Courage Before Confidence: The Mindset Behind Authority Through Authorship

Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: January 2025.

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, joined Mike Ashabranner on Mike King Biz Radio, the Hounds of Business broadcast on ESPN RVA 106.1FM, for a New Year conversation that turned out to be less about books than about nerve. The thread running through it: the same courage it takes to ride a hot-air balloon when you’re afraid of heights is the courage an expert needs to put their name on a book and step into the open.

The Hounds of Business Community gathers founders and operators around candid conversations, and this one let Richard tell the personal story behind the practice, how a shy, introverted corporate technologist became a prolific ghostwriter by deliberately walking toward the things that scared him.

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The Conversation

From Corporate to the Writing King

Mike: Tell us a little about your journey. What inspired you to pursue writing and ghostwriting?

Richard: I spent 33 years in the tech industry, the last stretch as Director of Computer Operations for Trader Joe’s. One day I just decided it was time to work for myself. I was tired of corporate, tired of bosses, and tired of California. So a day after my birthday, after a big blowout party, I got in a moving van and drove across the country to Florida. Within a few weeks I’d started writing, and soon after I started ghostwriting and built a little company. Since then I’ve written 54+ books for clients and 113+ under my own name, across about thirteen years. It’s been quite a journey.

Courage Before Confidence

Mike: A lot of people can relate to getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. Did you always have a passion for writing?

Richard: My first unofficial project started at 17, interviewing my grandfather for a book I didn’t finish until decades later, which I’ll come back to. After that I always wanted to write, but I had to make a living. The harder thing was that I was painfully shy growing up, a defense mechanism. When my wife passed away, I decided I didn’t want to be shy anymore, so I picked up a camera and used it as an excuse to talk to people. Eventually I didn’t need the camera. I’m still introverted, but I’m not shy, and breaking that took real work.

Mike: People ask where I got the confidence to do what I do. I tell them it wasn’t confidence, it was courage. Courage to look like a donkey if that’s what it took.

Richard: Exactly. It takes courage and a willingness to step out of your box, or better yet, get rid of the box entirely. Confidence is what you have afterward. Courage is what gets you there.

Conquering Fear on Purpose

Richard: Every year I go up in a hot-air balloon, because I’m afraid of heights. Every few years I go cave hiking, because I’m claustrophobic. I’m still afraid of heights and I’m still claustrophobic, but at least I know I can face it, and it isn’t running my life. That’s the same muscle an author has to use. Putting your name on a book and standing behind your ideas in public is a fear for most people, and you beat it the same way: you walk toward it on purpose.

Getting Out of the Box

Mike: You just stack the wins, little win, bigger win, and they build on each other.

Richard: They do, and so do the losses. I spent part of last year procrastinating on a few things, and it’s amazing how that piles into one solid mass. I had to peel it apart, this didn’t get finished, that didn’t get decided, and clear it. Letting undone things accumulate is a real mind killer. Once I decluttered, work started flowing again. Each box that dissolves, the job, the bad habit, the skill I never learned, like marketing, leaves me able to do more.

Discipline and Teamwork: The Veterans I Hired

Richard: At Trader Joe’s I made a point of hiring veterans, ex special forces, ex marines, during the Iraq and Afghan wars. My boss asked why I wasn’t hiring normal people. I said because veterans get things done. They work as a team, they have discipline, and when I say I need something, they figure out how rather than telling me why it can’t be done. We once had to move a half-ton cabinet that was live, three hundred systems running on it, with no downtime allowed. They rigged up a contraption and did it. My boss wouldn’t even go in the room. These were men who’d been in combat, so a heavy cabinet was nothing.

That lesson traces straight back to my grandfather. At 17 I sat down to write his story and discovered he was a war hero, a prisoner of war for four years. He didn’t survive that alone. He survived it through teamwork and discipline, and that stuck with me.

What a Book Does for an Executive

Mike: How does writing a book impact a professional’s career? Any success stories?

Richard: My first professional client was an executive who wanted a technical book that spoke to business people, so he could get noticed by his CEO. When it was done, the CEO not only noticed him, he wrote the foreword. The client got promoted, the book landed in libraries, he got on the speaking circuit at keynote rates, and he eventually used the book as credibility to raise $30 million in venture capital for his own company. Another client did a TED talk I’d suggested. Every client who actually uses their book sees results, because a book raises you up where people can finally see you. That’s the whole point.

The AI Barrier, and the Others

Mike: Is there a stigma around ghostwriting, and where does AI fit in?

Richard: There are a few barriers I work through every time. The newest is AI. People ask, what about AI? Well, AI is a terrible writer. Use it if you like, but the book will be flat and few people will read it. I can tell within seconds when something was written by AI. It isn’t a brain, it’s pattern matching, and that’s probably all it’ll ever be. The other barrier is the belief that this is easy and cheap. It isn’t. I can only do a few books a year, and they’re an investment. A good one costs less than a new car, and unlike a car, for a business it’s usually tax deductible. Ask your accountant, because I’m not one.

Finding the Client’s Passion

Mike: You listen deeply to capture your client’s authentic voice. Walk us through it.

Richard: For a sixty- or seventy-thousand-word book I’ll interview the client for about a month, an hour a day on weekdays, about their life, their career, and their backstory. What I’m really hunting for is the passion. One client ran a cleaning franchise. On the surface, what’s special about cleaning? But I found his real passion, hiring people and watching their work fulfill them, and the book became about how cleaning fits into a better life, not just about cleaning. I did a book for a woman who’d survived an abusive relationship and wanted to help other women, so we got to the root of that. The rock-star client was passionate about everything, a different thing every day, so we narrowed it to one. Most ghostwriters chase facts. I undercut that and find why this person cares, and that becomes the foundation of a genuinely good book.

How to Start: Find Your Passion First

Mike: For someone just entertaining the idea, what’s your advice on finding their voice?

Richard: Set up a one-hour discovery call and we’ll explore it, and I may send you home with homework on what actually drives you. The passion rarely spills out in the first ten minutes, so often it’s best to brainstorm it with someone. Some of my contracts are just ten or fifteen hours up front for exactly that, a structured brainstorming engagement to find the passion and the audience before any writing starts. Sometimes we discover the person has spent their life doing something they don’t even like, and the real question becomes what they want to do instead. That was me fifteen years ago.

Not every book is for business, either. I have senior clients who write so their grandchildren will know what they did, World War Two and Vietnam veterans whose stories would be lost otherwise. I wrote a novel from a woman’s lifetime of handwritten dreams, it’s on Amazon as Gators in the Soup, and seeing her hold her lifelong dream was something I’ll never forget.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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