How to Monetize Your Writing: Freelancing, Content Mills, and the Hustle | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 249

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s monthly third-Tuesday appearance on episode 249 of The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by co-host Warrior Queen of Poetsalm, broadcast live on February 19, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Music breaks and segments outside Richard’s hour are omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction and a bio correction

Sage the Poet: Episode 249, and tonight’s theme: how to monetize your writing and professional writing services, with tips provided by the accredited published author himself, Richard G. Lowe Jr., The Writing King. My bio sheet says 63 books published and 16 ghostwritten, and I’m certain those numbers have increased. Richard will make any corrections needed. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Lowe: Thank you, I’m doing fine. And on the correction: I’m working on my 24th, 25th, and 26th ghostwritten books right now [54+ ghostwritten as of 2026]. Three at a time.

Sage the Poet: Congratulations. And we’re bracing for a wintry storm system tomorrow on the East Coast; schools are already announced closed. We’re going to stay warm indoors and write.

Richard Lowe: Good. This is good writing weather.

What is ghostwriting, and how big is the demand?

Richard Lowe: Ghostwriting is: let’s say you wanted to write a book, but you didn’t have the time or didn’t know how to write. You hire a ghostwriter, and the book publishes under your name. Probably every celebrity book and politician book you’ve ever seen is ghostwritten, almost certainly, because celebrities don’t know how to write. It’s not their job, and they don’t have the time. They hire somebody like me. I tend to write business books, books on artificial intelligence, technical subjects, because my niche is technical and management: I was a manager, so I know a lot of different ends of the business.

What have I ghostwritten? Technical genres like artificial intelligence and computer security, plus fiction, a science fiction book, memoirs, business and franchise books, biography, a little bit of everything. There are things I won’t write, because I have a sense of ethics. But otherwise, I can write what the client needs, using Google, interviews, and conversation. Haven’t done a movie script yet. And by the way, lyric ghostwriting is extremely common: quite a bit of the lyrics you’ve heard were ghostwritten by somebody else. Greeting cards too.

Freelancing: the easiest way to monetize writing

Richard Lowe: If you’re looking to monetize writing, one of the best ways is to freelance, and ghostwriters are freelancers: contractors, 1099 in the United States. You’ll hear the term “gig economy” a lot now, and that’s all it means: companies hiring contractors instead of employees, hiring you for exactly what they need, and then you’re done. It’s an excellent way, while you’re struggling to publish and get your own books known, to make a living and still be a writer.

That’s what I do. I write LinkedIn profiles; I’ve written over 300. I write blogs. There’s a lady who doesn’t write strong English, so I review her documents monthly and make them land the way they’re supposed to. If it’s in writing, I do it, as long as the rate is good.

But you have to hustle, because you’re selling yourself. Get off your behind, get on LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever, and into the real world: talk to people, shake hands virtually or physically, and ask what they need. You’ll find somebody who says, well, I’ve got a website. You look at it, and oh, it’s terrible. How much to rewrite it? You name a number, they counter, you agree, and you do the copy. Keep doing that until you have more business than you can handle. If you don’t hustle, the business doesn’t come to you. You go to it.

And the same is true for your books: readers don’t come to you unless you have a big name. Publishing a book and waiting is like dropping it in the middle of a library: nobody reads it, because nobody knows it’s there, and it’s buried by all the other books. Put up the signs, point the arrows, speak about it, and you’ll sell books. You go to the readers.

The strange allergy to the word “work”

Richard Lowe: Here’s a phenomenon I run into selling training to writers: the moment my product description says “it takes effort,” nobody wants the training. I guess they want to wave a magic wand and have money come in. But if you were going to be a massage therapist or a mechanic, you wouldn’t just pick up a wrench or a bottle of lotion and declare yourself in business. You’d train for months or years. Why would writing be different? Know your tools: Word or Scrivener, and grammar, spelling, and style, inside and out. Know how to publish, how to market, how to promote, how to hustle. It happens over time, and sometimes you supplement the income along the way, which is exactly why I freelance.

Content mills: the arithmetic of a bad deal

Sage the Poet: Any suggestions on websites where freelance writers can find assignments?

Richard Lowe: A lot of people go to the content mills, and there’s a whole list of those sites. Here’s what they mean: you’re competing against everybody on the planet. A typical project gets 30, 40, 50 bids, and the client picks something close to the lowest. That means you’re often working for a dollar or two an hour. Somebody wants a resume for $10. Somebody wants a whole 20,000-word book for 200 bucks, and gets a hundred bids from people who want that 200 bucks, and the winner spends weeks earning it. I don’t suggest content mills at all. They’re a great way to waste time and not make money. Some people will say they made a ton on those sites, and it’s relative: one of my ghostwriting gigs makes me what 75 or 100 of those freelance gigs would. I’ve got the credentials to command that now, but you build those, and you don’t build them at two dollars an hour.

Instead, pound the pavement like you would for a job. Decide what you write, say, blog articles about management. Search LinkedIn for managers. Connect, and send a message: I’m a writer, and I’d like to help you out. Maybe include a sample: I took something off your website and rewrote it; what do you think? Now you’re competing against nobody, or maybe one other person, because you contacted them out of the blue and they’d barely thought about it.

Then build reference chains. You write a good article; you ask, did you like it? Great: can I use you as a reference? Will you introduce me to Bill? Then you write Bill: I did some work for Bob, Bob liked it, and he suggested I talk to you. Bill sees Bob’s name, assumes it’s fine, probably never even calls Bob, and before you know it, you’ve got a contract. That’s the difference between active and passive: on the mills, you place an ad and wait; out here, you’re in control, you’re making an impression, and people love to talk to people. Thirty hours on a content mill blog for 20 bucks? You could have worked at McDonald’s and made ten times that. You can do better.

And I’ll confess: this very week I’ve been busy and lazy about hustling, and there’s no business coming in right now. None. All that means is I need to get out there and move the fingertips, the mouth, and the butt muscles, and the business comes back. It’s cause and effect.

The bundle, and the Yeadon replay

Richard Lowe: I have a special running right now: go to the number one, heckofawebsite.com, and you’ll find all of my training courses in one package, normally over $600, for $67. How to make a living as a freelance writer, build your own book empire, show versus tell with examples, how to write fantasy, mystery, romance, and science fiction books, Amazon marketing services, promoting with smartphones and video, and five prompt books, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, and historical, 2,500 book ideas in total. Or get anything individually at fictionmasterclass.com, and my services are at thewritingking.com/. The site says the special runs one day; I’ll probably leave it up the rest of the week for replay listeners, and then the price goes up. And at the top of that page is a free bonus: the full replay of the webinar I did for the Yeadon Public Library on self-publishing, free to listen to.

Advice for new writers: tools, scams, and writing to be judged

Sage the Poet: Anything specific for our millennials, those just starting out, on monetizing their writing?

Richard Lowe: First: find good training and soak up as much as you can, and know your tools. Grammar, your language, your style. I like the Chicago Manual of Style; it can be intimidating, and there are simplified versions all over the internet. Understand the proper way to form sentences, what semicolons are for, and do it right; these are your primary tools for communicating, and you need to be as close to perfect as you can get. Then read books about writing. An excellent one I use, pulling it off the shelf now, is How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card, the man who wrote Ender’s Game. The Science Fiction Handbook by de Camp is another. On fictionmasterclass.com I keep a full bibliography page, a good 50 or 60 books I don’t sell, just links, everything from forensics and detective procedure for mystery writers to a stack of books on show versus tell, because that concept is genuinely hard.

Second: watch out for scams. There are a lot of people who’ll tell you: write this book in an hour, have it online in two, and you’ll be making thousands within a week. You can’t. It requires work, and here’s the rule: if something doesn’t require work to make a lot of money, it’s a scam. Just like that. I fell for one myself: the puzzle book training. The guy who created it was the first one in; he sold maybe 20,000 copies of his puzzle books, and then he sold the training about how easy it was. I made puzzle books in a couple of hours, published in three, and sold maybe five copies. Didn’t even earn back the price of the training. If it sounds too good to be true, it is; nobody in Sierra Leone, or whatever country they pick this month, pulled your name out of a hat to give you a million dollars.

Third, and this is the core of it: to be a writer, you have to write, and I mean write professionally. I believe in journaling and blogging for their own sake, but the difference between amateur writing, and I don’t mean that as a derogatory term, and professional writing is that professional writing is judged. You get critiqued. You get rejections. And because of that, you get better. So write to publish, from the beginning. Start a blog and publish there. Guest blog for people. Sell a few blogs, even for a few bucks. Try a magazine, then a newspaper, then a client, then your own books. Each one gets judged, and each one teaches you: this didn’t sell, the client didn’t like that, what needs to be corrected? You’re competing now, and it raises you a level. And do it daily; publish like a crazy person. It sounds like a lot of work because it is, and if writing is your passion, that shouldn’t be a real problem.

And the other toolset is marketing and promotion, which shocks most writers; it shocked me. My first move was to buy a bunch of ads. That didn’t work, so I dumped in more money, because I’m stupid sometimes, and more. Finally I stopped bashing my head on the wall and started marketing instead, and now it works better. Don’t buy ads first. Buy ads after your book has an audience.

Peacekeeper and the projects in progress

Sage the Poet: Is there any current book project you’d like to share details about?

Richard Lowe: I’m working on a science fiction novel called Peacekeeper. It’s set in the far future, about an interstellar empire, and some battles and things. I’m also working on a young adult novel about interdimensional travel, and I’m studying a romance set in Rome; I’m trying to hit all the different genres. Plus the three ghostwritten books in progress: one on artificial intelligence, one on computer security, and one on management. I try to keep busy. You know: idle hands.

Sage the Poet: On computer security: does anything of yours touch on identity theft?

Richard Lowe: I have a book on Amazon called Safe Computing is Like Safe Sex: if you don’t practice it, it ain’t safe. Go to coolauthor.com, which goes straight to my Amazon page, and you’ll find it, written at a layman’s level: how to secure your computer, prevent identity theft and fraud. Grab it and you’ll get a lot from it. There are books on LinkedIn there, how to sell on eBay, and coloring books, pretty good ones, if I do say so myself.

Sage the Poet: And children’s literature: is that a potential project in the not-too-distant future?

Richard Lowe: It’s something I want to do, because it’s actually one of the more lucrative areas out there, and children’s books aren’t hard to write. The catch is you usually need an illustrator, since they’re almost always illustrated, so it becomes a co-authorship, 50-50 or so. I haven’t confronted that yet. But I did coloring books, so I suppose I could do children’s books too. I’m a little busy.

Closing

Richard Lowe: Contact me through the form at thewritingking.com/. Training is at fictionmasterclass.com, along with the bibliography page. The $67 bundle is at the number-one heckofawebsite.com, including the show-versus-tell course, and it won’t last long, so take advantage of me. And no shout-outs, but I’ve been doing about a radio show a week lately, including one with 15 million listeners. Staying busy.

Sage the Poet: Richard, this was an enrichment forum tonight, and we thank you for all you gave. Every third Tuesday, ladies and gentlemen. We bid you adieu until next month.

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.