ISBNs, Contracts, and the Ghostwriter’s Many Hats | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 256

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s monthly third-Tuesday appearance on episode 256 of The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by caller Paul Carve, broadcast live on April 16, 2019, lightly edited for readability. Segments outside Richard’s hour are omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction

Sage the Poet: Welcome to episode 256 of The Exceptional Scribble Show. Tonight’s focus: ghostwriting, with tips from the accredited bestselling author Richard G. Lowe Jr., The Writing King. Many of us are gifted and love to write, but we don’t know the routine to follow to get a manuscript approved, published, and selling, in ebook, paperback, hardback, or audio. Welcome back, Rich.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for having me on the show again.

The self-publishing steps, in order

Richard Lowe: Let’s start with what you need to do to publish a book, and I’ll take self-publishing, since that’s what I’ve done mostly. Obviously you need a finished manuscript. Send it to an editor, always; if you’re broke, a writing critique group or friends can help, but make sure that step happens. Then a proofreader, which is different: editing looks for problems with the structure; proofreading catches grammar and spelling. I often get a book proofread twice, depending on how serious I am about it.

Then the cover. You can start on it earlier. Get a professional cover producer, or use pre-made cover packages where you drop in your own image and text. I advise against making your own in Photoshop, because most writers are not graphic designers, and here’s the thing: a cover is different from graphic design. A cover has specific text placements and font sizes that make it sell, and a general graphic designer won’t necessarily know those. And whether you go low-end or high-end: make sure you own the rights to the graphics. Quite a few designers pull images off Google, and then your book is selling well and you get a takedown notice from whoever owns the art. You usually won’t get sued if you take it down right away, but now you need a new cover overnight, and it’s always embarrassing, especially when you thought the graphics were yours.

ISBNs, library codes, and who needs them

Richard Lowe: Before you publish, decide about ISBN numbers. You only need them for physical books; Kindle doesn’t use them, unless you’re selling ebooks into libraries, which pay a royalty per read, and then you do need them. If you buy your own, each country has exactly one seller; in the United States it’s Bowker, at $125 each, a pack of 10 for a few hundred, or a pack of 100 for around $500. I bought the pack of 100. Actually, I wound up buying two. That’s how many books I’ve published. You need a different ISBN for each edition: hardcover and paperback are two numbers, and a major new version needs a new number, though fixing proofreading errors doesn’t.

For libraries there’s also the LCCN, and the only way to get one is to create a publishing company and apply; the instructions are on the government site. And that little block of text under the copyright notice, the cataloging data you see in library books: that can be purchased for around a hundred bucks, and most libraries need it to know where the book goes on the shelves. All these little details. But if all you want is to publish: use the free ISBNs that come with KDP. I recommend owning your own, because then you control it, but for your first novel, use theirs; you can always republish later with your own number. You don’t lose much.

Formatting: styles, and format last

Richard Lowe: You also have to format the book, and each output is different: paperback and hardcover are close, the Kindle version strips formatting way down because Kindle is primitive, and the aggregators, the services that publish your book onward to Apple, Kobo, and Nook for you, have their own requirements. So while you’re writing: use styles. Simple, consistent styles, normal headers. I’ve edited manuscripts with no styles at all, manually bolded, and they’re a real problem, because when somebody decides they want italics instead of bold, you change every instance by hand. With styles, you change the style and everything changes.

And do the final formatting last. You’ll end up with as many as five or six copies of the book: Kindle, aggregator, paperback, hardcover, and if you then find a grammar error, you fix all five and re-upload all five, which is annoying, especially across many books. My order: publish the Kindle version first, because it’s the easiest and shakes out the kinks. Then the aggregator, which finds more kinks. Then paperback and hardcover, which goes through IngramSpark for the hardcover.

Then audio: go to ACX, create an account, and producers will audition for your book. On the royalty share plan it costs you nothing; the narrator takes the larger share of royalties up front for doing the work. You get the files, they go up, done. And remember every format takes a different cover: Kindle is front-only, paperback needs front and back at a different size, audio is square. When I find a cover artist, I have them perfect the Kindle cover first, then produce all the other formats at once; they give a reduced rate because it’s easy additional business for them.

Now, I made that sound complicated, and in its simplest form it isn’t: for your first book, just publish it on Kindle, the easiest of all, then the Kindle paperback, the next easiest. If you still feel motivated, look at the other formats. Don’t get into the complexities until you need to; you can always unpublish and republish for libraries later, or keep both versions.

And understand: at that point, you haven’t even started. You’ve reached the third-of-the-way point. The next part of the adventure is getting the book to sell, and we did a whole show on marketing earlier. One timing note: Amazon gives a new book a little boost, so the time to promote the heck out of it is at launch. Promote six months later and that boost is gone. It’s not huge, but it helps.

Falling into ghostwriting: the origin with numbers

Sage the Poet: Let’s switch to ghostwriting.

Richard Lowe: I fell into ghostwriting almost by accident. I’d just retired from my full-time job to be a writer, with a little nest egg and no hurry, doing some freelance writing, my blog, some Facebook. At a writing critique group, working on a novel, I met somebody starting a ghostwriting company, and he hired me to write three books. He paid me a thousand bucks a book, and I figured out pretty quickly I was earning about three dollars an hour. Ridiculously low. So I finished the books and went out on my own, and the day after I left his company, I landed a book for $15,000. Within a week, a second book for $10,000. Okay, fine: I picked the right career, because I can make money at this. And I did.

The seven hats

Richard Lowe: Ghostwriting is a challenging choice of career, because you wear a lot of hats.

First: salesman, and you sell hard. You’re out there every single day pitching to whoever buys your services. I sell to CEOs of large companies, which means figuring out how to get the CEO of a $500 million company on the phone. Today I was on the phone almost seven hours, talking until my voice started going, about people who want books. When you call somebody out of the blue and ask them to spend $15,000, you’d better talk well, and what they primarily want to hear is confidence: that you know what you’re doing and will hold their hand all the way through.

And structure the payments: payment plans, but always paid in advance. Writing the book over eight months? Eight monthly payments, each paid before that month’s work. You’re not their bank; you’re not their loan officer. Walk into most companies without that and you’ll end up on 90-day terms, and why are you letting them hold your money for 90 days? My contracts say no refunds, and nobody has ever once questioned it; I’m one guy, not a company with deep pockets. And the payment plan protects them too: taking $15,000 up front and walking after a week gets you chased; taking it in $1,000 or $2,000 increments means their risk is low, which makes them more likely to buy.

Second: marketer. You’re building the picture of yourself as competent: a portfolio. No portfolio? Write articles on your blog and self-publish a book, so they can see what you do, and keep a little of this going every day.

Third: advisor. Clients ask: what’s the process? What do I do when the book’s done? You need to know the entire pipeline and explain it up front: editor, proofreader, cover, publisher. If they know at the start, they’re fine. They get really upset if they discover at the end that a finished ghostwritten book still needs an editor.

Fourth: writer, obviously. Fifth: editor of your own work; even though it goes to an editor, deliver it as clean as you can make it.

Sixth: project manager. A book is a project with milestones. If it’s six months at 3,000 words a month, don’t write those words in the last two days of the month. And you manage the client too: their interviews, their meetings, their time.

Seventh, sometimes: counselor. On biographies and memoirs, they’ll hit personal pain, the father who did this, the mother who did that, and they might start crying, and you work them through it. Learn to change the subject: okay, good, I understand, that’s what I need for the book, let’s move to the next section. Otherwise you’ll be a counselor burning hours you’re not getting paid for.

So it sounds simple, “I write books for people,” but like any freelancer you’re selling a service, promoting it, marketing it, producing it, and managing it. After you’ve gone through it once or twice it becomes routine. But price for all of it. The writing is not the whole project. If a 10,000-word novelette takes 40 writing hours, add the promotion, the management, the interviews, the research, then taxes, then expenses down to the printer ink. Thirty bucks an hour sounds great until the feds and the state take ten of it, then LinkedIn Premium and your tools take more, and now you’re at $15 and you might as well work at McDonald’s. Figure out the real rate, or you’ll drive yourself into the ground juggling 20 projects just to survive.

Choose your clients like you’d choose a boss

Richard Lowe: I’m on my 28th ghostwritten book now [54+ as of 2026], and at this point I know the questions before they ask them, I know their concerns before they know them, and I know how long they’ll take to find the money. And here’s one of my final points: choose your projects wisely, and put yourself in a condition to turn work down. If writing isn’t paying your bills yet, keep another income source, because you do not want to take the abusive client, or the book slamming a spouse, because you need the money. I work about 25 leads a week, 25 phone conversations about new business, and out of those I’ll turn down three and land two or three books. Sometimes what they really want is a counselor. Sometimes they’re just wacko; you run into the whole mix. The client is kind of your boss, because they’re paying you, and the beautiful thing about freelancing is you get to choose your boss. Choose badly once? Finish, get out, and choose better next time.

Names on covers, pen names, and the ghost’s portfolio

Sage the Poet: Can the ghostwriter ever also be the co-writer, with their name known?

Richard Lowe: Yes. Sometimes, especially if you have a name, they’ll want it on the cover; I’ve got a couple of clients who want mine there. Most of the time your name appears nowhere, and they don’t want anybody to know you helped. What you can do is take a chapter or two and sanitize them, change them beyond recognition, for your portfolio, and sometimes clients grant permission to show their book privately to prospects. That’s the eternal problem of the ghostwriter: you’re the ghost. That’s why it’s called ghostwriting.

Sage the Poet: And pen names: can you ghostwrite under a pseudonym?

Richard Lowe: There’s no reason you can’t be an author and a ghostwriter at once; I am. Sixty books under my name, twelve under pseudonyms, and twenty-eight ghostwritten. And if the subject matter is controversial and the client wants a name on the cover that isn’t yours, you can use a fake name, as long as your client agrees. It’s between you and your client.

The contract, clause by clause

Sage the Poet: How does a ghostwriter’s contract differ?

Richard Lowe: Let me look at one of mine. You state what you’re writing: a book about this subject, 30,000 words, at this price, and what happens if it goes over. If your billing service charges a fee, mine adds 3.5 percent on credit card payments, the contract says the client pays it, or pays by direct deposit and avoids it. A no-refunds clause. All invoices due and payable immediately. Additional expenses, flying to their location, research books, memberships, paid by the client, agreed in advance. All interviews will be recorded, in the contract, so consent is clear regardless of state law. A termination clause: we can terminate each other at any time, shake hands, and go away; money is non-refundable, and the client keeps everything written, because it’s already paid for. Ownership rights: the client owns everything they’ve paid for. A confidentiality clause. An indemnity clause, and this one is fairly important: the client protects you if he’s sued for copyright infringement or the like. And an arbitration clause: disputes go to arbitration instead of court. That’s how simple my contracts are.

And one more thing: set your rate and don’t negotiate it. If $5,000 is your price for a 20,000-word book, it’s $5,000. Let them negotiate and they’ll negotiate you down, and professionals don’t do that; they know what they’re worth. If you must give ground, get something for it: more paid in advance, your name on the cover. I used to negotiate rates, and I learned it doesn’t buy you anything. If they push, ask whether they negotiate with their doctor, their lawyer, or their plumber. Or whether their boss renegotiates their salary once a week. Come on. I have to earn a living.

A caller’s poems

Paul Carve (caller): I have poems that haven’t been published. What’s the first thing to do? Find a publisher, or publish them myself on the internet?

Richard Lowe: You can create a WordPress blog and publish them there, submit them to writing contests or anthologies, publish them on Facebook, just about anywhere. It’s really up to you.

Sage the Poet: And Mr. Carve, your poems have a narrative, epic style; one poem could become a short storybook.

Paul Carve: That’s a possibility, because I’m thinking about writing some storybooks also.

Richard Lowe: And with that, I have another call in a few minutes, so we’ll pick up self-publishing guidelines again next time.

Sage the Poet: Until next third Tuesday, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Richard.

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.