybe that webinar can be done. Anything is possible, right?

Richard Lowe: Anything is possible. Send me something on the contact form, or she’ll send you my phone number and you can call me up, and we can talk.

Sandra Wilkes: That’ll be fine. Thank you so much for the time, and I can always go back and listen to the recording for what I missed.

The question of going traditional

Sage the Poet: My co-host, Warrioress Queen Zepora, has a completed urban fantasy series and has had challenges finding the right publisher. How might you assist her?

Richard Lowe: Well, I’ll be honest: I’ve actually never gone to a traditional publisher, so I’d be learning at the same time. My understanding is you write a proposal and send it to an agent; the agent reviews it, and once the agent is fine with it, it gets shopped around to publishers. Writing those proposals can be a hefty project: the ghostwriters I know charge about ten to fifteen thousand dollars to write a book proposal, because there’s a lot of market research involved. You basically have to prove the book is going to sell probably fifty thousand copies, show what the market is and what your social platform looks like. Unless you know somebody in the publishing industry who can help you.

That’s not something I’ve pursued. I’m not thrilled with the traditional route, because it takes a long time. I like doing the book, getting it up, and going on to the next one. Traditional can take a year: one of my clients went traditional, we finished the book in February, and it’s not even through the publisher yet. It’s at the publisher, but they haven’t finished proofreading and editing. Those are my thoughts on that.

What subjects can a ghostwriter take on?

Sandra Wilkes: Since you spoke about the ghostwriting: what were the storylines? Fiction or nonfiction, or any special subjects? Most people have experienced something and want to make awareness for other people, the community. Is that a story a ghostwriter can write for that person?

Richard Lowe: Of course. That’s what I tend to do. I can write almost anything. I’ve got one guy I’m doing a science fiction book for. I do business books. I’ve written a book for a cleaning supply company. I’m doing a dentistry book, all the way up to high technology, artificial intelligence, things like that. And I’ve done a biography of an Afghan politician, which was very interesting. The thing to do is contact me and we have a conversation, and I’ll let you know if I feel I can be helpful. I don’t want to get into a project I can’t help with, but I certainly want to hear what you have. And if I can’t, I’ll give you a reference to somebody who can. I know a lot of ghostwriters, and we give references to each other when we can’t do the work.

Sandra Wilkes: You answered that beautifully, because it’s a variety of things; you just don’t know what somebody’s going to need. And you refer someone when you’re not the expert. I appreciate that.

Closing

Sage the Poet: Rich, in closing, any final remarks before we transition to the free publishing tips hour?

Richard Lowe: I’ll talk to you all in a month: third Tuesday next month. Have your questions ready.

Sage the Poet: That’s Tuesday, November the 20th, at 8 p.m. The Writing King will be back. Thanks again, Rich.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for having me.

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.