How to Leverage Your Book: Turning a Manuscript Into Authority

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins the Author to Authority podcast for a candid conversation on what to actually do with a book once it exists. He covers why a book is only a tool, his own path into ghostwriting, the discipline and thick skin the business demands, and a leverage strategy that starts long before publication, illustrated with the story of a client whose life’s dreams became a novel.

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books under his own name and ghostwritten over 54 more for clients. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

Why you have to leverage a book

Host: Welcome to the Author to Authority podcast. Today’s topic is how to leverage your book, and I’m excited to have Richard Lowe, a professional ghostwriter and author. Richard, why is it important to leverage a book? We’ll get to the how, but first, why do you have to leverage it?

Richard: My customers tend to be C-level businesspeople, usually in their 40s or 50s, thinking about pivoting their career, often into coaching or a new business. They want to establish credibility, and the best way is a book with their story, what they like and don’t like, whatever they want to write about. Then they use that book to get speaking engagements, TED Talks, press, and more. That’s for nonfiction; fiction is a whole different ballgame, and I do both.

Host: Writing a book is not a field of dreams. Publishers paint this picture that you write a book and customers and radio and TV just fall into your lap, and they forget to tell you the book is only a tool.

Richard: Right. You still have to promote it and use it as promotion, both at the same time.

Host: We do our clients a disservice giving them the impression that writing the book is the hard part and then everything comes to you. Writing the book is like being pregnant; then you have to raise that kid.

The grandfather book, and a first job about an Afghan engineer

Host: Richard, share a little of your story. How did you get into ghostwriting?

Richard: I ghostwrote my first book in my late teens, more for fun. My grandfather was a World War II vet everybody called cranky and told me to avoid. I wanted to know him, so I ignored them and went and talked to him. It turned out he’d been captured on Corregidor, was in the Bataan Death March, and spent time in a POW camp. I decided to write his book. It was never published and pretty rough since I was a teenager, but I fell in love with it. I got to interview him and we became friends.

Richard: After that I focused on a career for 33 years, becoming a tech leader at places like Trader Joe’s and VP of consulting at several businesses. Then I’d had enough of corporate and started my own business. I jumped off the cliff, moved from California to Florida, and tried everything: affiliate marketing, straight writing, selling on eBay. I made money at all of them, but nowhere near enough. Then I stumbled into ghostwriting through a ghostwriter I met at a writing critique group.

Richard: He put me on the memoir of an engineer who built the roads in Afghanistan in the 70s, before the Soviet invasion. During a coup he was put under house arrest, then got an anonymous phone call telling him to pack and leave immediately. He made the long, dangerous trip down to the Durand Line at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and got out. When the Americans looked at the prison he’d have been sent to, they found tens of thousands of skeletons of executed people; he’d have been one of them. A dramatic story, and I got paid a whole thousand bucks to write it. I was excited to do it, not excited by the rate.

Two days, $25,000, and a lot of phone calls

Richard: After a couple more, I decided I could make a lot more money doing this. My boss said no, you can’t, you don’t know how to market or sell. So I quit. The next day I had a $10,000 book, and the day after a $15,000 book, so within two days I had $25,000 worth of work, and I never looked back. Part of it was my tech background; I had connections and could find people who wanted those books.

Host: I like that you leveraged your network. People say anyone can quit and earn $25,000 the next day, but they don’t mention the years spent building a network so you can go to a few people who’ll convert.

Richard: It was almost 500 phone calls to get those two clients over several days. That was before LinkedIn and social media were big. The best way to find businesses is to connect and talk on LinkedIn, call them, or send a direct email. Social media takes longer and is more complicated. It’s simple: pick up the phone and call somebody, and if they don’t like it, they’ll tell you. You’d better grow a spine and get used to harsh words, because you’re making cold calls. If you’re going to be a ghostwriter, you’re going to need a spine.

A spine also means saying no

Host: You need a spine two ways. When I started I was on freelancing sites taking any job to gain experience. You charged $1,000; I charged $500 for my first book and realized it was nowhere near enough for the hours. The other part of a spine is knowing who to say no to.

Richard: I’ve turned away customers left and right. I got out of corporate because I didn’t want a toxic environment, so why create another one? People can be toxic, so I turn down a lot of business, and I’m in a position where I can. I charge between $60,000 and $100,000 for a book now, a long way from that $1,000, but it takes a year and a lot of work. I once turned down a toxic person who was also a lawyer, because then I’d be dealing with a toxic person who could successfully sue me. Most of my audience is high-level technical and C-level managers.

Gators in the Soup: don’t judge a book by its cover

Richard: My favorite ghostwriting story: someone contacted me through my website about three years ago, a 78-year-old woman who wanted to meet at Panera Bread. I took one look and thought, they don’t have the money; they looked exactly like the Beverly Hillbillies, missing teeth, clearly living in a trailer, which was true. But she could afford me. This was her life’s work. She’d kept a journal of her dreams her whole life, handwritten in scratchy notes, and wanted me to turn them into a novel. Her sister transcribed them, and we wrote a young adult novel called Gators in the Soup, gators going through a magical swamp fighting magical beasts. It’s on Amazon and it’s one of my favorite projects.

Richard: She got it published and was ecstatic, and then COVID hit and she passed away two months after publication. It touched me that I could have that big an impact on somebody. The lesson is don’t judge a book by its cover; I completely misjudged them at first. People aren’t always the way they appear.

The whole package: leveraging the book together

Richard: Writing is hard, but doing something with that writing is harder, so I offer the whole package. You come to me for a book, you get the book, I help you market it, find the right people for the cover, and if you want a traditional publisher, I write the book proposal, which is a marketing tool they require; self-publishing doesn’t need one. I can do the whole self-publishing process including marketing, which I largely outsource through me.

Richard: What I found is people hire a ghostwriter, get a book, and then don’t know what to do with it, so they spend $20,000 to $40,000 and it sits on the shelf. That’s sad, so I added these layers. With my current customers, we write a LinkedIn post several times a month, they tag me, and I add to it: I’m working with this person as their book coach, here’s what I learned about their subject. We build on each other, so he gets the advantage of my LinkedIn network and I of his. We leverage the book together, so by the time it’s published it has an audience.

The book launch and Amazon’s first two weeks

Richard: Then I recommend a virtual book launch party with as many as 1,000 invited, and hire a host. I know a great guy who used to do real radio, back in the Wolfman Jack era, with that kind of voice. You have someone do the admin, run a special on the book, and by the end you’ve probably sold 100 copies. It’s very important to sell as many as you can in the first week, because Amazon reads your demographics from the first two weeks and promotes your book to whoever bought it then.

Richard: If your market is teachers but the first-two-weeks buyers are from the tech field, it won’t be matched right, so you need that match correct. There are whole books on the algorithm, but the point is it learns a lot in the first two weeks and gives you a boost. If you can’t sell it in the first two weeks, you probably won’t sell it.

His own books, and the ones he’s proudest of

Host: You’ve written many books. Share one you’d like to promote today.

Richard: Most of mine were written years ago because I needed something to show, since I can’t show my ghostwritten books. The one I’m most proud of, though it sold only about a dozen copies, is Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex: if you don’t practice it, you’re not safe. It’s the first one I did, with diagrams and pictures, and I spent a lot of time on it. You can find all my books at coolauthor.com.

Richard: I did about 20 coloring books, including four belly dance coloring books using my own photographs of dancers and models, which sold about 1,000 copies because the dancers all bought the editions they were in and got their friends to. Focus on LinkedIn is a little outdated now, written before Microsoft bought LinkedIn, but I was a LinkedIn branding expert for a company run by Donna Serdula, who wrote LinkedIn for Dummies, and I did about 300 profiles. That one became a bestseller, selling about 15,000 copies in three days with a nice launch party. How to Sell on eBay sold about 5,000 copies in one day.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of ghostwriting

Host: Here’s the question I ask every author: for one of your books, what was the good, the bad, and the ugly of writing, editing, and publishing it?

Richard: I’ll take a ghostwritten book without the title. The good was that by then I’d smoothed out my process. I write seven books at a time, seven clients at once, and I call it multithreading: I do a bit of each book each day to make forward progress, because otherwise I procrastinate and try to do everything in one day at month’s end. The process is interviewing the client, research, writing, and getting them to revise, which is sometimes hard because they hired me since they don’t have time. The worst are the ones where they just say, write the book on this subject, because by the end I’m wondering, is it okay?

Richard: The one I’m doing now I revise every day; I write 500 to 1,000 words a day so they can review it in an hour. The hard part of ghostwriting is writing while pretending to be somebody else. If you’ve hired me, I’m you while I write that book, and I’m doing seven at a time, switching between personalities all day. Sometimes it bleeds into my personal life; one author cursed a lot, so his book has a lot of cursing, and I’d catch myself cursing like a sailor and have to stop before going out in public.

Richard: Then the hard part is marketing, where authors fail 99 percent of the time. They write the book, love it, hit the wall of marketing, and don’t know what to do, so ghostwritten books commonly just sit on the shelf. Hiring a marketer costs about what you paid me, so you’d better make sure the book is what you want. That’s why I vet it up front and have them review it the same day, because there’s nothing worse than rewriting a whole book because they wanted first person, or present tense, halfway through. The real ghostwriting problem is managing the client and their expectations, so I have to be a project manager, keep them informed, and pull them back when they wander off.

Feast or famine: the most important freelance rule

Richard: This is the most critical rule of freelance: it’s feast or famine. Around September or October, sales boom, and then you get almost nothing until maybe February, because leads don’t convert during the holidays. Right now, coming up on the summer holidays, leads are really tough, so use that time to build leads. The best advice I can give any freelance writer is to understand it’s feast or famine and keep at least four to six months in the bank. The more, the better. That’s also why I keep seven books going: if one client wanders off, I’m not suddenly wondering how to pay the rent.

Final thought: if it’s important, you’ll find the money

Host: Share one quick final thought, and anything you’d like to promote.

Richard: If you have a book in you and don’t know how or don’t have the time, hire a ghostwriter. People say they don’t have the money, but you have money for a vacation, or for a heart transplant you needed; you have money for the important things. If writing your book is important, you’ll find the money and the time. If you can’t, it’s not important. Figure out what’s important in your life and pursue that.

Richard: As a giveaway, go to my website and schedule a free call, up to an hour, about whatever problem you’re having. I do book coaching, LinkedIn profiles, and LinkedIn coaching. If you’re stuck on a book, call me, I’ll give you a few tips, and if you want to buy an engagement it’s four to 10 hours at a time. That’s thewritingking.com, with lots of links to my scheduling tool.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

Is writing a book enough to build authority?

No. A book is only a tool; publishing it is the start, not the finish. The common myth is that once the book exists, press, clients, and opportunities arrive on their own. In reality the book has to be actively used and promoted, which is where most authors stall, hitting what Richard calls the wall of marketing.

How do you leverage a book while it’s still being written?

By building an audience during the writing, not after. Richard co-posts the writing journey with clients on LinkedIn several times a month, tagging each other and sharing what they’re learning, so the book has an engaged audience before it launches. That momentum then feeds a virtual launch party and strong first-two-weeks sales, which Amazon’s algorithm uses to decide who to promote the book to.

Why does a ghostwriter turn down paying clients?

To protect the working environment. Having left corporate to escape toxicity, Richard declines clients who show toxic signs in early conversations, and is especially wary of combative clients in a position to sue. Being selective is possible once a practice is established, and it keeps the work sustainable rather than lucrative but miserable.

What’s the hardest part of the ghostwriting business?

Managing the client and their expectations, not the writing itself. Ghostwriting means writing as though you are someone else, often several clients at once, while keeping each one engaged enough to review drafts. The writer has to act as a project manager, keep clients informed, and pull them back when they drift, because a rewrite of a whole book, over something like point of view or tense, is the worst outcome.