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

Tequila and Tech Talk is a virtual networking symposium for cybersecurity and technology leaders, co-hosted by Richard Lowe (The Writing King) and Natan Verkhovsky. In this February 2025 session, the room digs into one idea in particular: how a book can do for a tech or cyber career what a degree is supposed to do, opening the door to the C-suite, to investors, and to a recognized authority position. Richard shares the credential-substitute stories, the business-language gap that keeps experts stuck, the cybersecurity leader who raised venture capital with a single targeted book, and his rule that done beats perfect. The panel weighs in throughout.

Natan introduces Richard as the Writing King, also known as the ghostwriting guru, with 113+ books and multiple bestsellers, and a prior career as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s for about 20 years and VP of consulting at a couple of computer companies.

BOOK YOUR PRIVATE CONSULTATION

The Roundtable

Richard: I used to be the Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s, in charge of computer security, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery, and just about everything else. If nobody else wanted to do it, I did it. I had thousands of computers under my care, plus the staff and consultants, virtually all of them veterans, because I like hiring vets. On call 24 by 7, including Christmas. Then I decided I didn’t want to work for corporate anymore, went into ghostwriting, and I’ve never looked back.

Natan: Let’s debunk a couple of myths. For people in tech wondering whether they can ever get to the C-suite, what are the biggest ones?

The Myth That You Need a Degree

Richard: At Trader Joe’s I was the level below VP, and my next step would have been CIO. I tried for it, and I got denied because I didn’t have a degree. That’s a common myth, that you need a degree to go higher. Since I started ghostwriting, I’ve written several books people used instead of a degree to get promoted. One VP-level person wanted to reach the C-level, wrote his book, and within days of it being published the CEO read it and said, give this guy a promotion. I’ve seen that over and over. The books weren’t necessarily long, but they thoroughly explained the person’s field in leadership terms. You don’t need a degree. You need to know what you’re doing and be able to prove it, and that’s what a book does.

Speaking the Business Language

Richard: Part of why some C-levels want degrees is they’re not convinced tech people can speak business language. A book speaks in business language about the things we care about, like why you need disaster recovery. I once went into a meeting with a CEO and started in on how we needed this and this, and he turned to my boss and said, get this person out of here, I have no idea what he’s saying. I got escorted out. If I’d had a book, I could have shown him I was the expert. Because I didn’t speak his language, he didn’t know that I knew what I was talking about.

Jessie Foles: I’ve been a CIO, a CISO, and a director of IT operations, and the biggest challenge was dumbing myself down to a kindergarten level to talk to C-suite people, because it’s rare for anyone in the C-suite to know much beyond a spreadsheet and email. I’ve watched non-technical CIOs run systems into bankruptcy because they say yes to the business without understanding the infrastructure underneath.

Richard: Right. They know the business, but you’re talking technical, and that disconnect causes exactly what you described.

The Cybersecurity Expert Who Raised Venture Capital

Natan: Tell us about the cybersecurity expert who was leaving because he’d never reach the C-suite, and a book transformed where he was.

Richard: He was a high-level person at a Fortune 50 company who was tired of working for corporate and wanted to start his own company. We wrote the book, but the target audience wasn’t the C-levels, it was venture capitalists and the people who would fund him. So we wrote it differently, talking dollars and cents in a different way, and he got to tell his story in human language. He raised several million dollars in venture capital and started a very successful company. That’s another thing a book does, credibility, aimed at a very specific audience. His book was a success in his mind because he achieved his goal. He didn’t sell many copies, that wasn’t the point, he was happy giving the one copy to the one person who gave him millions. He actually donated every penny of the sales to charity.

You’re the Expert, Not Me

Richard: One more thing: I don’t have to speak your language or be an expert in your field. You’re the knowledge expert, I’m not, and I don’t pretend to be. You come to me, tell me your stories and expertise, I write the book, and you review it. I wrote an entire book on AI having never been exposed to it beyond Alexa, which really isn’t AI.

(Alexa interjects from somewhere in Richard’s office.)

Richard: Alexa, shut up.

Books That Raise Money for a Cause

Natan: What are some of the more unusual things you’ve seen a book do?

Richard: I had a client who wanted a book to raise money for charity, for people in Africa who needed help. It stretched me, I’d never raised money for charity, so we worked closely and it achieved his goals. Another was a woman who’s a charity powerhouse, she can raise millions, and she wanted a young-adult book to raise money for hospital charities while teaching kids the dangers of the internet. I’d never written a children’s book, so I read the craft book by the author of the Goosebumps series, the biggest young-adult author in history, and learned how. We wrote a book about children who go into an internet world and learn its dangers. She had it beta tested in schools, the kids loved it, and the only fixes were a few words too technical for them. They learned things like the person who befriends them in a chat room might not be a child. That book may have protected a lot of kids.

Tamara Cribley: Books can do so much more than sell copies or convert leads. I have a client writing a multi-book historical fantasy series with a deliberately diverse cast, and what she’s really doing is building a community that lives on after the last page. If you figure out what you want to happen once the reader closes the book, there’s a lot of opportunity.

Writing Backward From the Emotion

Richard: That segues into where I start: the last page. When I ghostwrite, I ask, what emotion do you want the reader to feel when they finish? Not the logic, the emotion. Mad, upset, happy, content? Then we outline backward from there, and each chapter gets its own emotion, because we’re writing to emotion, not logic. It’s the same for a technical or business book: what emotion do I want these venture capitalists to feel, what do I want the boss to feel?

Let me ask the room: what’s the emotion you want at the end of the introduction of any book?

Jessie Foles: Intrigued.

Richard: You hit it on the head. The feeling is, I have to finish this book. When I read Lord of the Rings, after the first fifty dull pages, I had to finish it. The introduction is the most important thing in the book. If you’re a CISO writing a short book to convince your CIO to fund something, the first page has to convince the person, and the rest supports it.

The Book as Your Marketing Foundation

Jessie: Kids today abhor reading. They educate themselves in 20- and 30-second TikTok snippets. How do you aim at that generation?

Richard: Children have always had short attention spans, which is why the Goosebumps-style book works: short chapters that each end on a cliffhanger and pull the reader into the next one. As for the rest, you use the book as the foundation of your marketing. It has content in it, so you can turn a chapter into videos, a blog post, graphics, or a speech. Several of my clients turned their books into speeches, and one did a TED Talk. The book becomes the tool chest for your marketing plan.

Tamara: There’s great AI now that takes research papers and generates videos, podcasts, and audio versions, even changing the language for a younger audience or producing a Cliff-Notes video. Having that core content solid and complete makes it accessible for AI to repurpose in the ways shorter-attention audiences want.

Richard: Right. The book is the basis for everything, so you write the book first, then feed it to AI to do what you need.

Done Is Better Than Perfect

Ben “The Automator” Christensen: I’ve been writing a book for six months, over 100 pages, but it’s dense, somewhere between an ADHD-friendly book and a for-dummies book, with TL;DR sections. I think I’m struggling with perfection, I’ve built interactive ROI calculators and all kinds of bells and whistles. Can you just tell me to stop?

Richard: I can. Done is better than perfect. Get it to 80 percent and ship it, because it’s self-published, you can upload a new edition as many times as you want. A finished book beats a perfect one that doesn’t exist for five years. I’m a perfectionist too, with fifteen thousand projects going at once that all have to be perfect, so I know it’s hard. Just get it done.

The Short Book That Opened a Classroom

Richard: Here’s a good tipping point for me. I banged out a short book about how to be a consultant over a couple of weekends. I got a call from a professor at a good engineering university who said, I loved your book, I want you to speak to my class about how this industry works. Up until the pandemic, about four times a year I spoke to his engineering students about being a freelancer, what to do and what to watch out for. A short book I wrote in a few weekends made a real difference in those people’s lives. Who would have known?

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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