Every Business Needs a Book: Networking, Ghostwriting Rates, and the Bed Bug Chapter | Main Street Mavericks

This is the complete conversation from Richard Lowe’s appearance on Main Street Mavericks Radio with Joel Helfer, lightly edited for readability.

How do LinkedIn keywords get you found in search?

Joel Helfer: Welcome to Main Street Mavericks Radio. I’m Joel Helfer, and today we’re talking with Richard Lowe, the Writing King: author, ghostwriter, and LinkedIn branding expert. Richard, one of the things that impressed me when I looked you up: when I search ghostwriter on LinkedIn, there you are, right near the top. How did that happen?

Richard Lowe: I’m about number three on the search for ghostwriter, and it moves around all the time. The way that happened is keywords. The headline is the most important place: mine says ghostwriter and best-selling author right there. And then those same keywords appear naturally through the summary and the experiences. The key word is naturally. You don’t stuff a list of keywords into your profile; the search engines detect that and throw the keywords away, and it reads badly to human beings. You sprinkle them where they belong, in sentences that make sense, and the search engine adds it all up, and there you’re on the first page.

Joel Helfer: And that produces business? People actually find you that way and hire you?

Richard Lowe: I get inquiries from LinkedIn all the time. Not all of them are qualified; a lot of people want a book for five hundred bucks, and that’s not what I do. But the ones who understand what a book is worth, they find me because I’m findable. That’s the whole point of being on LinkedIn: to be found.

Talk to people, not at them

Joel Helfer: Let’s talk about outreach, because everybody on LinkedIn gets hammered with pitches. Somebody connects, and thirty seconds later there’s a sales message in your inbox. What do you do differently?

Richard Lowe: I don’t pitch. When I connect with somebody, I talk to them like a person. I might say something about their profile that interested me, ask what they’re working on, or just say hello. My rule is: no pitch unless it comes up naturally. If the conversation gets to books, and it often does once they see what I do, then we talk about books. But if I open with “buy my ghostwriting services,” I’ve just told them I don’t care who they are, and they’re right.

Joel Helfer: I do something similar. When I reach out to people, I’ll open with something completely human, like the weather. “How are things in Florida? We’re freezing up here in Chicago.” It sounds trivial, but people answer it, because it’s a person talking, not a machine. And then a conversation exists, and everything else can grow from that.

Richard Lowe: Exactly right. It’s the difference between talking to somebody and talking at them. Everybody can feel the difference immediately. When you talk at people, they put up the wall. When you talk to them, they talk back.

Know, like, and trust

Joel Helfer: A mutual friend of ours, Ron Sukenick, runs a networking organization, and he preaches relationship networking: the question you walk in with is “what can I do for you,” not “what can you do for me.”

Richard Lowe: Ron’s got it right, and so do the BNI folks and Mark O’Donnell over at RGA Networks; I’ve spoken for their groups. The progression is know, like, trust. First they have to know you exist. Then they have to like you, which happens through those human conversations and through you helping them without a bill attached. And then they trust you, and trust is when business happens. You cannot skip a step. Every spammer on LinkedIn is trying to jump straight from know to buy, and it doesn’t work.

Joel Helfer: And the numbers back that up. Cold outreach, cold email, cold anything: conversion rates are terrible.

Richard Lowe: Under one percent. Way under, usually. You can send a thousand cold pitches and get silence, or you can build twenty real relationships and get clients, referrals, and friends. The ghostwriting client I’m working with now: he found me, we talked over months, he came to trust me, and then he signed. And now he wants two more books. That’s what a relationship produces. A cold pitch produces a delete.

Joel Helfer: I’ll give you an example from my side. I posted a story about visiting my mother in a nursing home, just a personal story, nothing to do with business. That post got more response than anything promotional I’ve ever put up. People came out of the woodwork, sharing their own stories about their parents. And some of those people became business relationships later, because they knew me as a human being first.

Richard Lowe: That’s it exactly. People like stories. They like personal things: a little tragedy, a little humor, a little joy. A small business can build its whole social media presence around that. You’re a printing company? Tell the story of the delivery that got through despite the flood. Get a testimonial about how your printing saved somebody’s launch. And when people respond, respond back like a person. People get vicious on the internet because they forget there’s a person on the other side of the screen. Don’t forget it, and you stand out automatically.

The Internet of Things book

Joel Helfer: Tell me about the book you’re ghostwriting now.

Richard Lowe: It’s a book on the Internet of Things, for a gentleman who’s fairly big in that industry and wants to brand himself. It’s been about nine months, and we’ll publish around March. I’m also the publisher on it; I have a little publishing company. And the subject is fascinating and a little frightening. Everything is becoming connected: your thermostat, your lights, your alarm, your car.

Joel Helfer: The car thing gets me. My car knows where I’ve been. Who owns that?

Richard Lowe: That’s one of the questions the book digs into: who owns the data your car generates? Right now, mostly not you. The manufacturer collects it, and there are real questions about warrants and law enforcement access. And it goes further: if the car is connected, the car can be commanded. There are already scenarios where police can stop a connected car remotely. And if a cop can stop it, a hacker can stop it. These are the questions nobody’s asking while they cheerfully connect everything they own to the internet.

Joel Helfer: So what does the ordinary person do about it? I’ve got a router in my house like everybody else.

Richard Lowe: Basics first. Your router is the front door to your house, electronically. Change the default password on it; the default passwords are all published on the internet. Keep its firmware updated. Put your smart gadgets behind the firewall the router provides, and think before you buy: does the fish tank really need WiFi? And on your computers: if the machine suddenly gets slow, that’s frequently a virus doing work in the background, so scan it, don’t shrug it off. None of this is expensive. It’s habits.

Why does every business need a book?

Joel Helfer: You’ve said every business needs a book. Make the case.

Richard Lowe: The book is instant credibility. It’s got your name on the front cover, pretty pictures inside, text that explains what you do. I walked into a man’s office recently, a speaker who teaches people how to dress for success, and his book was sitting there: a thick book, detailed, with pictures, on how to maintain your image. I was instantly impressed, because I’ve written books and I know how hard it is. The book could have been gobbledygook for all I know; I didn’t read it. Just looking at the cover, I thought: this guy must know what he’s talking about. Without the book, I might have been suspicious that he was just after my money for his courses. With it, I was comfortable before he said a word.

Joel Helfer: What about those multi-author books, where somebody writes one chapter alongside fifty other people? We’ve seen those have a similar effect. Is that as good?

Richard Lowe: It’s better to have your own book, but failing that, a chapter in a multi-author book certainly can’t hurt, and it’s a lot less work. Somebody I knew funded one: everybody chipped in a hundred dollars, fifty authors, and it got published. They could all say they were published. But it’s very different to have a book with your name alone on it, maybe a whole shelf of that book behind you when you’re talking to somebody. The person looks at that shelf and thinks: he wrote a book. And then a second book on a similar subject: he’s written two, he must really know this. I wrote a book on survival, and then one on evacuation bags. If I’m selling in that arena, you’d better believe I walk in with both.

Joel Helfer: And you did that for the apartment manager client.

Richard Lowe: Yes: a book for an apartment manager, on managing apartments. Every business has a book in it. His chapters each start with a story, and my favorite is the bed bug chapter. Bed bugs are the bugaboo of all apartment managers, no pun intended, and he had a lot of stories about them. Not funny at the time; certainly funny twenty years later. The chapter opens with a bed bug story, and then it breaks down into the lessons: how you actually deal with them, what a manager needs to do. Story first, lessons after. That’s how you structure a business book that people actually read.

Joel Helfer: That matches what they teach in public speaking, doesn’t it? Open with the story.

Richard Lowe: I’m a Toastmasters member, and that’s exactly what’s recommended: start your speech with a story, personal or funny. It relaxes everybody, makes them laugh, gets them looking at you, and tells them you’re talking to them, not shoving a product down their throat. It doesn’t have to be funny. It can be a personal story, an interesting story, a meaningful one. Same principle in a book chapter.

Joel Helfer: You know, someone said that to me the other day. I was in the construction business, and the stories that come out of building buildings, you wouldn’t believe. Somebody told me, “You should write a book.”

Richard Lowe: And if you hired me to ghostwrite it, that’s precisely where we’d start. Ten chapters, fifty to seventy-five pages, and we’d take your funny construction stories and build the book around them. Each chapter opens with a story, and the story breaks down into the lessons you learned from it. That’s your book, and it already exists in your head.

How much does it cost to hire a ghostwriter?

Joel Helfer: Walk me through the ghostwriting process. Do you just write the book and the person accepts whatever you write?

Richard Lowe: I wish, because that would be easy. No. It starts with an initial interview and a contract, and the first question out of their mouth is almost always “how much,” before I’ve done a single interview, when I don’t even know what they want yet. You do enough discovery to come up with a number. For a reasonably sized book, it starts at ten grand and can go up to fifty, depending on length and complexity. You settle on a price, sign a contract, create an outline the client approves, maybe refine the quote at that point, and the contract needs to allow for that.

Then you write one chapter at a time, and this part matters: the client reviews each chapter as you go. I finish a chapter, two or three thousand words, send it over, they review it, we go back and forth a couple of times, they approve it, we move to the next one. We spend extra time on chapters one and two making sure I’ve got the voice and the direction right. That way you never reach the end of the book and hear “ew,” which is the ghostwriter’s nightmare. By the end, the book is 95% done: they’ve read and approved every chapter, so the final pass is fixing small things. Nobody can say “I didn’t know what I was getting.”

Joel Helfer: And when the client’s mother reads it and doesn’t like how something reads?

Richard Lowe: That happens, almost word for word. And that’s where your contract earns its keep: revisions beyond the process are fine, and they cost more. Otherwise you enter the infinite revision phase, and that’s a nightmare for both sides. Reviewing as you go prevents most of it.

Joel Helfer: Ten to fifty thousand is going to shock some listeners. There are places online where people offer whole books for a few hundred dollars.

Richard Lowe: The chop shops: Fiverr, Thumbtack, places like that. You can find ghostwriters there who’ll write a whole book for pennies on the dollar, and you’re going to get junk. Usually someone who isn’t a native English speaker and doesn’t understand the American audience: fine people, wrong product. You’ll pay a few hundred or a thousand dollars and get back garbage, and here’s the problem: that garbage has your name on it. It brands you. The whole point of the book was to make you look good. If you’d pay for a car, office space, supplies, and promotion, you should be willing to pay for the book that brands you. A well-written fifty-to-seventy-five-page book starts around ten grand, without heavy research or extensive interviews, which cost more. Walk in knowing that, and you’ll get a book worth having.

Selling ghostwriting versus selling your own books

Joel Helfer: How do you market yourself? The audience always wants to know how the business actually comes in.

Richard Lowe: It’s an interesting question, because I’m marketing three different things: myself as a best-selling author, my own books, and myself as a ghostwriter, and they’re totally different. Here’s the truth: it’s much easier to make money selling ghostwriting and freelancing than selling self-published books. Ghostwriting marketing is finding the right contacts, starting relationships, and staying in them until people trust you enough to talk about their book. They know I’m a ghostwriter because I say so up front, and eventually the subject comes around: “I’ve always had this book I’ve wanted to write.” “Well, why don’t you?” “I don’t know how to write,” or “I don’t know if there’s a market.” Whatever the reason is, you address it and move forward. The IoT client came exactly that way: found my LinkedIn and Facebook, we talked, trust built, contract signed, and now he wants a little library.

Joel Helfer: And the self-published side? Everybody wants the 40-page book on Amazon and the 99-cent bestseller launch now.

Richard Lowe: And most of those books aren’t that good, which is the problem and the opportunity. Everybody can publish a book now, and that’s democracy at work: you write it, you publish it. But because everybody’s doing it, how does your book stand above the rest? The keyword is quality. Would you want to read your own book? Would your friends, assuming honest answers? Would strangers? You have to write a book other people want to read, and then another, and another, and keep pumping them out until you have a career at it. That’s what I’m doing, and it’s the subject of the book I’m writing now, out in February: how to build a career as a self-published author.

Fifty-six books and three kingdoms

Joel Helfer: How many books are you up to now under your own name?

Richard Lowe: Fifty-six published books at this point, plus the ghostwritten ones, which I mostly can’t talk about. And some of the fifty-six are a different kind of book entirely: I’m doing coloring books now. I was a belly dance photographer in California for years, and I’ve had photographs converted into line art. And dragons: I found an artist, and we’re doing a dragon coloring book series. Adult coloring is a big market, and it’s fun, and it sells.

Joel Helfer: So the Writing King has a Coloring King in him too.

Richard Lowe: That’s literally the brand. thewritingking.com/ is the main business. I registered TheColoringKing for the coloring books. And years ago, when I sold on eBay, I was TheEbayKing. I find a kingdom and I move in.

Joel Helfer: Richard, this has been a pleasure. Where do people find you?

Richard Lowe: thewritingking.com/, spelled out. All my books are at coolauthor.com, which goes to my Amazon author page. And I’m on LinkedIn; search for ghostwriter, and I’ll be near the top.

Joel Helfer: Richard Lowe, the Writing King. Thanks for being a Main Street Maverick.

Richard Lowe: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.