Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: 2021.

Richard Lowe, The Writing King, joined Steve on Episode 60 of the ROI Online Podcast for an unusually concrete session: how to fix a LinkedIn profile, how to actually win on social media, and how to crack Amazon’s category-and-keyword game. After leaving the corporate world, one of the first things Richard did was get certified through the LinkedIn Makeover program and optimize more than 300 executive profiles, for CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, directors, even a few ambassadors and government people, and roughly 75% of his own business still comes through LinkedIn. He’s since written 113-plus books under his own name and 54-plus for clients.

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The Conversation

Mistake one: the picture

Steve: What are the must-dos on a LinkedIn profile?

Richard: When I look at a profile, I look for specific mistakes, and the first is not having a good picture. The cover sells the book, and that’s a truism with LinkedIn profiles too. If the picture is awful, people aren’t going to look at your profile at all. It has to relate to your brand. If your brand is a circus performer, a clown suit is fine; otherwise, probably not. Casual works for a writer like me because that’s part of my brand. If you’re a banker, casual is not appropriate.

And watch the background. You wouldn’t believe how many profile pictures are somebody’s head clipped onto another person’s shoulders, it’s awful. I’ve seen one with a cemetery in the background, others with beer bottles all over the place. The advice is simple: get a professional photo. Even a mall photographer is fine, well dressed, a little makeup to clean you up, and make it as professional as you can.

Mistake two: the headline

Steve: What’s the number two mistake?

Richard: The headline says something goofy, usually just their job title, which is the least important thing to be promoting. What you want to promote is what you do and what you deliver. I’m a ghostwriter; what do I deliver? Quality books. It needs to be keyword-driven, because it’s referenced in Google, so find some keywords and build your call to action around them. Don’t put things like “looking for work”, I’ve seen a lot of that since the pandemic, because it lands on the front page of the search engines.

The same goes for the headline on each of your experiences. You only need to say “ghostwriter” once; Google and LinkedIn are smart enough to figure it out from there. You don’t need it sprinkled all over the place. Keyword stuffing doesn’t work.

Mistake three: the About section

Steve: And number three?

Richard: Their About section is just their resume, cut and pasted in, written in third person. Your About page should be in first person, I and me, not third person or past tense. What do you do now? I do this, I deliver this product, I deliver this service, and here are my statistics. Nobody cares what your responsibilities were. They care what you’re going to deliver for them, and how you can back it up: “I increased ROI by 5% over a year.” Be careful with numbers, though, a lot of banks don’t allow figures on LinkedIn, especially publicly owned ones; I found that out the hard way. And keep it about you, not your company. When I look at someone’s profile, I want to see what they can do for me.

While you’re at it, make your experiences tell a coherent story, working forward from your education. If you’re an engineer now but you used to be an auto mechanic, say how being a mechanic helped make you a better engineer. Tie it together.

Playing the social game

Steve: Once the profile’s squared away, who do we connect to, and what next?

Richard: Connect with as many people as you can, but use caution, because LinkedIn has spam filters and if you just connect, connect, connect, you’ll get locked out. Connect through the day, as you meet people and find them in groups, so it looks natural. If you don’t know them, write a short personal intro: “I read your book,” which I do a lot, or “I see you’re into AI and I write about AI, want to talk?” Never lead with a sales message, that’s the fastest way to get blocked so I never hear from you again. Keep it succinct and at least semi-targeted, not robotic. You can build a thousand connections in six months easily; I’ve got more than 16,500 now and I add to it every day. And aim them, if you want bankers, connect to bankers. You can’t attract everybody; attract the audience you want.

Then post every single day, even just a hundred words, a success, something you learned, a class you took, an article you read. But here’s the secret to all social media, hiding in the word social: the platform wants you to be social. That means posting a lot, commenting on other people’s posts, and sharing them. Liking doesn’t matter; LinkedIn doesn’t really care about likes. Comment, and LinkedIn says “this person is playing the game I want” and rewards you with more reach, especially on the topics you engage with, comment on AI and you’ll get more AI in your feed. Commenting is at least as valuable as posting, maybe more, and as you comment you’ll think, “I could write a few hundred words about that.” Use the @ sign to credit whoever sparked the idea, and they’ll often come look and share it back; LinkedIn loves that.

On time: fifteen minutes a day, thirty at most, five days a week, sprinkled morning, noon, and night. Go through your feed, comment, share a couple, write a quick post, and maybe once a week or even once a month spend an extra hour on a real article. And you can always hire a good ghostwriter to write those articles for you, plenty of my clients have me write their LinkedIn pieces and then post them, just make sure it’s a professional.

Cracking Amazon: categories and keywords

Steve: Amazon has its own game to play, correct?

Richard: Absolutely. Start with categories. Search out a category that has real sales but isn’t dominated by big-publisher juggernauts. If every book on page one moves 60,000 copies a month, walk away, you’ll never break that, they’re being promoted by big houses. You want a category where the top books do a couple thousand and then it drops off fast to 50 and 10. That’s one you can break into. That’s the trick.

Then keywords, and Amazon’s keywords are not Google’s. Google uses AI to figure out context. Amazon is literal, like the internet twenty years ago, you say “geology” and it just files you under geology, no bells and whistles. So if a book isn’t selling, the order is strict: fix the cover first, then check that the category and keywords are right. Those two things matter a hundred times more than the look-inside, the title, or the reviews, because if a bad cover or the wrong category keeps people off your page, they never get to the reviews at all.

And take every format you can. The only real cost is about $50 for the hardcover; Amazon doesn’t charge for paperback or Kindle, and for the audiobook you can split royalties with a narrator or record it yourself. My nonfiction titles all come in audiobook, paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.

Try small before big: the short-ebook strategy

Steve: What about promotion services?

Richard: There are people and sites for it, BookBaby has a package around $1,000 where they do the cover, format, publish, and promote, but there’s no accreditation in this field, so the only way to judge anyone is testimonials and referrals. Get referrals, and try small before you go big; you’ll probably fail a few times before you find someone good, or you learn it yourself.

Which is my real recommendation. Instead of pouring a year into a novel and a fortune into promoting it, publish a short Kindle ebook first, five or six thousand words, a short story or a novelette of ten to twenty thousand. You can write it fast, polish it, promote it, and experiment without wasting time or money. Done right, they sell; I’ve seen people move 20,000 copies at $2.99 off something they wrote in a day or two, and I’ve seen one-page Kindle pieces written in an hour sell a thousand copies at 99 cents. That’s getting out of the box, and it tunes your writing skills besides. I’ve got a few out there, and they were fun to write.

Promote like an experiment

Steve: What are good strategies for authors to promote their books?

Richard: First they have to be willing to promote at all, which is genuinely hard, because so many writers and technical people are introverts who started writing because it’s easier than talking to people, that was me, a long time ago. Promotion means coming out of your shell, and some writers find it exhilarating while others hit it like a wall of fire, get discouraged, and never write another book. So you have to be willing to promote, willing to experiment, and willing to fail.

I tried Facebook ads and lost the money. A LinkedIn ad, nothing. YouTube, not for me, I’m not a video person. Then I tried podcasts, and people started calling saying they’d heard me and wanted to hire me; I’ve landed several large contracts that way. Match the channel to the book: consumer and fiction lean Facebook, business leans LinkedIn, a political book leans Twitter, and YouTube works if you can make videos that grab people. Influencer marketing works too, a friend, Bonnie, a terrific marketer, started writing her own books and got established science-fiction and fantasy authors to help promote them, and they climbed. And before you pay anyone for Google or Amazon ads, take a class or two and learn how they work, because they’re pay-per-click, not pay-per-sale, and the money goes like a vacuum cleaner. I’ve wasted plenty on promotion I didn’t understand. For me, LinkedIn works best; my contracts are large enough that I only need about a dozen a year to make a good living.

Better writing, briefly

Steve: Give us some ideas to become better writers.

Richard: Three questions first: who’s your audience, what’s the theme, and why are you writing it? If an AI article is aimed at directors who don’t care about the bits and bytes, write at that level, around a clear theme, “AI helps the consumer because it controls the house and makes the alarm system safer”, and you’ll do fine. Break it into headers and subheaders, and add images, but be careful: don’t grab pictures off Google or you’ll hit copyright trouble and could get sued. Use free stock from somewhere like Pixabay, or shoot your own with your phone, which is unique, and Google loves unique. For video, short and funny wins, thirty to sixty seconds, high-level and inspirational; a flat, matter-of-fact video won’t get hits, but a funny one will. And pick the one or two channels that actually fit you, for me that’s podcasts and LinkedIn, rather than forcing yourself onto a platform you hate.

Why people hire me

Steve: What are your books mostly about, and where are clients in their careers?

Richard: Most clients use the book as credibility, the proof that makes them the expert and gives them a step up. They walk into an interview saying “I wrote the book on AI,” send it to the press, and use it to land keynotes that start around $5,000 and run much higher. They usually come to me feeling stuck behind some barrier. One was a senior VP in a division of a Fortune 50 company who hired me specifically to get the CEO’s attention, and the CEO ended up writing the foreword; the book became required reading where he lives and sells on Amazon, and he donates those sales to charity because that was never the point. Lower down, a VP or director will hire me for blogs to build their image while they pursue the next step.

My own focus, given my background, is technology, but not deep technical writing, I explain it at the level a manager or director needs, how to sell a kind of AI, how augmented-reality goggles help a warehouse, rather than how it all works under the hood. I’ve got a science-fiction book in progress and two collaborations going, and a goal to write one book in each of twelve genres, a mystery, a romance, and so on.

The process, and the title trap

Steve: How does the work actually go, and do you help with the title?

Richard: We decide what to write and who it’s for, build the outline, and then go a chapter at a time. It starts with an interview, and each chapter I get closer to your voice, first chapter, review, second chapter, review, and by the third we’re in sync. The point is to revise as we go so there’s no big revision phase at the end; we finish with a polished manuscript ready for an editor, who’s inexpensive next to a ghostwriter and fixes the inconsistencies that creep into a book written over six months to a year. Editing and writing are different parts of the brain.

The title usually becomes apparent about halfway through, and I recommend you research it and maybe work with a marketing person, because a clever-sounding title isn’t always the one that sells; work it from a marketing point of view, not a “sounds good” one. And know the one hard deadline: once the paperback is published, you cannot change the title. Kindle, yes; paperback, no, Amazon and the ISBN service won’t allow it. You’d have to create a whole new book and lose all your reviews.

The perfect client, and pricing like a professional

Steve: Who’s the perfect client, and what’s the biggest mistake to avoid?

Richard: Director to C-level, with the budget to afford me and, above all, easy to work with, because I’m easy to work with. I learned that fast from watching other ghostwriters take anything because they needed the money, and then drowning in clients who were snarky, difficult, or didn’t pay; any ghostwriting group is full of those complaints. My job is to deliver quality on time and on budget, I’m not late, I managed projects for a living, and I left the corporate world to lose stress, not gain it. Fiction clients tend to want to work very closely because they’re nervous about handing over their baby, but a couple chapters in we’re a cohesive team, and I want the relationship to succeed for both of us.

The biggest mistake to avoid is price. Many freelancers price themselves too low, and too low screams amateur. You can also price too high, but the low end is the killer. Research what professionals charge, land in the middle of that range, and don’t negotiate it away. If $100 an hour is the professional rate, charge it; if you can’t get work at that rate, fix your marketing, don’t drop to $5 an hour because you doubt yourself. Charging professional rates is itself a sign of a professional.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Notable quotes from this conversation

Common questions from this conversation

What are the most common LinkedIn profile mistakes?
A weak or unprofessional photo, a headline that’s just a job title instead of what you deliver, and an About section that’s a pasted-in resume in third person. Fix the photo, make the headline keyword-driven around your value, and write the About section in first person about what you do now.

How should you actually use LinkedIn?
Post daily, but spend even more energy commenting on and sharing other people’s posts, that’s what the platform rewards. Connect naturally with a short personal note rather than a pitch, aim at the audience you want, and keep it to fifteen to thirty minutes a day.

How do you pick an Amazon category that can actually sell?
Find a category with real sales but not dominated by big-publisher juggernauts. If the top books each move tens of thousands a month, skip it; look for one where the leaders do a couple thousand and it drops off quickly. That’s a category you can break into.

Why isn’t my self-published book selling?
Almost always the cover, then the category and keywords. Those matter far more than the look-inside, the title, or reviews, because a bad cover or wrong category keeps readers off your page entirely. Fix them first, in that order.

How should you price yourself as a professional writer?
Research what professionals charge, land in the middle of that range, and hold the line. Pricing too low doesn’t win work, it signals amateur. Charging a professional rate is itself a mark of a professional.