The Least They Could Get Away With: Pricing, Worth, and Why the Cheap Work Never Ends

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Two Contracts, Paid in Advance

Paul: Welcome, fellow adventurer, to Gamify Business Tavern Tales, a place to discover the roads less traveled on your creative journey. Welcome back to the tavern, fellow adventurers. I’m Paul Pape, your barkeep and game master. So tonight’s guest spent 33 years building and maintaining the invisible systems that kept one of America’s most beloved grocery chains running: data centers, supply chains, cybersecurity.

He rose to director of computer operations at Trader Joe’s, and then walked away to write books. What he discovered when he got there nearly cost him everything. It wasn’t a dragon, it wasn’t a dungeon, something small, something that had already moved into his workshop before he unpacked his tools. Cheaplings. These creatures don’t attack, they infest.

They slip into a creative’s workspace the moment they step into unfamiliar territory. A new lane, a new identity, a new way of valuing what they make and begin their quiet work. They don’t steal your money. Instead, they stop it from ever arriving. Every project, every proposal, every number you consider, the cheap liens whisper what it’s worth.

Not dramatically, not obviously, just a quiet, authoritative murmur that sounds exactly like market wisdom. This is what people pay for this kind of work. Don’t push it or they’ll leave. Hey, you’re new here. Start low and earn the right to charge more later. Now, cheaplings don’t have any actual knowledge of what your work is worth. They just sound like they do.

And in the discomfort of a new creative identity, that confidence is enough. Richard Lowe stepped out of Trader Joe’s and into ghostwriting, and the cheaplings were waiting. They told him what ghostwriters earn. They told him what the market would bear. They whispered that creative work doesn’t pay like corporate work and that he should temper his expectations accordingly.

And he believed it because they sounded like they knew. But then a client didn’t blink at a number that made Richard flinch to say out loud. He said he would have paid double. That was the moment the operator woke back up, the same brain that had spent two decades running enterprise systems and asked a simple question.

Why are you letting something that small run your pricing? So he exterminated the cheap links. Then he rebuilt the whole operation, real pricing, real production pipeline, custom software underneath. And then he got to work. 54 books, ghost written and counting, 113 books under his own name, a publishing operation that treats creative work the way Trader Joe’s treats supply chain, systematically, deliberately, and at scale.

Tonight, he’s here to share how the cheap leans invest a creative workshop, how he discovered they were there, and what it actually looks like to run a creative business once the scale is finally set right. Richard, welcome to the tower. So what did that client’s face look like when he didn’t blink?

Richard: It looked like that I’d underbid. It had that look. It was very interesting to realize that. You got to understand that before that, I’d really been hit by the cheaplings. I worked at a small ghostwriting company before I went freelance. I moved from Trader Joe’s, and by the way, I was there for 20 years and in tech for 33.

So I wasn’t in Trader Joe’s for 33 years. But I moved here, I moved to Florida, love Florida, and got a job at a LinkedIn service that And then I got a job as a ghostwriting company. And he paid me a whole $980 for a book, which when you add it up, works out to about five cents a word. it’s pitiful. hourly rates probably under 50 cents. But I needed to get in. I justified it.

I need to break into the business and stuff. And it was a book about property management. And another one about dentistry. And then finally one about an Afghan person. That one was an interesting book because he didn’t speak English, not very well. I don’t speak Afghan. I’m not Muslim. I never don’t know any Afghan culture. So I had to learn all that stuff.

Started writing the book and he got it and it wasn’t what he wanted. And I spent 16 hours doing interviews to fight to understand what he wanted. through an interpreter, his wife, and then he flew off to Afghanistan and never heard from him again. So that book was over and done. Wow. And then my boss and I got into it because I was like, this is not enough money. And he said, well, whatever. You can always go somewhere else. And I started my own company.

The very next day after I quit, the very next day, I got a contract for $10,000. The day after that, I got a contract for 15. And it was the 15 who didn’t blink. He said, oh, sure, that sounds like a good price. And I realized at that moment I could have asked for a lot more.

That’s one of the ones that I could name. It’s a company called Know Before. They do security, cybersecurity. And I wrote their, or actually updated their existing book twice. It’s called Cyber Heist. And the first one was an update. The second one was Mostly it was called a developmental edit. It went through and basically completely rewrote it. And after that it was all over. I was just, I was having fun.

Paul: Excellent. So you stepped out of a director level role at Trader Joe’s and into ghostwriting and something was waiting for you, a quiet voice that sounded exactly like Market Wisdom telling you that creative work is worth, what the market would bear and why you should start low. Actually, it sounds like you worked for that. So when you first realized that voice wasn’t, when did you first realize that voice wasn’t giving you the real data and that your workshop had been infested by these cheap ones?

Richard: When I got those two contracts, I didn’t expect them. They just came into my lap. I didn’t have to work for them. And it became, wow, I just made $25,000 and it came to me. And they paid in advance.

Paul: Wow.

Richard: They kept a small amount for the end, but most of it they paid in advance. So I was thinking somebody just dropped that I barely know, dropped a ton of money in my account and he trusted me. And that was a big thing. And it is a big thing in ghostwriting and probably any freelancer field.

You get trusted and you never break that trust. That’s an important thing. You have to keep the trust. And it can be difficult to do.

Paul: It absolutely can. My other business is Paul Pape Designs and it’s completely freelance design work. And those moments are good. I’ve had the exact experience whereas they’re like, oh, name your price. I named the price. They’re like, sure, Yeah, let’s do that. And you’re like, man, alive. Throw the money on the table that could have gone for.

So fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with them long enough. that I can now ask them. I said, so what’s the ceiling here? And I’ll stay underneath it so that they keep me around. But I’m like, because when you’re starting out, I was doing the same thing at $500, $800 just in. When they came back to me and they said, she actually pulled me aside.

She’s like, it should be like 3,500, Paul, or it should be 5,000, or it should be quoting a lot. And I was like, people pay that? Because it had never been my experience, much like you when you got into ghostwriting, to have that opportunity and you’re like, wow, there is There is so much more that can be there.

And it all depends on where they’re coming from. Like you said, those companies, they’re like, yeah, here you go. And they drop that money into you. But for some people, when you’re making 900 bucks a book, when somebody’s like, yeah, it’s gonna cost you $15,000, you’re gonna hold back. You’re gonna be like, ah, that’s too much.

So you’re afraid to step into that. fully recognize that those people are out there, those companies are out there that are willing to pay that amount, and it doesn’t really matter to them. It’s not that huge of a difference, even though it might be to you, is something that we have to grow and get used to as we’re moving into the entrepreneur business.

The Wedding Nobody Warned Him About

Richard: Actually, let’s step back just a little bit, and I’ll tell you my first experience at that. I was a photographer also while I was at Trader Joe’s. I picked that up because my wife passed away and I wanted to get rid of the grief and photography helped do that. So I photographed Renaissance fairs and belly dancers of all things. They go together well.

And while I was at the fair, dressed in my costume, photographing the whole fair, and I’d usually take thousands of photographs at a single fair, somebody approached me, one of the dancers, and she said, I’m having a wedding tonight. Would you like to photograph it? And I’d never photographed a wedding before. And I said, sure.

And she said, well, I’ll give you 150 bucks. So I thought, okay, that sounds fair. Naive me. And got my camera and went out there and took some pictures. It turned out to be a pagan wedding. Wiccan. Very interesting. background to pagan weddings and Wiccan weddings that I did not understand. It was a little shocking and definitely not something this little bit more conservative person had experienced before, but it was fine. It was fine.

I was surrounded by beautiful women and I didn’t care. All in costume, all having a good time. And she was a singer. She’s a fairly famous singer, low level famous singer and in addition to being a dancer. And then I told my photographer friend, I was so happy I got $150 for her at the wedding. And she said, dude, wedding started 5,000. You got ripped off.

Paul: Yeah. How do you, how do you, like when your friend told you that, what’s the reaction? Like what, what’s happening internally? Because we, we’ve all been there at some point. So what’s that internal reaction?

Richard: Considering that she couldn’t stop laughing for about four minutes. She said, you got away lucky because you sound like it was a good experience. And I said, yeah, it was a good experience. She said, normally weddings are the biggest pain in the ass that you’ve ever seen because everybody’s all stressed. You got to get the perfect picture.

If you happen to miss the big one, the kissing picture, you’re dead meat and they don’t want to pay $5,000. They want to pay more like $500. If that, you got people standing up shooting pictures with their cameras now. I could go on and on and on. I said, yeah, none of that really happened except for, they were all singing and dancing and having a good time and doing funny stuff that I didn’t, that was shocking to me and wicked stuff. Probably not what you’re fixing. Different stuff.

Paul: I don’t know. I come from this world here, so you’re like, I probably have a pretty good idea, but I’m sure my listening audience doesn’t.

Richard: You probably do. Just like for the wedding, they bound themselves with vines and stuff like that. And that was mild. They had a concrete pad with a pentacle with eight little statues at each end and stuff. And it was permanent and all kinds of stuff like that. It’s okay. But that’s what that’s where I really learned. First of all, test your market.

Paul: Absolutely. Yeah. And second of all, with the number. Yeah, that’s that’s something you got to question right off the bat.

Richard: Start high and work low instead of start low, work high.

Paul: That never works. I had it work once.

The Two AM Call on New Year’s Day

Richard: Did you? I had one project, I walked in, He calls me up on January 1st. He calls me up in the morning, two in the morning. I pick up the phone, I happen to be awake ’cause I’m that kind of guy. And I pick up the phone and he says, I got a… I’ve done work for him before. I said, I got a project for you.

And I said, oh, that’s good, because he kind of dropped the one before that, COVID. And he was terrified of COVID. And I said, sure, what kind of project? He said, well, I got this and this and this. And I was thinking in my head, that’s a $5,000 project. He kept outlining it. And then he said, and I want to pay, how much will that cost? And I said, eh. He said, well, don’t tell me.

Why don’t I just give you $60,000 for it? And I was shocked, so I didn’t say anything. He says, Okay, 75. He’s going like, Well, this has never happened before. I wound up making over 100 on it.

Paul: Wow. And I think there’s a valuable lesson in that a lot of people don’t recognize is that while you were silent in stupefaction, That silence is actually a learned trait. If you can learn it, it works to your advantage. I had a good medical friend of mine who did the exact same thing. She just knew to stay quiet and they just do everything in their power to sweeten the pot. And eventually she’s like, yeah, sure.

She would’ve said yes at the very beginning, but she just knows to stay quiet. So it’s something you really should learn to not just jump at the first thing, to let them sweat a little bit instead of you getting a nice fever sweat ’cause that number sounded great.

Richard: Most of my clients, they’re paying for it with their own money. So they do negotiate. This one was paying for it with company money. So it was a little, and I didn’t find that out for a long time. So it was a little bit different. And for those listeners who are shocked at those prices for writing a book, that’s good ghostwriting.

Even today with AI and all that stuff, AI doesn’t write good books. People write good books.

Paul: Correct.

Richard: A good book, a nice book, this size. It’s probably going to run you 30 to 40,000. And before you die in shock, that’s six to eight months of my life. Sure. And I’ll overlap two of them at a time, maybe three, and I’ll get maybe, four of those a year. So it’s a good living. I’m not getting rich from it.

Paul: Right. But you’re comfortable. That’s what you’re after.

Richard: I’m comfortable. I’m, it pays the bills and the cat gets fed.

Everybody Gave Me the Least They Could

Paul: There you go. Absolutely. All right, so you quoted a number originally that made you flinch, certain that it was too high, but that client didn’t blink. So he said he would have paid double. So walk me through that moment. What happened that when you realized how much you had left on the table and what did that moment tell you about how long the cheap leans had been adjusting your scale?

Richard: All my life. I realized at that moment, I have one of those moments where I look back on the past for when I first got a job when I was 17 up till now, or actually before that, when I was like five, everybody gave me what the least they could get away with. And I didn’t think I had much to say about it.

But now it’s like, I don’t have to put up with it. I’ve got savings, I’ve got emergency funds, I’ve got investments, I’ve got all kinds of stuff. If I don’t get your gig, I’m not going to die. I want your gig. You know, it sounds like a great book. You’re a nice person and stuff, but you’re going to pay me fairly.

And the fairly is what I just said, because it is a lot of work. It’s not even, even with AI in there, it’s an AI. I don’t write books with AI. I write, I use AI as a tool to help me with certain, just like I would hire a VA for a virtual assistant for it, right? Hire artificial intelligence to do certain things.

So it was, it was like, oh, for my entire life, I’ve been underselling myself. I’ve been taking less pay than I should have at my jobs. I’ve been, boss would say, we don’t have the money for promoting, to give you a raise this year. Yet the company profits increased by 20% or whatever, et cetera. And it was like my whole life just went, I gotta change.

Paul: Absolutely. And it’s good to have that wake up call. depending on where you’re at in your life, but at some point we all have it and it is good to have it to have that wake up moment. And some people, they. they fall into a pit of despair because of it, because they have that reflection moment and they think that’s where they have to live.

And it sounds like you had that moment, but then you’re like, okay, going forward now, I now know to correct. And so you actually learned from that as opposed to held yourself back because of however you felt about it when that came up.

Richard: I don’t know if this is scientifically true, but it’s true for me. Depression is keeping your focus on the past for me. Anxiety is keeping my focus on the future. So you get anxious about things that might happen and so on. For me, the more calm place is being concerned with right now. And that seems to work very well. Yeah, I’ve got enough to pay the bills. I’ve got enough in the bank. I’m not worried about it. I got, a comfortable place.

I actually live inside a nature preserve. which is interesting because they’re bobcats and alligators. It’s Florida after all. Yeah, I’m on the shores of a lake. It’s 20 feet outside my door, my window. It’s actually a swamp and there are alligators. So it’s best not to be walking out there at night and don’t let the cat out unless you don’t like the cat. Right.

Treat It Like a Profession

Paul: Absolutely. So the same brain that ran enterprise systems for Trader Joe’s eventually looked at your creative business and asked, why are you letting something that small set your prices? So what does it take for creative entrepreneurs to wake up the operator’s brain? So how do you start running a creative business like a real operation instead of a wing and a prayer?

Richard: You treat it You have to treat it as a profession. You have to be professional. And that’s a whole set of things. Come up with a brand. Hawaiian shirts are part of my brand. It means that I’m because I want to be easy to communicate with. It’s a lot easier to communicate with somebody in a Hawaiian shirt than it is with somebody in a suit. The customers that I have.

Now, if I was in a lawyer business or something, I’d probably wear a suit, specifically a blue suit is what I’m told lawyers wear. There’s actually a code almost. Haven’t done a lawyer book yet. That’d be, hey, people out there, if you’re a lawyer, you need a book. There you go. I got to write it. Where was I? You got to treat it as a business.

And you have to separate the business from the personal. So I have a space in here in my, I converted my dining room because I live alone. I don’t need a dining room to my office. And when I’m in my office, I’m working. When I’m not in my office, I’m not working. And it’s a good separation.

There’s not a door, but there’s a big space there. And then I got books behind me. I got butterflies above me. So if I get depressed, I can just look up at the butterflies. Literally butterflies, big ones in cases that are from a butterfly farm in South America. Legal butterflies, butterflies only live a week anyway, so it’s not really Bad to kill them, but they’re in plastic and they’re in acrylics and things.

It’s all set up for me to be a writer. Got my writing books right here in a circular shelf and everything’s professional. And that’s the key is you have to realize you’re not an amateur. You’re a professional. And if you’re not, if you don’t feel like you’re a professional, then what’s going on to cause you to feel that? in your life. Are you not dressing right? Do you not have your brand set up? Are you not asking high enough prices?

Are you not achieving your goals. whatever the problem is, debug it and fix debug it. I’m a computer guy. If it’s a pass, fix it.

Paul: Yeah. it’s and that’s that’s brilliant advice. And I love the idea of setting up a sanctuary and not it doesn’t have to be in a closed room or anything like that. A place that says I am at work versus I am at restaurant play. And then also like doing that introspection to look at what you’re doing and saying, am I taking this seriously? Do I feel like a professional?

If not, what steps do I need to make to get myself there? It’s all brilliant advice.

Richard: It’s also important not to take not you said take it seriously. That’s different than hurting yourself with anxiety and stuff over it. You want to treat it seriously, but not necessarily take it seriously, as in internalize it.

Paul: There you go.

Richard: Because then you’re going to give yourself stomach problems and all that kind of stuff.

Paul: Yeah.

Richard: Money is always going to be an issue for freelancers because it’s a feast or famine. And very few freelancers solve that. Usually they solve it by turning, turning their business into something more than just them. And then even then it becomes feast or famine.

Paul: Feast or famine on a different scale.

Richard: Exactly. Because then you got people to worry about.

Paul: Right. And that’s a different kind of stress altogether.

Systemise the Business, Not the Creation

Richard: Oh yeah.

Paul: Most creative entrepreneurs will tell you that their work can’t be systematized, that writing, designing or making is inherently unpredictable and personal. But you built custom software for your production pipeline, you’re 160 books in So what do you say to a creative who insists their work is different, that systems will kill the soul of what they make?

Richard: That they’re looking at it wrong. They’re looking at the creation, which is something that is personal and introspective and important to them. But they’re expanding that through the whole business. So you want to you want to You wanna have a lead generation pipeline. You wanna have leads coming in. That certainly can be systemized. That’s no creativity there at all.

That’s just finding out how you get leads and getting them in. You wanna have a checklist for when I finish a book or when I’m working through a book, did I meet milestone one? What are the goals for meeting one, two, three, four, five? ‘Cause I get paid by milestone. So I wanna make sure I meet those milestones and do them on time ’cause I want the money. And, have I submitted the invoice? Have I finished the book? Have I all these things? So you systematize things.

Yeah, the book is creative, but all the systems around it aren’t. And just build those properly. I can’t use a CRM. I’ve never been able to use a CRM. A customer or something management lets you manage your customer database.

Paul: Yes.

Richard: I can’t. I’ve just never been able to do it. But if you can, use one. If you can’t, I use Excel. I’m an old fashioned dude. It works. But then I have 102 leads. I don’t have a lot of leads. I don’t need a lot of leads.

Paul: Right. Yeah. And I think that’s an important thing for a lot of people. And I say it, I think on every single time I’m on air is that you don’t need millions of people. You need enough to keep you busy and enough to keep you comfortable. charging right and you’re comfortable, then you don’t need a ton of leads to make it happen.

Richard: And you gotta choose your business right. Are you gonna be on Fiverr and you’re gonna be making $10 per gig? That’s gonna take you a long time to make a lot of money and you’re gonna be working your ass off all the time. Probably gonna have a little staff that you subcontract to, probably contractors. You’re gonna be really busy because they’re little leads.

Me, I only need four to six of those contracts a year and I’m doing pretty damn well.

Paul: Yeah.

Richard: It’s just as much work to get a $50 lead as it is to get a $50,000 lead.

Paul: Absolutely, absolutely.

Richard: Close them and stuff.

Raising the Price Changes Who Calls

Paul: That actually leads into this perfect lead into the next question, which is you said that raising your prices changed who showed up, not just what you earned, but who the clients were. So for creative entrepreneurs who are terrified that charging more will drive people away, what actually happens on the other side of that price increase? Who leaves and who arrives?

Richard: It changes who you’re looking for. If I was doing $500 books, I would be out on Facebook and Fiverr and things getting $500 books. And it’d be an entirely different kind of lead generation and an entirely different kind of process. And those for $500 books, I’m going to write with AI because I can’t write a $500 book in any respectable amount of time. Sure.

That’s one reason why I don’t do it because I don’t like writing with AI because it makes crappy books. really crappy books. Then, but when you have a higher price, you start it and you start pitching to those people, you start attracting people who have money and who are willing to spend it. Now, when you put together your, your ideal customer, there’s several things.

There’s a concept called the ideal customer in sales. And you build that, okay, who’s my ideal customer? Well, it’s, it’s somebody who’s Love just making this up, who’s male and conservative or female and liberal or whatever, and who wears green pants and whatever. One of those criteria has to be and has the money for my services and is willing to spend it. Right.

So if you’re going after a market that doesn’t have the money, what are you doing?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. And it’s a hard lesson to learn because when you’re first starting out, you want to help anybody who wants your services. You’re like, I want to be useful. I want to be helpful. I want to help everyone. But then you get the $500 jobs. You get the $100 jobs. And you’re like, I feel like I’m giving it away for free, even though making something, but it’s not enough.

It’s definitely not all what my time is worth. And you start to get embittered by it as opposed to like changing gears and then trying to make that adjustment from going from charging 100, $500,000 to try and then try to find completely different people that may not even be in the circles that you’re familiar with.

So you’re like, how do I entice those people when I’m a $500 person? How do I find that $50,000 person? And creating that character sheet and really digging into like who are my ideal clients? And it’s, I think the best advice I ever got was your ideal client, when you’re thinking about your ideal client, Picture that they have kidnapped your children.

What lengths would you go to find out everything you need to know about that person to get your kid back? That’s how you should approach it. So if you are unfamiliar with who your ideal client should be, if you’re unfamiliar with that lifestyle, whatever, research. Dig into it. The information is out there.

Richard: There’s a book by a guy named Larry Winget. And he’s called the Pitbull of Coaches or something like that. And he writes books that are in your face. Oh, he curses in there. If you get hurt, your feelings hurt easily, don’t read his books. And you can tell from the title. One of them is called People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It.

And one of the things he says in there is, if you wanna make it, you wanna be rich, Stop hanging out with people who aren’t rich. Hang out with rich people. They will pull you up.

Paul: Yeah.

Richard: It’s like if you’re an alcoholic and trying to get over being an alcoholic, you don’t hang out with alcoholics.

Paul: Right.

Richard: If you’re a smoker and you’re trying to get really trying to kick the habit of smoking, you certainly don’t hang out with smokers. You cannot quit smoking if you’re hanging out with smokers. I know my wife was a smoker, so.

Paul: It’s crabs in a pot. It’s the same analogy. If there’s a bunch of crabs in the pot, one’s trying to crawl out, the other ones will pull it back in. And it’s the exact same situation. If you’re a smoker, if you’re a drinker, whatever you’re into, if you’re around people who can’t afford your services, and you keep surrounding yourself with those people, they’re going to keep you there. And unfortunately, humans are worse. They’re worse than crabs.

Crabs just grab you and throw you back in. But people are worse because they’ll start to like defame you. They’ll start to put you down. They’ll do everything that they can to keep you in your place. And that place is among them. So yes, had a band instructor when I was young. He used to say that doctors hang out with doctors. And we didn’t understand what that meant.

And he’s like, well, this drug runner just went to jail. He was a student that was in the band, and he’s gone because he was hanging out with drug runners. He wouldn’t have that problem if you hang out with band kids. Oh, that makes more sense.

Richard: Right. So if you want to be richer, you want to have a better business, hang out with people who will pull you up. Hang out with people that you feel like I’m less than everybody in this room. Not people like, oh yeah, I’m better than anybody in this room or I’m equal than anybody in this room.

You want them to be better than you ’cause they’ll pull you up if you can survive.

Paul: Right. Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong. It is uncomfortable, but you’ll get used to it. What do they say? Your floor used to be your ceiling, your glass ceiling. You broke through that ceiling. Now you’re standing on that floor. The next one, there’s gonna be a level of being uncomfortable when you elevate to that next level, but eventually it becomes your new floor. And just keep growing that way.

The Box Everybody Builds

Richard: My next book that I’m going to write is going to be called, I don’t have a title yet, but the concept is we’re all in a box. Everybody has a box around them. And the concept is why get rid of the box. Why are you building these boxes? Just get rid of it and go out and do stuff.

Paul: That’s how I live my life. It’s boxless, so I understand.

Richard: But even you got a box, there’s places you won’t go, there’s things you won’t do. And, there is, of course, the reasonable stuff. I’m not going to go hang out on a street corner where I’m likely to get mugged. That’s just stupid. But that’s part of my box.

Paul: Right.

Richard: I also tend to be a bit of a hermit because I’m a writer and I’m a introverted, but not shy. Does that make sense?

Paul: Yep. So extroverted introvert. Yep.

Ninety-Seventh Percentile at Sixty-Four

Richard: Yeah. Yeah. So it also severely ADHD. So it makes That’s a very interesting story, by the way, big ADHD.

Paul: Feel free to explain.

Richard: I learned I was 97 percentile ADHD when I was 64.

Paul: Wow.

Richard: Which is last year. And my whole concept of my entire life, as soon as I found out, went, oh yeah, that makes sense. ‘Cause the pattern, you remember one of those things where you learn it and the whole pattern goes, And that was one I was like, oh yeah, that explains everything. The scatter, why I can work on 50,000 things at once and so scattered and everything.

Paul: Which is interesting. Actually that does lead into my next question.

Richard: I don’t read minds.

Paul: You’ve ghostwritten over 54 books and published over 113 under your own name, and that is staggering output. So for creative entrepreneurs who struggle to finish one project, who start strong and abandon, what does your production discipline actually look like? And what’s the system that keeps the work moving when the cheap lings are gone and the real work begins?

Richard: Focus. ADHDs have something called hyperfocus. So like after this, I have to work on a client and I have to finish two chapters, which is 7000 words by Friday night. I haven’t started yet. And that’s normal. So I will turn out the lights, turn on some music, sit down and just focus on it. And I’ll bang those out first draft in probably six hours.

Then I’ll do a second draft and a third draft and send it off to the client and he’ll rip it to shreds because he’s like that. Send it back to me. He’s fine with it too because he has realized that I’m the writer. He’s, he’s the knowledge expert. He knows the subject. I don’t. So of course I’m going to write it wrong, but I put in the scaffolding for him so he can write the story around it.

So we have a pretty good working relationship and, uh, um, that hyperfocus really pays off.

Paul: Absolutely. I was diagnosed at 50 with ADHD. And again, all those bricks kind of fell into place. That makes sense.

Richard: You know, the feeling.

Paul: Yeah. I always tell people, I work six times faster than most people. And they’re like, we don’t understand how that’s possible. My wife says it all the nobody works at the speed of Paul. And it’s like, yeah, I understand that too. I can hyperfocus.

A Novel in a Week, and Why Ingram

Richard: I’ll bang out a full novel, 100,000 word novel. in a week the first draft and then I’ll go through and I’ll I’ll edit it and stuff and then two weeks have gone by and it’s done and then it goes out on Ingram I don’t publish on Amazon it goes out to Ingram Spark which then puts it on Amazon.

Paul: But then you’re going through Ingram then you can get into bookstores then you can do other things with it you know Ingram’s a better way to go.

Richard: Amazon publishes through Ingram anyway oh all of its paperbacks go through Ingram interesting yeah so why not just why not just go to Ingram to begin with Ingram is a much less hostile place anyway agreed Ingram is a publisher Amazon is a platform and Amazon is an advertising platform Ingram doesn’t have any real advertising.

Paul: Right look at those pearls of wisdom that came out of nowhere that’s wonderful great I’ve published.

Richard: Over 160 books they’re all well Three of them were traditional published. All the rest were self-published.

Paul: Nice, nice. And you found, obviously you found success with that. And so that’s, and so if you’re listening, follow the advice. Literally leaving breadcrumbs for you.

Richard: Three of my clients did traditional. The problem with traditional is take, that’s one of the big five publishing houses is they take a long time. That’s a multi-year long process and by their rules, you get lower royalties. but you will get more sales. But if you do self-publishing, you can publish it today, no matter how crappy it is, and you’ll get less sales unless you promote it.

My biggest bestseller got 15,000 copies sold in three days.

Paul: Wow, nice.

Collision With Andromeda and the AEO Book

Richard: That was a difficult task, but I wanted to prove I could do it. I don’t really bother now because that’s not really my job, what I do. I write these books, I put them out there, people buy them, they buy them. It’s more fun. One of the ones I’m polishing up now is called Collision with Andromeda. It postulates intelligent galaxies are intelligent.

And of course, Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda in two and a half million years. Well, what if Milky Way doesn’t want to?

Paul: Interesting.

Richard: It has a kind of war in it. Humans are stuck in the middle.

Paul: Of course.

Richard: Just finishing it up. It will probably go on sale this weekend.

Paul: Oh, really? Like just finishing it up. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, it’s going to make sure that we put them into links there.

Richard: The last edit. Yeah.

Paul: Wonderful.

Richard: Yeah. And then I’m publishing another one this weekend. What I do is I work on several things at once and then they all go published all the same time. It’s it’s called the death of your website is dead. the death of your website and the how to use AEO to improve your traffic. You know what AEO is?

Paul: I do not, actually. What is AEO?

Richard: SEO is the search engines. AEO is the artificial intelligence engines.

Paul: Ah, okay.

Richard: Who are scrolling, scanning through your site. So what do they want to see?

Paul: Right. And anymore, that’s where they’re going. That’s everything is going that way.

Richard: 60/40 now.

Paul: Is it?

Richard: It’s increasing rapidly. Yeah. Yeah. SEO is basically, you got to have SEO before you can have AEO because the crawlers got to find you. Right. But it doesn’t, you don’t need to worry about the search engine so much anymore. Now you need to get the ChatGPT and cloud engines over to you so that you can answer questions. I’ve got a whole book on it.

Paul: Excellent. And we’ll check that out. And if it’s coming out this weekend, that’ll be great because by the time this airs, it’ll be available.

Where to Find Richard

Richard: I’ll send you links.

Paul: Excellent. Excellent. So for adventurers listening who want to work with you or explore your books or learn more about what you’ve built with the Writing King, where should they go?

Richard: They could go to thewritingking.com/. That’s my website for my ghost writing business. If they weren’t interested in my books, they can go to masterofworlds.com. So masterofworlds.com or thewritingking.com/. I also have a series of eight books that I wrote on geopolitics called enemiesofyou.com. And that’s eight books about things like what the Russians are doing to us now and who our real enemies are. And they’re different than you think.

Paul: Perfect, perfect. I will have all of Richard’s links in the show notes, including thewritingking.com/ where you can book a free consultation. So if the cheaplings have been adjusting the scale in your workshop, tonight’s conversation is how you find out. So I wanna thank Richard for pulling up a chair tonight and naming a monster most creative entrepreneurs don’t even know has moved in. Those darn cheaplings.

They’re small, cunning creatures that infest your workshop and adjust the scale, whispering with the confidence of market wisdom what your work is worth, what people will pay, why you should start low and earn the right to charge more later. But they have no actual knowledge of what your work is worth. They just sound like they do.

And in the discomfort of a new creative identity, when you’re new to the lane, you don’t yet have that real data, that confidence is enough. So here’s what I want you to take away from tonight. Cheaplings lose their power the moment you stop mistaking its confidence for knowledge. The client who didn’t blink wasn’t unusual. He was calibrated correctly. Richard was the one with the infested scale. So check your workshop.

If the numbers you quote make you flinch before you say it out loud, cheaplings might already be there. And the operator’s question is a simple one. Where did that number actually come from? So if Richard’s message resonated, find the writing king in the show notes. And if you’ve been thinking about writing a book, book the free consultation. It’s a conversation, not a pitch.

And before you go, head over to gamifybusiness.com/quiz and take the tavern personality quiz. Find out your class, your strengths, your blind spots, and how your brain approaches the adventure. You’ll get a free 11 page deep dive into your business personality at no cost, no catch, just clarity about the adventure that you already are. Until next time, remember, Business is an adventure. Don’t be an NPC.

And Richard, it sounds like you have one more thing to add to this conversation.

Richard: I also have coaching service. So I just want to get some advice on how to price or something, you come to my website, send me a message and we can set up an hour long coaching thing so that you don’t have to, it’s not necessarily buy a book, but I’ll also coach you. That’s at cost.

There’s a cost for that, but But if you need some help, you can get a couple hours, we can chat on Zoom and maybe I can solve your problem.

Paul: Excellent, excellent. He’ll include those notes as well in the show notes. So thanks so much again for joining me, Richard. I do appreciate it.

Richard: My pleasure.

Paul: Excellent, thank you.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

What should a ghostwritten book actually cost?

A good full-length book runs $30,000 to $40,000, because that represents six to eight months of a writer’s life. At the bottom of the market a whole book might pay $980, around five cents a word, and nobody produces good work at that rate.

Why does raising your rate change the clients you get?

Because you stop fishing where the cheap work is. Chasing $500 books means Fiverr and Facebook groups and a large volume of small jobs. Higher prices mean a different pipeline, and the people at the other end have budgets and something worth writing about.

Can a creative business be systemised?

The business, yes. The creation, no. Lead generation, milestones, checklists and follow-up have no creativity in them and should run like any other process. The mistake is extending that instinct to the writing itself.

Does AI write good books?

Not at any price point worth taking. A $500 book has to be written with AI because there is no other way to make the economics work, and that is precisely the argument for refusing $500 books.

What does trust have to do with pricing?

Everything, once money moves before the work does. Being paid most of a five figure fee in advance by somebody you barely know is a particular kind of obligation, and keeping that trust is the whole foundation of freelance work.