A Book Is a Tool, Not a Lottery Ticket: What Authorship Really Earns You

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

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, joined Dr. Christopher Loo for a conversation aimed squarely at high-income professionals and entrepreneurs weighing whether a book is worth their time. The real answer Richard kept returning to: yes, but not for the reason most first-time authors expect. You almost certainly won’t get rich on sales. What a book buys you is leverage.

The discussion ranged across the realities of modern publishing, where AI actually fits, and the practical question physicians, founders, and executives keep asking, what does authorship return on the hours it costs.

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The Conversation

From Corporate Tech to Ghostwriting

Dr. Loo: Tell the audience what you do and how you got there.

Richard: I spent 33 years in tech. I was a VP at two different companies, I led the project that built the computer systems for the Las Vegas Valley Water District, and I finished as Director of Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, in charge of cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and whatever else needed running. About thirteen years ago I decided I was done with corporate, the politics, all of it. People told me I’d never make it as a writer, that there’s no money in it, and I said, whatever, I’m going to try. I jumped off the cliff, freelanced, and fell into ghostwriting, which turned out to pay better than Trader Joe’s did. What I love is forming relationships with people who want to get their message out and helping them put it into words.

A Book Is a Tool, Not a Lottery Ticket

Dr. Loo: A lot of first-time authors think they’ll get rich off the book. Talk about why that’s usually not the case.

Richard: Roughly 10,000 books a day are published on Amazon, so you’re a snowflake in a blizzard. A book that sells more than fifty copies is genuinely rare, and of those fifty, ten went to your mom and five to your dad. If your goal is to get rich on sales, that’s the wrong goal. What I help people build is a marketing tool, and like any tool, if you don’t use it, it sits there and rusts. But used well, a book boosts you to a level you didn’t dream of, a TED talk, keynote engagements, the credibility that helps clients raise venture capital. The book is what gets you in the room.

Selling copies is a different game, and it can be done. A friend of mine just published the eighth book in a fiction series, a few thousand copies each, and she’s out doing signings and the bookstore circuit. But that’s a full-time promotional effort, not a windfall.

The Only Two Levers: Promotion and the Cover

Dr. Loo: Are books not selling because of changing consumption habits, or because the market is flooded?

Richard: Going back a hundred years, it’s always come down to two things: are you promoting it, and how does the cover look? If a book isn’t selling, start with the cover. A common mistake is a title so small you can’t read it as a thumbnail, and everyone’s shopping on a phone now, so they scroll right past. As for habits, physical book sales are actually rising, and so are Kindle and audio. People still want to read, they just want it in different formats, and your book can live in all of them.

Self-Publishing, Traditional, Hybrid, Ghostwriting: Untangling the Choices

Dr. Loo: When would someone choose self-publishing versus a ghostwriter?

Richard: Those aren’t opposites, and that trips a lot of people up. A ghostwriter simply writes the book; how it gets published is a separate decision. With self-publishing you own everything but you do everything, the cover, the editing, the promotion, or you hire it out. A traditional publisher gives you a royalty and a distribution arm into bookstores and libraries, but takes certain rights. Hybrid, where you pay them to publish, I generally wouldn’t recommend. You can replicate traditional distribution while self-publishing, but promoting to libraries is a full-time job, and promoting to bookstores is another. If you want copies in lots of hands, you’ll either go traditional or spend far more than you’d spend on the writing, hiring a PR agency to do it.

Where AI Actually Hits the Market

Dr. Loo: ChatGPT can crank out a book quickly now. Why hire a ghostwriter at all?

Richard: Because AI writes flat, lifeless prose. I can look at a page and tell you in a second whether a machine wrote it, because the emotional level never changes. What AI is really doing is cutting out the bottom of the market, the Fiverr writers charging $500 a book, or people using AI and pretending to be ghostwriters. Four or five years out, AI may produce genuinely good books, but it can’t yet. I’m a premium ghostwriter, between the budget end and the celebrity end, and I sell to people who want quality. If someone wants a $500 book or an AI book, more power to them, that just isn’t my market.

I do use AI as a tool, for outlines and research, never for the actual writing, and you have to remember it lies a lot. Treat it as a tool and you’ll get along fine. Treat it as your replacement and it might be, in which case start looking for a new job. I’ve written four books on AI, so I’ve thought about this a great deal.

Translating Your Expertise So Customers Understand It

Richard: One of my favorite kinds of project is a technical expert who wants a book for his own customers. He speaks deep tech, and he asked me to take it from a twelfth-grade level down to about a second-grade level, his words. So I translate his language into theirs, using their terms instead of his, and the result is a book his customers actually understand. That earns him more sales, better customers, and stronger relationships, which is the whole point.

It Still Takes Your Time

Dr. Loo: So a ghostwriter is basically replacing you in a more professional way?

Richard: Sort of, but not entirely. A ghostwriter writes the book, and my name doesn’t go on the cover, but you’re still the knowledge expert. We’ll have a lot of conversations and I still need the material from you, so it takes your time. It isn’t, here’s the book guy, go write about the automotive industry, have fun. You can hire that out, but then the writer does all the research and interviews without you, and that costs far more, as it should. A book carries your authority and your message, so you have to be in it. Done right, it adds real credibility to your brand, which is exactly why it’s an investment, not a quick or cheap thing.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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