Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: 2018.

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, joined Josh Wilson on the Bet The Jockey Show for one of his most personal conversations, the loss that nearly closed him off from the world, the camera that pulled him back out, and the writing career he finally built on the other side of it. It’s a story about grief and reinvention that turns, by the end, into a practical guide to the craft and business of writing.

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The Conversation

The dream, and the leap

Josh: Since the age of six you dreamed of writing books, and now you’re doing it.

Richard: At six my mom took me to the library and I picked up Isaac Asimov. He could write about anything and make it understandable, he wrote a book on nuclear physics that I could follow as a seven-year-old, and I decided I wanted to be that. Then life got in the way: school, a career, a family. I spent 33 years in technology, the last 20 as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, running about 1,300 machines and the team behind them. Before that I’d been a vice president of two computer companies starting young, even ran a stretch working two jobs at once, including installing a SCADA system, the kind that controls dams and floodgates, until I did my taxes and realized two jobs had bumped me into a bracket where I made less. In 2013, with a nest egg saved, I finally jumped off the cliff to become a writer.

Grief is not your friend

Josh: Tell us about overcoming grief. A lot of people go through it and don’t know how to deal with it.

Richard: It was harder than I usually let on. My wife was sick for eight and a half years; I learned to do her IVs and change her dressings, and she was hospitalized many times before she passed in 2005, after twelve years of marriage. When she was gone there was the loss, then a guilty relief that the long ordeal was over, then guilt about the relief, a thousand emotions at once.

What I learned is that grief is not your friend. It’s your enemy, and the worst advice out there is that you must sit with it, explore it, feel it, and understand it. That’s hooey. It’s like inviting your drunk uncle to a party at your house. The first thing I did was turn off the television, because the violence and the angry news only fed it. Then I got out of the house. I’m an introvert, so left alone I’d have curled into a ball and disappeared, I’ve watched other people do exactly that, but I forced myself into nature and around people. The grief didn’t vanish; it inched away a little each day, came back, inched away again, until one day it was mostly gone. Movement helped too, a sedentary life makes grief worse. It was a long process, but getting out, rather than turning inward, is what worked.

How a camera pulled him out

Josh: Tell us about the photography and the dancers.

Richard: I’d started nature photography just before she passed, shooting the national parks, and I kept going, fifty or sixty thousand pictures of parks and waterfalls, hikes and adventures, a cactus needle once went clean through my foot. Because I’m introverted, the camera became a talisman, a reason to walk up and say “can I take your picture?” At a Renaissance fair I met the dancers, and before long I was the belly-dance photographer for southern California, 1,200 performance shoots and hundreds of Renaissance fairs, all of it for free. They thanked me with birthday parties, a hundred dancers putting on a show, two nights in a row once. When I finally left for Florida, one of them, Mardhavi, a classical Indian dancer from Sri Lanka, refused to let me drive across the country alone and rode the whole way with me before flying home.

Josh: You’d hire a hundred dancers to come dance for you?

Richard: I didn’t hire them. I’d photographed them all year for nothing, and the party was their thank-you. Eventually it got so big I rented a community center for two evenings, a hundred dancers each night. I’m not joking.

Learning to write, and learning to promote

Richard: In Florida I joined critique groups, the place writers tear your book apart, and met a ghostwriter who hired me. I did three or four books for him until I worked out a $1,000 fee on a 300-page book came to about $3 an hour. I told him I was done, and the very next day landed my first real ghostwriting contract, $15,000, just from getting out and talking to businesspeople. Then I started publishing my own books, threw them on Amazon, and learned the hard truth: they don’t sell unless you promote them. I wrote a book on LinkedIn, promoted it relentlessly, and it sold 15,000 copies. Amazon won’t push your book until it’s already selling, ten thousand titles a day get published, so the work is on you.

The gold is in your email list

Josh: Give us one way people are not promoting their book well.

Richard: The moment you start promoting, a tidal wave of people will try to sell you ways to sell your book, and almost none of it works. I spent something like $10,000 learning that. What actually works is your email list, that’s the gold. Get every reader’s email if you can: at the back of the book, offer a free gift, usually a missing chapter with a special secret, in exchange for signing up. Then don’t just blast ads. Send a useful tip most days and an offer only occasionally, maybe every fifth message, and build the relationship like a friendship. And don’t give away something free every single day, or you train readers to expect everything for nothing and they’ll never buy. Give away good material; sell the best material.

Writing ten thousand words a day

Josh: What’s your advice for writing 10,000 words a day?

Richard: It sounds impossible until you break it down: over a ten-hour day, that’s a thousand words an hour, which isn’t much. I write 45 minutes, then walk a mile, then 45 more, because staring at the screen too long actually brings on writer’s block, and getting up clears it. Keep the environment calm and make it known that a closed door means do not disturb unless the building is burning down, because interruptions will kill you, so turn off the phone and the feeds. And I dictate. Using voice-to-text software, Dragon Professional (these days I no longer recommend Dragon; Microsoft Word 365’s built-in dictation works well), that’s about 99% accurate, I can speak roughly 5,000 words an hour and clean up the misfires in a few minutes.

Why a business owner should write a book

Josh: If I’m a business owner, why should I write a book?

Richard: Because society looks up to authors. Presidents, senators, and major CEOs write books to establish themselves as the name; when Lee Iacocca writes about running a company, he becomes the man who knows how to run a company, talking straight to you. A book hands the press something to cover and gives you something to say from a stage, and a businessperson should be speaking regularly, in person and on podcasts. I wrote one for a car dealer titled around how dealers rip you off, his point being how the other dealers do it, and suddenly he’s the trusted expert giving speeches. That’s the edge: most people won’t write a book because it’s expensive, so the one who does stands above everyone else in the field. It helps far more than a blog or social media, because it gives you something worth posting about.

Three ways to work with a ghostwriter

Josh: What do your services look like?

Richard: Three models, depending on what you need. The first is hourly consulting, billed against a block of hours, for clients who don’t yet know what they want to write; we use it to figure the book out. The second is book coaching and collaboration, also hourly, where you’re the knowledge expert and I’m the writer, and we build the book together, which usually goes faster and costs less than people expect. The third, about two-thirds of my work, is full ghostwriting: you say “write this book for me,” I research the subject, interview you for the parts only you know, and deliver a finished book, full ghostwriting runs at my standard rate of a dollar a word. Whichever model fits, the book ends up yours.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Notable quotes from this conversation

Common questions from this conversation

How did Richard overcome his grief?
By refusing to wallow in it. He turned off the television, got out of the house and into nature and around people, and kept physically active, treating grief as something to move away from rather than sit inside. For him it faded gradually over time, and he’s blunt that turning inward is what traps people.

What’s the most overlooked way to promote a book?
Building an email list. Offer readers a free gift, like a bonus chapter, in exchange for their email, then send useful tips far more often than offers. The list, not paid promotion services, is where the real value lives.

How can someone realistically write 10,000 words a day?
Break it into a thousand words an hour over a ten-hour day. Work in focused stretches with real breaks and a walk, protect the time from interruptions, and use voice-to-text dictation, which lets Richard produce roughly 5,000 words an hour.

Why should a business owner write a book?
It establishes them as the expert and the name in their field, the way it does for CEOs and public figures. It gives the press something to cover, fuels speaking engagements, and stands out precisely because most competitors never bother to write one.

What are the ways to work with a ghostwriter?
Three: hourly consulting to figure out the book, coaching and collaboration where the client is the expert and Richard is the writer, and full ghostwriting where he researches, interviews, and writes the whole book.