The Night Before the Yeadon Webinar: Fiction Masterclass and Making a Living as an Author | The Exceptional Scribble Show

This is the complete conversation from Richard Lowe’s call-in appearance on The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet on December 4, 2018, the night before his Yeadon Public Library webinar, lightly edited for readability. Music breaks and show segments outside the conversation are omitted.

The introduction

Sage the Poet: Ladies and gentlemen, the moment of truth: rolling out the red carpet for a very special feature tonight, published author, professional writer, The Writing King himself, Mr. Richard G. Lowe Jr. Good evening, Richard.

Richard Lowe: Good evening. How are you today? I’m doing very well. I was just putting together the notes for tomorrow’s show.

Sage the Poet: We are so very excited. Everyone tuned in: this is the very first live webinar at the Yeadon, PA Public Library. You can join on location, for those in Delaware County or the city of Philadelphia, or you can join online. Richard, share how everyone can access the webinar tomorrow evening.

Richard Lowe: The link for the webinar is a Zoom link, and it will be published on the show’s Facebook page so it’s easy to find. It starts at 6:30 and runs about an hour and a half. I have quite an agenda, so I’ll probably talk most of the time, but I will leave time for questions. It will be recorded, and there will be a download available, so if you miss it, you can catch it later; I’ll send the link afterward. And there’s a phone number for people who’d rather call in than connect on the web; I’ve put that on the Facebook page as well.

What the webinar covers

Sage the Poet: What is the topic for the webinar?

Richard Lowe: The topic is how to make a living as a self-published author. I’m going to go through the basics, not so much of writing or publishing a book, but of how to actually turn your authorship into a living, whether part-time or full-time. Because that’s what I do: I write for a living, with multiple streams of income, freelancing and books. This is aimed at the person who writes books.

What do you need to do? How do you build a name? What is your author platform? How do you promote? Do you need a blog? Do you need an email list? Are there legal concerns, like plagiarism and litigation? How important is the book cover? What is all the stuff on the Amazon book page and inside the book: what are the parts of a book? How do you network with people?

And one of the problems authors have: they’ll do a book launch, the book does really well, and then it crashes. It sells a thousand copies, and then it sells three. So how do you keep money coming in on a regular basis? And then you have to treat it like a business. I’m going to go over the business things you need to be aware of, because you can’t treat it like a hobby if you want to make a living at it. Hobbies are different from businesses.

I’ll do some PowerPoint presentations, and I’ll make the handouts available afterward for download, along with the replay. That, in a nutshell, is what I’m going to be doing. You should listen even if you don’t want to make a living at it, because there’s a lot of useful information in there.

The Fiction Masterclass catalog

Sage the Poet: Many of our listeners are interested in online courses to enhance their writing ability. Could you share how they can register?

Richard Lowe: I have a website called Fiction Masterclass, and if you scroll down the page, you’ll find the courses I’ve put together, usually 50-to-100-page PDFs that go through the aspects of the subject.

Take Science Fiction Book Empire as an example. The concept: you want to be a science fiction author, so I talk about writing short 15,000-word science fiction stories and publishing them as ebooks on Amazon. You can do one, two, three a month, because they’re basically novelettes. This maintains your income, your writing, and your audience. Here’s the key: writing one book that takes six months means you’re invisible to your audience for six months. Writing and publishing a short book every other week means you’re visible constantly, and you can build a following very quickly. The course covers it front to back, from getting the idea to publishing and promoting it. Then there’s Mystery Book Empire, Romance Book Empire, and Fantasy Book Empire, which is actually the bestselling one.

Then some promotion courses: how to do Amazon marketing, how to use video to promote your books, and how to promote your books using just a smartphone, because everybody has a smartphone.

And I have what I call prompt books: idea books. The science fiction writing prompts book has 500 different ideas for science fiction books; the romance one has 500 romance ideas. You open it up, go through it, and find a great idea, each only a couple of sentences long, and write a book around it. Because that’s often where writers get stuck: what do I write about? Maybe a unicorn falls in love with another unicorn and the humans are in the way. There are tons of ideas in there.

Everything has a 30-day money-back guarantee: if you buy one and it doesn’t help you, pop me an email and you get your money back. And they’re marked down for the holidays; the Black Friday sale ended, but I forgot to mark the prices back up. So hurry there before I remember.

Self-paced, practical, no theory

Sage the Poet: When you say training courses, how long are they?

Richard Lowe: They’re self-paced: books you read, with each chapter covering a different thing, aimed at practicality and application. I don’t get into a lot of theory; it’s “this is what you need to do, here’s an example.”

There’s one called Six Figure Freelancer: how to make a living as a freelance writer, the steps you need, and all the blocks people put up in front of themselves: “I can’t do that because I don’t know this.” How to promote yourself, find business, and get out there, because that’s the problem everybody has in the freelance world: you’re competing with millions of people. How do you become seen and known?

There’s another on show versus tell. Everybody hears it: show things, don’t tell them. If you don’t know what that means: telling is saying “he was angry.” Showing is: his face turned red, his lips puckered, and his eyes narrowed, and the reader goes, oh yeah, he’s angry. You never say he’s angry. The course goes into a couple dozen ways showing works better than telling, and a few ways telling is better. If you’re having trouble with show versus tell, that one’s for you.

And I’m releasing basically one new product every week, starting this week.

Becoming known: flow outward every day

Sage the Poet: A lot of times people say it’s not that the writer’s work isn’t good literature, but they don’t know them; they don’t feel connected. Any tips for the up-and-coming author who wants to be known for their writing?

Richard Lowe: Writers have to promote themselves, market themselves, and market their name. A lot of people have a problem talking about themselves in a positive way; they feel bad about it. Get over that. Promote your name, your brand, what you’re selling, what your books are about, your series, and make it a constant thing: every single day, sit down and do a little bit of it, and you’ll build up buzz and an audience.

Even if you’re not publishing a book every month, even if it takes you six months, you should be flowing outward, and accepting flow inward from what people have to say. And it shouldn’t be “buy my book, buy my book.” It needs to be: here’s something entertaining. Here’s something funny. Here’s something informational, something helpful. That’s how you get known as an influencer, a leader. That’s one of the keys.

Closing

Sage the Poet: Don’t forget, everyone: the webinar is tomorrow, Wednesday, December 5th, live at the Yeadon PA Public Library, starting at 6:30. If you’re attending in person, arrive between 5:30 and 6 for seating. This is the first, and you don’t want to miss the first. Richard, is this possibly a recurring event?

Richard Lowe: That’ll be up to them. This is the first one; it depends on how successful it is and how many people attend. I would like to do it quite often. And I’ve got to run to finish preparing, but it’s going to be a fun show. You’ll learn a lot, you’ll have a chance to ask questions, and I’m going to start right on time. Jump on Zoom, or call the phone number from the Facebook page, and you’ll be able to listen or watch.

Sage the Poet: I’ve already planned to be at the library with friends. Wishing you the very best; thanks again, Rich.

Richard Lowe: You’re welcome. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your evening.

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.