Credibility Through Content: Building a LinkedIn Brand One Post at a Time

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins Out of the Blank for a long, wide-ranging conversation that starts with the craft and business of ghostwriting and opens into his personal story: the death of his wife, the grief that pushed him behind a camera, and the Renaissance-faire and belly-dance community that pulled a shy introvert into a second life as a photographer. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

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.

113+ books, and counting, since leaving Trader Joe’s

Host: Welcome to another episode of Out of the Blank. I’m here with Richard Lowe. Richard, tell me a little about yourself.

Richard Lowe: I’ve got an interesting background. Currently I’m a ghostwriter; I do that professionally and make a pretty good living at it. I’m also an author. I’ve written 113+ books under my own name and ghostwritten 54+ more for clients, and my full-time writing career began after I left Trader Joe’s in 2013.

Host: So you still like the authenticity of actually writing something. Don’t you miss having a pencil in your hand, crafting out words?

Richard Lowe: No, I hate it. I use dictation, voice to type.

What a ghostwriter actually is

Host: When people hear ghostwriter, the first thing they think is you’re writing books about ghosts. Explain what your form of ghostwriting is.

Richard Lowe: A ghostwriter is somebody who writes a book for somebody else, and that person, called the author, pays them and puts their name on the book. When you see a book by a celebrity or a politician, they usually didn’t write it. Ninety-nine percent of books by celebrities, politicians, and leaders of industry are written by a ghostwriter, someone like me. Ghostwriters also do music; there was a flap a few years ago about rap songs being ghostwritten. It’s very common.

Richard Lowe: I’ve done 28 ghostwritten books [54+ as of 2026], everything from a cleaning-supply company to an Afghan politician, to the memoir of a POW, to artificial intelligence and robotics. I do whatever they pay me to do. I don’t go into the deep technical stuff; it tends to be aimed at the business level or normal people rather than technical people. That’s just not my forte, but I do it all, and people hire me.

Host: Do you think people feel too good to write a book about themselves, or too lazy?

Richard Lowe: Usually it’s neither. They don’t have the time and they don’t know how to write. It’s the same as hiring a contractor to build your house because you don’t know how, and even if you did, you don’t have time. You hire someone to do it for you.

The first job: rescuing a book about an Afghan politician

Host: What kind of stories have you come across?

Richard Lowe: My first ghostwriting job was a steep gradient. I was writing my own science fiction and attending writing critique groups, where about a dozen writers sit in a coffee shop and tear each other’s work apart. A guy there was starting a ghostwriting company and hired me. I was brand new and he grossly underpaid me, about $750 to rescue a book. He’d started it, another ghostwriter worked on it and quit, and I took it over from awful handwritten interview notes.

Richard Lowe: It was about a politician in Afghanistan before the Soviets invaded in the 70s, before the Taliban, before 9/11. One of the stories: he was flying to the United States to attend college, and a stewardess offered him a hot dog. He said no, no, don’t want a hot dog, and turned to his brother and said, they eat their dogs in the United States. He eventually gave up the project, so I can speak about it generally.

Asimov and a love of books that isn’t dying

Host: Where did your fascination with writing come from?

Richard Lowe: There aren’t a lot of ghostwriters. There are hundreds of thousands of people who call themselves writers, and over a thousand new books published on Amazon every day, but ghostwriters are a rare breed, probably fewer than a thousand of us in the whole United States. I got my impetus at six years old when I picked up a book by Isaac Asimov. His goal was to write 500 books before he died, and I think he got to 501. I said, I want to be just like him. He wrote about everything: Shakespeare, atomic energy, science fiction. The movie I, Robot came from one of his books.

Richard Lowe: Books aren’t dying by any means; they’re just changing forms. They’re very popular, now as ebooks, paperbacks, hardcovers, and audiobooks. The only part of the industry that’s really dying is the physical bookstore; there are only a few Barnes and Nobles left where there used to be many.

Digital transformation: keep up or die

Richard Lowe: Something I ghostwrite a lot about is digital transformation, where companies change very fast and, if they can’t keep up, they die. You can see it happening to Sears right now. Amazon’s success is that it creates a platform that satisfies customers and gives them a good experience. I’ve written a lot about customer experience, and it’s very important. A good website like Walmart’s or Amazon’s is easy, fast to check out, with flexible payment and shipping options. I once had a router go out and had a replacement delivered from Amazon two hours later, for free.

The help desk: is it plugged in?

Host: You must have run into a lot of people who know nothing about the technology you’re walking them through.

Richard Lowe: I used to run two help desks at Trader Joe’s, one for users and one for the warehouses. Our first question was generally, is it plugged in, is it turned on? You’d be amazed how many times that solved it. But my clients at Trader Joe’s were CFOs, CEOs, and the like, so we didn’t hang up on them.

Richard Lowe: I have the opposite problem now. I know routers pretty well, so when mine goes out and support wants to walk me through all the simple stuff, I ask them to skip to level two or level three. And they will. Then I’m talking router-talk with the guy and he says, you really know your stuff.

Why writers should never proofread their own work

Host: When I write, I craft something I’m proud of, and then I see all the little red squiggly lines and feel like an idiot. How do you handle that?

Richard Lowe: That’s proofreading, a different thing. Writers should never proofread their own work; always hire somebody, because writers are terrible at catching their own mistakes. But some tricks: wait at least a day before reading it. Read it out loud, forward, then read it out loud backward, paragraph by paragraph. Reading the last paragraph, then the one before, breaks the circuit in your brain that makes you skip over words, kind of like the movie Memento. And join writing critique groups and read it out loud; other people catch errors you can’t.

Thrown in the deep end: the AI and IoT books

Host: Do you have one really good ghostwriting project you still think about?

Richard Lowe: Quite a few, but I’m under nondisclosure for everything except a couple, so I can only be vague about the best ones. I did a book on artificial intelligence that’s in bookstores now, and another on the Internet of Things, smart light bulbs, smart factories, smart cities. Those two I’m proud of because I didn’t know much about the subject when I started and had to learn it. That’s ghostwriting: you’re thrown into the deep end of the pool with lead weights and sharks swimming around, no floaties, and you’re expected to know it. You start by interviewing, for hours and hours, the client and anyone he specifies, and then you write.

Grief as an enemy, and a decision on Skull Rock

Host: You mentioned you turned yourself from an introvert into an extrovert.

Richard Lowe: Let me tell you the interesting part. I got married at 33 to who I thought was my soulmate. We’d been on two dates, and on the third I asked her to marry me. It was a rough marriage, and she got very sick, for about 12 years, from smoking and asthma, until she passed away in 2005. One thing about me is I don’t like grief. Grief is not a friend you invite over for tea; it’s an enemy. You lock the doors when grief comes.

Richard Lowe: After she passed, I drove out to Joshua Tree National Park, where I’d hiked about a hundred times, climbed to the top of Skull Rock, sat there all day, and decided to change my life. The first thing I did when I got back was get a bunch of tattoos. Here I am, this conservative white guy at 50, arms covered in tattoos, to signify that life had changed. Then I went out to meet people and photograph.

The camera as a shield: national parks to Renaissance faires

Richard Lowe: Because I was introverted and caved in from the grief, I decided the camera would protect me and push me into things and toward people. I got a professional camera and went to all the national parks in California, Nevada, Arizona, the whole American Southwest, and took probably 300,000 pictures of nature, with plenty of adventures falling down cliffs and onto cacti.

Richard Lowe: Then I started going to Renaissance faires. The faire people are like a circus family, very close, and they recognized the state I was in and took me in as their official photographer. They actually hired me. I became great friends with all the entertainers; their backstage shows are quite interesting, the ones not open to the public.

Marjhani moves him to the front row

Richard Lowe: Then I sat in front of a belly dance show, women in full-length, authentic Moroccan costumes, head to toe, and I photographed for seven weekends in a row, took thousands of pictures, and put them online. They found them, downloaded them, and loved them.

Richard Lowe: One weekend, the head of the tribe, a wonderful lady named Marjhani, walked up to me. I was still extremely conservative and shy, and she had studs and tattoos, so I honestly thought she was going to mug me. Instead she put her arm around me and said, we really like your pictures, thank you, we’d like you to be part of our group as our official photographer. But she told me one thing: photographers who use a telephoto lens from the back row are considered creepy. She moved me to front row center, and from then on I was front row center at every show.

Host: People hear belly dancing and think strip club, but it’s nothing like that. It’s a form of expressing yourself through movement, like any dance.

Richard Lowe: Exactly, and the Renaissance faire is very conservative. She introduced me to the entire belly dance community in Southern California, and within two years I was the Southern California belly dance and Renaissance faire photographer, with over 980,000 pictures online. I photographed over 1,200 shows and over 400 Renaissance faires all over the United States, flying every weekend to a different show. I even started producing shows and contributing to charity shows.

Make your own birthday matter

Host: You experienced a loss and found a way through it with the Renaissance world.

Richard Lowe: I did. Here’s the kicker. Someone once told me he was lonely because nobody remembered his birthday, and I said, that’s because your birthday isn’t important to anybody else unless you make it important to them. Then I was sitting there depressed that nobody was showing up for my birthday, and thought, I should take my own advice. So I created a yearly tradition. I’d rent a room, and over a hundred belly dancers and Renaissance faire people would come and put on a party for me. My last one, in 2013, had over 200 dancers, break dancers, belly dancers, sword dancers, snake dancers, even a couple of mermaids, and Renaissance groups. Eight years of solid performances, and I was the main guy there.

Men and women can be friends: the Grand Canyon

Richard Lowe: I became genuinely good friends with a lot of these ladies. One of the complaints of most of the 1,200 women I photographed is that men can’t have women friends, that men just don’t do that. I’m a believer that they can, and I’m proof. One lady, Janna, I met at one of my first shows; she sat next to me goofing around, putting a sword on her head to cheer me up, and we became close friends.

Richard Lowe: That November, for my birthday, I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon but not alone, so I called her and said, let’s just go as friends. We took the Amtrak to Williams, then the special luxury train down to the canyon, and stayed a few days. The deal was she’d do a performance on the edge so I could photograph her, so she put on her belly dance costume and danced on the rim with a 3,000-foot drop behind her. What I didn’t tell her was that it was five degrees, with ice and snow everywhere. She did a great performance, all on video, some of the best pictures I ever took, real crisp. She thought it was interesting that she now had positive proof a guy could be just friends.

Richard Lowe: The next year there was a cruise where 150 dancers were going on a ship. Cruises are sold double occupancy, so a single traveler has to buy two tickets, which is expensive. She couldn’t find someone to room with, and neither could I, so we went on the cruise together in the same room, just friends. We did that four years in a row and had a great time every year.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

What is ghostwriting?

Ghostwriting is writing a book, or other material, for someone else who is credited as the author and who pays for the work. The ghostwriter’s name doesn’t appear. Most books by celebrities, politicians, and business leaders are ghostwritten, and the practice extends to speeches, articles, and even song lyrics.

Why do people hire a ghostwriter instead of writing it themselves?

Usually it comes down to time and skill, not ego or laziness. Most experts don’t have the hours to write a full book and don’t write professionally. It’s the same logic as hiring a contractor to build a house: even if you could learn how, you don’t have the time, so you pay a professional to do it well.

Should writers proofread their own work?

No. Writers are notoriously bad at catching their own mistakes because the brain fills in what it expects to see. Hire someone else, and use techniques that break the pattern: wait at least a day, read the text aloud, read it backward paragraph by paragraph, and read it to a critique group so others catch what you skip over.

How does a ghostwriter handle a subject they don’t already know?

By diving in and learning it fast, mostly through interviews. Two of the projects Richard is proudest of, on artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, were subjects he didn’t know deeply at the start. The process is hours of interviewing the client and anyone they designate, then writing, which is how a good ghostwriter becomes conversant enough to write with authority.