Writing to Advance Your Career: From VAX Clusters to 42 Ghostwritten Books | The SynAck FinAck Podcast

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on the SynAck FinAck cybersecurity podcast with host Robert Roncival, recorded February 14, 2021, lightly edited for readability. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The technical career, from DEC to Trader Joe’s

Robert Roncival: What did you do before your writing career?

Richard Lowe: In 1981 I got into the computing business, hired out of college, which I never finished, as vice president of a small consulting startup working on Digital Equipment Corporation computers: DEC, PDPs, VAX. We were highly technical: we did clustering of the computers, the first time that was attempted, and we wrote the first disk defragmentation product ever written by anyone, which eventually got bought, I believe by Raxco. Then another company doing the same kind of thing, and I wrote and project-managed SCADA systems, systems control and data acquisition, for New Haven, Connecticut, the Las Vegas Valley Water District, and an Ohio water district.

After a while I wanted more stability, because small companies were driving me crazy with cash flow problems, so I went to Trader Joe’s for 20 years as director of technical services and computer operations. A very wide field: all the production computers, the disaster recovery site, the digital transformation, the security, all the applications running on all of it, plus eight warehouses’ systems. Not the stores, not development, not the network; those were other people.

Robert Roncival: So basically all the back-end infrastructure for Trader Joe’s. What spurred the move to writing?

Richard Lowe: Staff was always kept small to save money, so we were on call 24 by 7, and as head of the department I was the point: no sleep, super-high stress. I looked at what it was doing to my mind and body and said: I’ve got some money saved, let’s slide into what I want to do, which is writing. With my tech background I figured I could get a job anywhere if it failed. I’d also never run a business of my own, so I started one.

The thousand-dollar apprenticeship, again with numbers

Richard Lowe: My first idea was novels, so I started my science fiction novel, which I’m still working on eight years later. At a critique group, one of the members owned a small ghostwriting company, and he hired me at a thousand dollars a book. I figured: a learning experience. It turned out to be about 50 cents an hour, because a book takes a long time, and I had no idea what I was getting into. The book was about an Afghani politician from the 1970s, before the Soviets invaded; he built the roads, they were going to execute him, and he escaped. Fascinating book, never finished, because he went back to Afghanistan. It’s one of the few I can actually talk about; that’s ghostwriting.

After a couple more books at a thousand dollars each, I quit, and the very same day somebody hired me for $10,000 to write a book on Agile and Scrum, which I’d never seen; at Trader Joe’s we used Waterfall. The next day, somebody hired me at $15,000 for a cybersecurity book. At that point: okay, I can make a living at this.

Then I had to overcome being a bit introverted, which every freelancer does. Cold-messaging AI executives on LinkedIn, C-level and director level: that was tough, and it worked. One wanted an AI book, another digital transformation, and now the count is four books on digital transformation, four on AI, three on cybersecurity, one on the IoT, plus about 30 others in those eight years. I’m on my 42nd ghostwritten book [54+ as of 2026]. The technical work aims at managers, leaders, and even lay people, not bottom-level deep dives, and it fills a real need: AI and ethics, the legalities of AI, misinformation and elections. And I keep variety: I’m writing three children’s books for a client right now, some young adult work, and one very large project I can’t talk about, full of intrigue, that will probably be a bestseller.

The Fortune 50 foreword, retold

Richard Lowe: My first big book in that field: a general manager in a division of a Fortune 50 company approached me wanting to get noticed by the parent company’s CEO. We wrote the IoT book together, and the CEO wound up writing the foreword. Goal achieved. Once it published, he landed $10,000 speaking engagements, which paid for the book; it’s now a textbook in another country; and he doesn’t care about Amazon sales, he donates those to charity, though it’s sold a few thousand copies. That’s what a book does: it lets someone say, this is me, this is what I know.

Robert Roncival: When someone hires you, do you just disappear for six months?

Richard Lowe: More involved than that. Initial discussion, mutual decision to proceed, because I like reasonable customers who are nice to get along with, and I’ve turned a few down. Contract signed, down payment paid, then interviews: outline, theme, audience, nailed down. Then a chapter at a time: interview, write chapter one, send it back, revise, revise, revise until done, and repeat through the book, so I never deliver a finished book they didn’t want; that’s my worst nightmare. There are exceptions in both directions: some say “just write the damn book” and I interview them every other month; and on the IoT book we were on Skype to France an hour a day, five days a week, and wrote every word together. It depends on the client.

Communication is power

Robert Roncival: I keep hearing from senior tech and security people that writing is the career skill. Your thoughts?

Richard Lowe: The ability to communicate is what gives people power in life. Without it you can rise to a certain level: a techie, maybe a low-level manager. Beyond that, you’re talking to people all the time: managing, directing, C-suite. Being an introvert doesn’t help there, and I struggled with that most of my life; it’s why I became a techie, and initially why I became a writer. I was forced to outgrow it. And writing matters even more now, in the pandemic, because often the only impression people can form of you is what they read on LinkedIn or elsewhere. If it doesn’t read well, they form a bad opinion.

And know your audience, always. I used to write reports for a CEO who hated technology and hated the IT department. One big technical word and the report went in the trash right in front of me: “This is crap. Bring it back in English.” I’d spent a week on it. Better to know that in advance. If you’re writing the incident report for a CFO and you mention PowerShell lateral movement, he’s asleep and your report’s in the trash. He wants the business impact, the recovery, the numbers. The difference between an incident responder and an incident leader really is the ability to write the right report for the right reader.

LinkedIn after 300 profiles

Richard Lowe: I’ve optimized over 300 LinkedIn profiles; one of my in-between jobs was with a LinkedIn profile company. The big mistakes: pasting the resume into the profile, which nobody cares about; they’ll get the resume later, they want to know who you are. Writing in third person as if somebody else were speaking; write it in first person. A bad photo, which is the first thing anyone sees. A bad title. And listing responsibilities: nobody cares about your responsibilities, on LinkedIn or on resumes. They want what you delivered and what you can deliver for them. And if the imposter syndrome is too strong, techniques exist: hire it out and be interviewed for it, or trade with a co-conspirator and write each other’s, but keep it first person, because a LinkedIn profile exists so I can find out who you are from your point of view.

Breaking the introvert mold

Richard Lowe: For introversion: number one, join Toastmasters and give speeches weekly. They have two tracks, leadership and speaking, and either will break the mold. I was in it for quite a while; sometimes my speeches fell flat, and the feedback is specific, so you fix it and try again, and you face the fear of rejection directly. Second, I became a photographer and used the camera as a way to talk to people: the camera in front of me, talking through it, at Renaissance faires and dance shows. A prop helps. Third, mix yourself into crowds of non-introverts. Larry Winget wrote, in People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It: if you want to be rich, hang out with rich people. Same principle: if you want extroverted tendencies, hang out with extroverts. And understand the real definition: an introvert gets energy from being alone and gets drained by crowds; an extrovert is the reverse. I go to a party and I’m ready to leave in 30 minutes. The extrovert playing Monopoly at my house is drained in 30 minutes and wants to go home. Podcasting, by the way, is a strange loophole: I love appearing on podcasts, and for an introvert that’s very weird, but you’re really talking to one person.

Improving your writing, and what to skip

Richard Lowe: To improve as a writer: first, learn grammar and spelling cold, and don’t depend on the checkers, even the AI-flavored ones; they’re often wrong, and it’s embarrassing. I read professional news articles with misspellings in them constantly; doesn’t anybody proofread? Then pick up a style manual and learn the style layer, because grammar alone is robotic. Then, if I were doing it over, I’d get a good writing coach for one-on-one training aimed at exactly what I needed. Udemy has courses on all of it, and here’s the trick: everything on Udemy goes on sale, so never pay the $190 price; wait a few weeks and it’s $15.

What I’d skip: the college writing course. Lots of time, lots of money, and you learn rigid rules that work for academic papers and fail for the report to your boss. A coaching client told me just the other day: the courses all say write this way, and I find it stilted. I said: it’s your book, write it in your style, and go look at how differently the published books read. He came back and said: the writing courses are wrong. Yeah. They are.

Advice for the next generation of tech people

Richard Lowe: First: don’t get yourself a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt. Second: give yourself options. The field changes fast; narrow AI and conversational AI are big right now, and a breakthrough in general AI or quantum computing could reshuffle everything. Don’t specialize so narrowly that you’re stranded. Third: find mentors, especially a mentor inside the business with the patience to help you. My first boss at that small startup mentored me, sat with me, held my hand when I failed; he later became one of the executive VPs at Walt Disney Corporation. If you find a mentor, you’ve got it made. Fourth: expect the entry-level job, not the $100,000 job, and move forward through it. Writing will help you do that: writing lets people know who you are, and when they know who you are, they want you on their teams.

And build the network: a tribe. Stay in contact with the people you’ve worked with, above you, below you, unless you hate them. When you’re a manager, stay connected to the people still working the line. People like to help people; they don’t like being taken advantage of, so don’t ask daily, but the network multiplies your power a hundred times. And here’s the last piece: the best way to get a job is through the back door. Every time I posted a database manager opening at Trader Joe’s, I got a thousand resumes. Do you think I read a thousand resumes? Nope. I read the one from the guy my buddy knew and recommended, and he got the job. You get those jobs by knowing people who know people.

Closing

Richard Lowe: Find me at thewritingking.com/: about 200 articles on writing and ghostwriting, samples, a contact form, and a booking link for appointments; or email rich@thewritingking.com. I’m on LinkedIn with 10,000 connections and always looking for more, especially in this field. I avoid Twitter like the plague, it’s become a chat box, and Facebook I keep social.

Robert Roncival: Thank you for sharing your years of experience in technology and writing. Everything goes in the show notes. If you liked what you heard, subscribe, and reach out to Richard for anything on the writing front.

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.