From Reach to Authority: How Influencers Build Lasting Impact With a Book

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins Chris Salem on Business Influencers, on Tel Radio, to unpack how a book builds influence and lasting impact. The conversation runs from why experts publish, through the collaborative brainstorming and chapter-by-chapter process, to word count and scheduling, traditional versus self-publishing, audiobooks, and why the personal story is the part that matters most.

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.

Impact, influence, and why a book matters

Chris: Welcome to Business Influencers on Tel Radio. Today we’re talking about great impact as an influencer, and we’re here with Richard Lowe, a ghostwriter who writes about cybersecurity, leadership, AI, AR, VR, the metaverse, and using LinkedIn to promote yourself. Richard, everybody has a message, experience, trials and tribulations, a perspective. Can you talk about creating impact and offering value, and why a book plays a major role in that?

Richard: To get anywhere in this world, you need influence. Ask any multimillionaire; unless they inherited it, they have influence, people who back them up and help them. You can build it on social media or in real life. Books are especially powerful because people respect them. If you write a book as an expert on something, it tells why you’re an expert, the story of how you got there, your trials, your failures, how those failures made you successful, your advice. People like seeing that you went through fire. Even if they read only a few pages, they come away thinking, you’re the expert, you’re the person I want to see about this.

Richard: If you want to portray yourself as an expert on artificial intelligence, you write a book on artificial intelligence, and people go, he’s the expert, because experts publish. Look at universities and hospitals: if you’re an expert, you publish papers and research. It brings you to a new level. Of course you still have to market the book and get people to see it, but what I do is help people write it.

Any level of influencer: the Fortune 50 client

Chris: Not all of us are writers, or have the time, or know how to articulate the message on paper. You don’t have to be the next Tony Robbins or Richard Branson; impact as an influencer can be any level.

Richard: Any level at all. A lot of influencers use a book to start out. One of my very first clients was upper-mid-level at a Fortune 50 company, and he wanted to be noticed by the CEO of the holding company on top but couldn’t. He asked me to help him write a book to do that. By the time we were done, that CEO wrote his foreword. After he left the company he used the book to raise several million in venture capital to start his own company, and he still uses it to get keynote speeches. He’s all over the place now, all because he wrote a book, and he’d never have achieved any of it otherwise.

Freeing the author to strategize

Chris: Beyond having someone who knows how to write and can adapt to your energy, isn’t the advantage that going to a ghostwriter frees up time so the author can focus on the bigger picture the book plays a part in?

Richard: Exactly. That way they focus on how to use the book I’m finishing for them, not on the nuts and bolts of writing it. What they focus on is giving me the message. I interview them for their values and message, I create the book, and they use it to market themselves. Writing a book is a pain in the patootie, and it’s not easy for everyone; some people have a hard time getting what’s in their head onto paper, where the words don’t match what they’re thinking. But if they can talk it, someone like me can take that and put it into their words.

Brainstorming the right book

Richard: When I get a client, the first thing we do is brainstorm, hours and hours on Zoom, working out exactly what the book is about, exactly who the target audience is, and exactly what the goal is. Is the goal venture capital, or speeches? Those might be different books. Is it to show you’re the best at artificial intelligence, or to talk to techies? Those are different books too. Then we brainstorm each chapter as we go. A lot of what I provide is that brainstorming, drawing on my background in tech and leadership; I was a VP for two companies and a technical leader at Trader Joe’s.

Richard: I’ve also written 113+ books of my own and ghostwritten 54+ more, on all kinds of subjects, from children’s books on artificial intelligence to adult books on the metaverse, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things, to franchise books people give out to their customers. So I bring a lot of experience and knowledge.

The process: feeling out the relationship

Chris: Talk about the process. It starts with a discovery call where you go through questions to get to the foundation of the book, its purpose, the anticipated takeaways for readers.

Richard: We start on the first call, a free introductory 30 minutes. I go through my process, then we talk about what they want from the book, who the audience is, and I’m feeling out whether we can work together, because one of my rules is that we have to. I don’t want clients who won’t work well, and they don’t want that either. That doesn’t mean we won’t have heated discussions about a chapter’s contents, but heated about the chapter, not emotional, not attacking each other. Writing a book is a long-term relationship with your ghostwriter, so on that first call the client is also deciding, can I work with this person, or am I throwing my money away.

Richard: Once we have the agreement, we move to the first few calls, getting into the nitty-gritty: the outline, what each chapter is about, and who we’re talking to, in sometimes nauseating detail, because you can’t sell to everybody. Do we want a fictionalized book, an interview style, or a normal narrative? I once wrote a fictionalized book that followed someone creating a new management process. Are we using external quotes, interviewing people? For some books I interview 15 outside people. How much research is involved? We work all that out together.

Collaboration and the 80-20 rule

Richard: My style is very collaborative, which sets me apart. A lot of ghostwriters want the interviews over quickly so they can get to the writing. When I was a software person, I learned the 80-20 rule: 80 percent design, 20 percent coding. It’s not quite that ratio in ghostwriting, but you want a lot of work up front to make sure the right book comes out the back, because once it’s written it’s harder to change. So we write it as we go: we brainstorm chapter one together, I write it, send it back, you review it, and on chapter one there are going to be a lot of I-didn’t-likes. Then I redo it and we try again, sometimes line by line depending on the client.

Richard: By right, I mean in the client’s voice, with their needs and desires taken care of. Are we telling the right thing to the audience? What do they get out of it? It’s not just, is it well written; it’s, does this chapter achieve its goal, and does that chapter achieve the goal of the book?

What to do with the manuscript

Chris: There’s editing, cover design, and all that, but you can’t do any of it without a written book.

Richard: Right. A question that always comes up is what to do with the book once you have it. I deliver a manuscript that’s a very good first draft. Then the client sends it to an editor, who isn’t very expensive and puts the polish on it. That’s for self-publishing, where they then get a cover and everything else. If they go traditional, through a big-name publisher, the publisher does all that; you send them the first draft and they take it from there. I’ve done both; I have four or five traditionally published books and the rest self-published. Traditional usually sells about 20,000 copies. The entrepreneur I mentioned sold about 10,000 and donated it all to charity, because he’d achieved what he wanted and an extra royalty check made no difference to him.

The personal stuff is the oomph

Chris: If you’re looking to create impact with a book, and it doesn’t have to be business, what creates that oomph factor?

Richard: I’m the writer, they’re the author. On behalf of the author, the impact is the personal part, the personal stories. That’s why you can’t just tell AI to write a book. On a startup book, it’s: how did you start? How did you fail? How did you get funding? Who rejected you, who didn’t, and why? How did it affect your personal life, your kids? People want to know the challenging aspects, how you failed and how to avoid failing, and if you do fail, how to get back on your feet. We have to put you in the book, or it’s just another textbook, and textbooks can be boring.

Richard: That’s why I can write about almost anything: I’m not writing a book about the Internet of Things, I’m writing about it from that client’s point of view. How did they learn it, get into the business, what challenges did they face? I have an unfinished book about a Harvard graduate and all his adventures along the way in his field. That’s what people want, the adventures, the personal stuff. If you just want a book about AI, you go to the bookstore and pick up a tech book; that’s not what we’re writing.

Word count, schedule, and pricing

Chris: So it’s a process, it takes time, and it’s not one size fits all. Is the length up to the writer, the author, or both?

Richard: We set a word count so we can get our arms around pricing and the timeline. Say we set it at 100,000 words; 60,000 is about the minimum for a real book. We split that into a down payment and payments, since you don’t pay all at once, and that sets the schedule. A 100,000-word book will probably take a year, getting together each month and writing 8,000 to 10,000 words a month, with lots of interviewing. The word count is just a target: the book might come out at 90,000 or 120,000. If it’s less you pay less, if it’s more you pay a little more.

Traditional versus self-publishing, and who owns it

Richard: For adult books, traditional publishers want to start at 60,000 words and really want 60,000 to 100,000, so that’s a good target for the traditional route. Traditional is different: you go through an agent or you know somebody. All my authors who went traditional had an in at the publisher, and an agent can help you get that in. You usually do a book proposal with a good portion of the manuscript done. If the publisher accepts, they handle editing, cover, and the rest, and that cycle can take six months to a year.

Richard: Self-publishing is better for establishing credibility for speaking and marketing, and you can publish tomorrow. Another advantage is if you want to add a chapter or fix an error, you just upload a new version, and you own it. With a publisher, ownership depends on the contract; they hold certain rights for a certain time, and questions come up like who owns the movie rights or the audiobook rights.

Always do an audiobook

Richard: You always want to do an audiobook. In today’s world, with people on the go, it’s almost mandatory. It’s not expensive; a narrator charges a few hundred dollars per spoken hour, so an eight-hour book costs a couple thousand, maybe 3,000. That’s money, but not way up there, and it gives you an additional channel. My audiobook sales are typically about the same as my Kindle sales. I offer all three formats, Kindle, paperback, and audio, and hardcover if you want.

A book lasts, and you can reshape it

Chris: A book lasts forever; it’s there when you’re long gone, creating impact at any phase.

Richard: Once a book is on Amazon as a hardcover or paperback, you can’t delete it, because people may sell used copies; Amazon won’t let you. You can delete the content and take it down so new copies can’t be sold, but the listing stays. When you self-publish you can repurpose a book, put a different title on it, and make it look like a different book, night and day. The only things you can’t change on a paperback or hardcover are the title and the author; everything else you can change, and I frequently do, because different titles make all the difference.

Chris: How can people get in touch with you?

Richard: The best way is to find Richard Lowe on LinkedIn and connect, or go to thewritingking.com, where I have a ton of articles, or email me and I’ll get back to you.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

Why does a book build influence better than other tools?

Because people respect books and associate publishing with expertise, the way universities and hospitals publish papers and research. A book tells the story of how you became an expert, including your failures and how they made you successful, and even a few pages leave a reader convinced you’re the authority. It works at any level, not just for household names.

What does the ghostwriter actually free the author to do?

To focus on using the book, and on the bigger strategy it serves, rather than the mechanics of writing it. The author’s job becomes supplying the message and story through interviews; the writer turns that into the manuscript. Since writing a book is hard and slow for most people, especially those who think clearly but struggle to get it onto the page, handing off the writing is what makes the project happen at all.

How does the collaborative writing process work?

It front-loads the thinking. After a free intro call to confirm the fit, the early sessions brainstorm the exact topic, audience, and goal, then each chapter is brainstormed, drafted, reviewed, and revised until it’s in the client’s voice and hits its purpose. Richard borrows the software 80-20 rule, heavy design up front, because a book is hard to change once written, so the aim is to get it right as you go.

Should every book have an audiobook?

Effectively yes. With so many people consuming content on the go, an audiobook is close to mandatory and opens an additional channel; Richard’s audiobook sales run about even with his Kindle sales. It’s also affordable, a narrator charges a few hundred dollars per spoken hour, so a typical book runs a couple thousand dollars to produce across the audio format.