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

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins Len Hayduchok on MaxAMAZING Your Retirement for a conversation that has less to do with business books and more to do with the question every retiree eventually faces: who am I now? Richard talks about the grandfather who turned a shy 17-year-old into a writer, the difference between a memoir and an autobiography, the client whose box of handwritten dreams became a published novel, why writing a book is a quiet form of catharsis, and the regret of never getting to interview his own parents before they passed during COVID. Woven through it is a practical case for the memoir as the most meaningful book a person can leave behind.

MaxAMAZING Your Retirement is hosted by Len Hayduchok, a Certified Financial Planner, author of MaxAMAZING Your Retirement, and founder of Dedicated Financial Services, with more than 25 years in the financial world. The show helps people approach retirement as a season of purpose, reflection, and contribution rather than just accumulated assets.

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Interview

Len Hayduchok: In this episode, I’m happy to have Richard Lowe Jr., a ghostwriter dedicated to helping businesses and individuals craft books that highlight their expertise, establish credibility, and share compelling narratives. He has authored 113+ books, including two Kindle bestsellers, has ghostwritten more than 54 books, and written more than a thousand articles for blogs and social media. Previously, he served as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s and was vice president of consulting at two computer firms. Richard, thanks so much for joining us.

Richard: My pleasure. Happy to be here.

Len: You love writing, and that’s a big part of who you are. And you used to be a computer guy, and I guess you still are a computer guy. Is that two distinct types of personalities, or do you see them integrated?

Two Paths That Intertwined

Richard: Well, they are integrated in that a lot of the books I write are for technical leaders, so I understand their technology. And they’re also distinct parts of my life because I’m not working for somebody else anymore. I’m a solopreneur, and I really like it much better than being part of a big business.

Len: How did you discover your interest in computers, and how did you discover your interest in writing? Were they two separate paths of life?

The Grandfather at 17

Richard: They actually kind of intertwined. When I was 17 years old, my grandfather was kind of introverted and stayed in a corner and nobody really talked to him. So I decided I was going to talk to him, and then I wound up writing a book about his life. Turns out the man was a hero. He was in the Yangtze River Patrol before World War II. He was captured on Corregidor. He was in the Bataan Death March and spent four years in a POW camp. So I got to write that book. We never published it, I was only 17. But then I liked writing. I thought it was great, learning new stories.

So I wanted to write, but I had to move out, make a living, raise a family. I went into the computer field because it was a way to make money, and I was also passionate about computers and technology. I went through career paths and finally wound up at Trader Joe’s for 20 years. And then almost exactly 20 years in, I decided I’m done with this, and went and started my own ghostwriting company. I was having a lot of fun getting my own clients, in charge of my own life, marketing, all that. Made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of successes, obviously more successes than mistakes, and haven’t looked back.

Len: I’d love to see the depth of that connection in your life through that exchange with your grandfather.

Richard: It was quite profound, because I’d never really considered the other person’s point of view before. I was only 17, going through all the usual things 17-year-olds go through. And he sat me down and talked about his life. He was pretty young when he got captured on Corregidor, his early to mid-20s, so he spent a lot of his life in there. It hammered home that there are other people and other points of view, people who’ve gone through things. I think it started the process of filing down some of the rough edges of my life and let me know that there are other people who have gone through tragedies, not just me.

From Technical Manuals to Memoirs

Richard: And writing that up was a big thing because I was starting to learn to write. I’d written a few articles before that for various publications, and through this whole time I was writing articles here and there for magazines, and a lot of technical manuals because nobody ever wanted to write them. Nobody likes to write technical manuals, but I loved it. I made lots of beautiful technical manuals that I’m sure are still gathering dust.

Len: So your writing topics were very technical, and for people not in that profession, very dull. And then you do much more connected things with memoirs. Is that like two different parts of your brain?

Richard: I don’t know if it’s different parts of my brain, but it certainly produces some interesting internal discussions. I’m very adept at technology. I’ve written books on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity and blockchain. But I’ve also written memoirs for people.

The $1,000 Afghani Memoir and Going Solo

Richard: I wrote a memoir, one of my very first books, and talk about a challenge. I got a thousand bucks for it. I got hired by a ghostwriting company, and he paid me a thousand bucks to write a story about an Afghani politician. The unique thing was that he didn’t speak English, so I had to go through a translator, and I needed to do all of the interviews in one day because he was going back to Afghanistan. So it was quite a challenge for a first professionally made book. An interesting baptism of fire. After that there were a couple more memoirs, and some books for franchises. And then I decided I can do a lot better on my own. My boss was kind of, “you don’t have the marketing chops, blah, blah, blah.” Two days after I left, I got $25,000 in business. So I was like, yeah, I can make this happen.

Len: Let’s explain very briefly, what is a memoir and what is a ghostwriter?

What Is a Memoir, What Is a Ghostwriter

Richard: There’s autobiography and memoir. An autobiography is the story of someone’s life as a whole. A memoir tends to be a story about their life. You pick a thread and you work it through their whole life. So it’s not their whole life, it’s just the story. There’s nothing hard and fast about it, that’s generally the difference. I haven’t written an autobiography yet. I’ve written a lot of memoirs. People want to talk about their life, but there’s usually a specific thing they’ve done that they want to talk about. One person put in a whole hotel chain and wanted to talk about how that happened. So what’s the pathway through that? It becomes a much more focused and interesting story than somebody’s whole life.

A ghostwriter is somebody who writes for somebody else and is invisible, usually. My name’s not on the book. There are 54+ books out there that I’ve written that don’t have my name on them. It has the author, the person who paid for it. They get all the royalties and the rights, which can be frustrating sometimes, because one of them got $30 million of venture capital because he had a book. It’s like, I should have made that contract a little different. But I get paid in advance to write their book, and then they go do what they will with it.

Len: Is it an emotionally difficult thing for a ghostwriter to do, to not get the credit?

The Contractor Who Doesn’t Sign the House

Richard: I kind of look at it like a contractor. A contractor builds a house, puts his heart and soul into that house, makes it the dream house for the person. The contractor’s name isn’t on the house. I’m the same way. I put my heart and soul into writing a book for somebody else. And then when I interview them, I take their heart and their soul and put it into the book. That’s an interesting thing to do, to find the heart of the book. And yeah, it can be frustrating sometimes to know I wrote this book and nobody knows it but me and the author who paid for it.

Len: Someone could contact you and say, hey, Richard, I’d really like to write a book about my life story. How would that conversation go?

Why Audience and Purpose Come First

Richard: Much like the conversation we’re having. We talk about what ghostwriting is, how it can help them, what they’re going to get out of it, how much it costs, how long it takes. And once they say, yeah, let’s go, then I have a series of conversations about their life, about why the author wants to write the book, what he’s going to get out of it, who the audience is, why they want to read the book, what the goals are. You’ve got to make sure those connect. We have quite a few interviews to put that together so the book resonates with both the author and the audience.

If the goal is a TED talk, which several of my clients have done, we tailor it that way. If they want speaking engagements, that’s another thing. If they want to use it to get venture capital, it’s written an entirely different way. If they just want to get their story out, then it’s more of a memoir. So I’ve got to know who their audience is and what their goals are before I can even write one word on a page.

Len: Because if you just want to tell a part of your life to someone, a good question is, who cares? Why would anyone read that?

Richard: That’s correct. We need to know why the book is important, who it’s important to, and what that reader will get out of it. Not only the whole book, but each and every chapter. When you’re reading a book, you don’t want them to get bored or go away in the middle of a chapter. So we need to have that purpose in mind through the entire book, and achieve it through every chapter and even subchapter.

Len: A lot of our listeners are retired or planning to retire. How could writing a book give someone enjoyment and fulfillment?

Doris and “Gators in the Soup”

Richard: I had a lady named Doris come to me, and she had written down her dreams every single morning when she woke up since she was a teenager. She came to me with several boxes full of handwritten notes, all the little stories she’d written when she woke up. She put it on the desk and said, I want you to take this and turn it into a novel. And I was like, okay, fine. After having somebody else transcribe all that, because I wasn’t about to read 4,000 pages and transcribe it, we produced an excellent novel. It’s called Gators in the Soup. It’s on Amazon. It’s one of the ones I can actually name. It’s this cute little book about two gators who go around a magical swamp known as Florida and have adventures.

When I handed the book to her, the look on her face was precious. She told me, this is almost as good of a feeling as when I held my daughter in my hands the first time.

Len: Oh my goodness. That’s an incredible story.

Richard: It was a lot of fun to write, and the look on the face of the customer was more than enough to justify the whole thing. I’ve gotten that several times. I wrote some books for a real estate person whose whole life had been heavily into real estate, and his story was phenomenal. You think, well, who would care? But it’s written in such a way to make the reader care, all the trials and tribulations of building the business, failure after failure, and then finally a success. It’s a great legacy to pass on to the kids and grandkids, to show them they can succeed too. So one audience for seniors is specifically to leave a legacy for others.

Len: When people retire, their identity in their work really drifts away. Through this concept of memoirs, what would you say to someone who says, I had a career that was an important part of my life and I don’t do that anymore, but I still want to connect with that?

Identity After the Job Title

Richard: I think that’s an excellent reason to write a book. You have to come into writing a book with a purpose. If the purpose is to spread the knowledge you’ve gained through your whole life, not only of work but of family and relationships, a lot of younger people today are confused about relationships. There could be a lot in there that helps family members with marriage and so forth. It can be comforting to others to know that granddad made some mistakes in his life and recovered from them. Everybody thinks their mistakes are horrible, they’re going to die, how can I ever recover. And granddad recovered, maybe from the Great Recession. So it can be very useful as a legacy to know that other people have experienced similar things to what you’re going through.

Len: I want to press into how writing a book can help people’s connection to what they’ve done throughout their profession still be relevant to their life.

Richard: One of the books that formulated my future was a book called The Other Guy Blinked, by the ex-CEO of Pepsi, from the ’70s and ’80s. It’s out of print now. He wrote about the Coke-Pepsi wars, the New Coke thing, Michael Jackson, all of it. I read that and learned he was a driven but more or less ordinary guy with a lot of the same problems I have. And he managed to become, at the peak of his career, the head of Pepsi. There were failures in there, and he was quite open with those. It helped me just reading that to know he was the guy who made it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography is very good and provides a lot of insight. There’s a wrestler called Mick Foley. He wrote two autobiographies, himself, no ghostwriter. From the poorest of the poor he became one of the biggest wrestlers in the WWE, and now he’s a comedian and a bestselling author ten times over. People can get a lot of understanding that their life isn’t as bad as they think, and get out of the mindset of, I’m in this maelstrom. Then they get some ideas: maybe I can get out of this and become who I’m supposed to be.

Len: A lot of folks who retire are in that place of, I’ve been who I’m supposed to be. And the question isn’t so much what you do, but who you are in this next stage. You’re not reinventing yourself. You’re just focusing on different parts of your identity you haven’t focused on before.

Richard: That’s correct. I’ve always been a little bit of a writer, so I refocused my life to be much more of a writer and much less of a technician. I could go back and work in technology again if I wanted to. I get the occasional offer. It’s not what I want to do. It’s very important to define that next part of life. I looked at it in exactly those terms a few years ago: what do I want the next third of my life to be? First of all, I don’t want to work for somebody else. And I’m getting to that age where it’s not going to be a choice anymore for most companies. They don’t hire older people. I think we call it ageism. Found that out real fast. And that was fine, because I didn’t want to work for them anyway. I wanted to work on my own terms.

A book can help you take that vast amount of experience and knowledge you’ve gained over your entire lifetime. It’s very comforting to write all that down and finally get it into an end result. My writing process, which is slightly different than most, is very interactive and collaborative. So the client and I work together to write that book, and they go through a catharsis. I love that word. It’s not intended to be a therapy session, but it’s almost therapeutic to look back at your life and go, yeah, I failed big time here, but I recovered. And then I failed here, but I recovered again. And finally I’m where I am now.

Define Your Legacy or Someone Else Will

Len: It’s almost like writing the first bunch of chapters in a book of their life, but there’s more to go.

Richard: Right. You also get to define what your legacy is, because if you don’t define your legacy, somebody else is going to. I’ve got a slightly sad story here. My parents passed away during COVID, and I had to go through their stuff and realized I had no idea who they were and never will now. Because they didn’t leave anything other than stuff. I know my father was an artist and my mother ran a store, and I know the facts, but what led to their journey? Why did they make these decisions through their life? No idea. I didn’t get a chance to interview them.

The Parents He Never Got to Interview

Richard: That was another reason I started going more heavily into the memoir thing, because I could see how my sister and I don’t know anything about them. Not like my grandfather, where I’ve got a pretty good viewpoint into his life. So I think writing a book is important to let other people know who you were. Finding out facts from a genealogist gets you a few minor facts and maybe a couple of pages here and there, but you can’t get the whole picture. You don’t maybe want the whole picture, but you want the story.

Writing as Catharsis

Len: There’s a story other people read, and there’s also your own story to think about yourself.

Richard: It is, because as we said, it’s therapeutic. It helps calm the mind. And I want to note that it’s not therapy, but it does help calm the mind down and lets you look back at the past and then make a rational decision: what do I want to do from now on? How do I want to be remembered? Do I want to start a second career? Do I want to go on a world tour on cruise lines? Sometimes that can be difficult to approach because you still have all this mishmash of stuff from your past that’s getting in the way. Writing a book can help smooth that out.

Len: What advice would you give retirees who want to explore writing but don’t know where to start?

The Free First Hour

Richard: Make an appointment with me. The first hour is free and there’s no obligation. I know that sounds trite, but I can help you. The purpose of that first hour is to untangle the concept. Do you actually have a story here? And I’m an honest guy. I’m going to say, you know what, there’s really nothing here for us to write about, though I wouldn’t say it like that. We’ll come to a conclusion as to whether writing a book is appropriate and whether they should write it themselves. It could be me as a book coach, where they do the writing and I help them. It could be with me as their ghostwriter. I act as a consultant for an hour for no charge. So take advantage of me.

Len: As a certified life coach, I find it interesting that you coach people to write books. How does that go?

Richard: I’ve got to get down to what their purpose is. What do they want to write a book for? And sometimes they don’t know. I don’t know why I want to write a book, I just know I want to. Well, you came to me for a reason. I use the Socratic method. I start asking questions and get the answers. By the time that hour is done, they’ve either decided no, I don’t want to do this, or yeah, let’s write a memoir. And sometimes they say, I want to write it myself but I want you to coach me, which is fine.

Capturing Heart and Soul

Len: When people think about their life story, it helps them get clarity on what will make their life amazing, doesn’t it?

Richard: I want to write a book that is amazing, that captures their heart and their soul. That’s my purpose, especially with memoirs. It takes a lot of work. I’m trying to get to what your soul is saying, what your heart is saying, and put that down into words. It comes down to their stories. Part of the process is filtering out the parts of the story that aren’t relevant to the goal. I might listen to 50 stories and we use five of them, because there’s just not room for all 50. They’re important, but not important to achieve the goal. That’s what a memoir is, the journey to a certain goal. In the case of Doris, the amazing experience for her was to combine all those dreams into something tangible she could hold in her hands. That was the amazing goal for her, and apparently I achieved it.

Helping People Live Their Dreams

Len: A lot of retirees have really given up on the concept of dreams. Just the idea of helping people dream and live those dreams, does that excite you?

Richard: It’s part of the reason I do it. There’s always the books somebody comes to me for to help their career, a pamphlet for a franchise. Those are interesting, but they’re not what I’m here for. The books I’m here for are the leaders who really want to help people, like your book. It’s definitely what I want to do, get the heart and the dreams and the focus of it. I might start from, what dream did you have when you first started on this path, and how did that change over your whole career? Did you, like me, get thwarted on your dream? I got thwarted on my dream of being a writer because I had to leave home, make a living, have a family. So I put my dream aside, and I’m fortunate I was able to pick it up again and become a ghostwriter and make a decent living at it. And I get to help people see their dreams. That’s the kind of book I love doing.

My grandfather had a dream of getting somebody, anybody, to understand what he went through, even a little bit. And when we were done, I had an understanding of what he went through. That was his dream. It might sound small, but that’s why he became so introverted. Nobody had any inkling of what he went through. Of course they knew the words, but they didn’t really understand what it means to be in a Japanese POW camp for four years. And I got a real look at that. When you consider I was only 17, it’s like opening the door in one of those horror movies and going, oh no, shut that door.

Len: Can I challenge you to think about writing that memoir for him? Might that posthumously honor him and benefit others?

Richard: That would be something I’d probably want to do. It’s an interesting project and challenge. It definitely would be honorable to him. He deserves the honor. He was never recognized. He was just one of thousands of people who were in POW camps. And he deserves people to recognize what he was.

The Last Word: Leave Your Legacy

Len: I’d like to give you the last word.

Richard: Since your listeners are mostly people who are retired, and I’m getting to retirement age myself next year, it’s important to leave your legacy, to let other people know what you’ve accomplished, because those lessons can be useful to other people. Whether you were an assembly line worker, or you invented something, or you raised a family with all its trials and tribulations and warts and happy times, put it into a memoir. You’ve left a legacy that other people can read and will read, to tell them there is hope. The world looks awful scary these days. I’ve been alive a while, and it’s always been awful scary. There’s just now news magnifying that scariness, and the internet. Giving a book to somebody else, your story can help say, yeah, I survived all this, and I survived well, and I raised a family and accomplished this, and you can too. So do it. That’s what I’d like to leave people with: leave that legacy.

Len: Your perspective is that the legacy isn’t about the person who left it. It’s about how it builds into other people’s lives.

Richard: Yeah, it’s therapeutic for themselves, but they already know their legacy. The real reason to write a legacy is for others: family, friends, coworkers, future people, the young people today. They could use that stability, and this is a way to do it.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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