Updated May 2026 to reflect current data. Original recording: 2024.

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins Rashad Woods on The T.R.O.N. Podcast for a conversation that covers more ground than the average ghostwriter interview. Topics: 33 years in enterprise IT before the career change, writing the first book at 17 about a grandfather who survived the Bataan Death March, the audience-first writing process built around emotion rather than information, the show-versus-tell rule most writers don’t follow, why AI-generated books trigger the same uncanny valley response as bad CGI, the kinds of clients Richard refuses (including a six-figure offer from an FBI informant), and the legal limits on what a ghostwriter can put on the page.

The T.R.O.N. Podcast (The Randomness of Nothing) is hosted by Rashad Woods, who interviews subject matter experts on topics that interest him. Rashad holds a black belt in Tang Soo Do, a brown belt in Taekwondo, and currently practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai. The show is available on YouTube and major podcast platforms.

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Interview

Rashad Woods: Good afternoon, everyone. This is your host, Rashad Woods of the T.R.O.N. Podcast, The Randomness of Nothing. Today we have a very special guest. He’s a ghostwriting, bestselling author, kind of a Swiss army knife and a master of all things when it comes to technology, AI, and really get a chance to be interesting to pick his brain for a few. Mr. Richard Lowe. Thank you. How you doing?

Richard: Good, good. Really appreciate your time, sir.

Rashad: So go ahead and tell us a little bit about, particularly when it comes to ghostwriting, I have a couple different questions. I’m really fascinated by how you got into the career of authorship after you transitioned from technology, being the director over at Trader Joe’s for 20 years.

From Geology Major to VP in 33 Years of Tech

Richard: Well, I was in tech for 33 years. Trader Joe’s was 20 years of that. I started out as just a coder, assembly language coder, very low level in the machine, on computers over the size of a room with less power than one chip on your smartphone. Worked my way up to be VP of one company and then moved to another company, was VP of that company. And then we went to Trader Joe’s, director of computer operations, and was in charge of everything, cybersecurity, disaster recovery, basically anything anybody else didn’t want to do. Lots and lots of things. I had a whole staff.

And then one day I was looking around thinking, I don’t want to work for anybody anymore. So I left my job, moved to Florida, as far away from California as I could get, and then started my ghostwriting career. It got off to a good start and I’ve never looked back. I’ve been doing it now for 13 years. In that time, I’ve written 113+ books under my own name and 54+ as ghostwritten projects, and it’s been quite a journey.

Rashad: Yeah, it’s been fascinating. A couple of questions I had for you: did you have a background in computer science before you got into computers? Obviously they’re very prevalent now, but to have that skill set was such a unique unicorn to be in technology. Did you do any computer science or programming at an early age?

Richard: No, I was a geology major.

Rashad: Oh, wow.

Richard: I remember back then they didn’t have personal computers. All we had was calculators that were awful. They used something called reverse polish notation. You’d have to type three characters for every character. It was awful. It was horrible. So there was no interest at all in computers. But I took a computer science class because I was late and there was only one thing that could fit in the slot. And my teacher started a company. He asked me to come on board and I was his first employee.

Rashad: That’s dope. That’s really cool. What college was that?

Richard: San Bernardino Valley College in the beautiful city of San Bernardino, California.

Rashad: Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.

Richard: That was sarcasm.

Rashad: Good tell. I couldn’t tell. I’ll take it. My apologies for not catching the inside joke on that. So as you transitioned to ghostwriting, I thought it’s fascinating because that’s really where you found your voice. And that’s what this show is all about, people who found that niche or that specialty they’re great at. How did you end up first getting into writing?

The Grandfather Book at 17

Richard: When I was 17 years old, way back machine, I wanted to know my grandfather better. So I started talking to him. Then I realized there was a book there. So I wrote my very first book. It was about his adventures in the Yangtze River Patrol before World War II. He was on the Philippines, got captured on Corregidor, was in the Bataan Death March, and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. I realized I was talking to a hero.

Rashad: Wow.

Richard: And nobody knew. I found his story and it touched me. I got to know my grandfather and that book has since been lost. It was never published, but it was fun to write. Then I had to make a living, move out from home, get married, the whole thing. So I went into tech and made a career and made some money. A few years ago I was like, okay, I’m done with all that. I could just go off on my own.

Rashad: So you really didn’t have a coach then that taught you how to write. Do you recommend, obviously you do that for people, did anybody guide you along the way when it came to learning how to write?

Richard: Nope. I did it all on my own. I took a few classes, but I’ve been writing technical stuff through that whole time, for business, for the job I was in, and articles for magazines and stuff like that. So I was picking up the chops of writing, but yeah, those first few books were a struggle.

Rashad: It’s funny because I think the common misconception is that you talk a lot, you think a lot, so it must be easy to write it. People, it’s not nearly as easy as people make it out to be when it comes to actually formulating thoughts, characters, development, transitional sentences. Do you have any particular writing process that you follow?

The Audience-First Writing Process

Richard: When I ghostwrite, the first thing I do is try and find out more about the client, the author. Then I want to find out about the audience. We spend a lot of time talking to try and get under that. I want to make a book that people are going to want to read and want to buy. If you don’t do that, you’re going to have a book that’s going to sit on your coffee table, maybe sell five copies. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine. But if you want to sell a lot of copies, you need to know who your market is.

So we start with basically a marketing pass. Who’s going to buy it? Why are they going to buy it? What are they going to get from it? Then we go through the book and we want to find out for each chapter, and then finally at the end, what emotion the reader wants to feel at the end of that chapter or the book. You want the reader to be angry, like maybe a political book trying to get elected, you might want them to be angry. Comedy book, you might want them to be happy. Children’s book, you want them to be uplifted. There’s an emotion at the end. That’s far more critical than the information.

The information is important also, but it’s more important that you put them on this emotional ride through the book. There’s ups, there’s downs. You’ve seen a movie, there’s ups, there’s downs, like on the edge of your seat. Well, you do the same thing in a book.

Rashad: Essentially you need, it’s almost, people try to get these large grandiose ideas, but it’s: are you conveying an emotion to get somebody to stay captivated, involved and emotionally involved with the topic that’s being spoken or written on?

Show Versus Tell, and the Subtext in Dune

Richard: There’s a kind of a rule in writing that most writers don’t follow because it’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s called show versus tell. Telling is like “he’s angry.” Right. Well, that’s kind of boring. It doesn’t convey the emotion very well. Instead, you show the emotion by showing his features, and maybe somebody else mentions it, sweating, eyes popped out, fingers clenched. You show it. Whenever you tell the reader he’s angry, the reader picks it up that way.

And then there’s another thing called subtext where you have this conversation going on, but the conversation actually has some undertones. It’s really hard to do, especially for beginner writers. You watch Dune, there’s subtext all over the place. Good movies and good writing have a lot of subtext and a lot of show. The problem with show is it takes a lot of room to write. So you’ve got to use it judiciously. It’s not all show. Sometimes you just want to get from here to there. Okay, he walked that far. But then you want to, if you’ve got to take your time, well, he meandered up this path and he tripped and he looked up and smelled the flowers.

And that’s important in a nonfiction book too. You want to show them the information, not tell them. So you don’t have a big table. You might have a big table, but instead you might walk them through some examples, some quotes, some real life case studies, and they get the idea much better.

Rashad: Well, it’s funny you say that because that was going to be my next question, the entertainment versus gathering knowledge. If I’m reading a particular book for my enjoyment and it’s engrossing to me on an entertainment level or emotional level, I have a different set of feelings or expectations than if I was reading a technical book where, because it’s a process-driven situation, it may not need to convey as many emotions. But you made a great point that people are visual and need to see certain things taking place. Now, you’ve written a lot of computer and AI books. Can you give us some examples?

C-Suite AI Books Versus Technical Manuals

Richard: In a computer book or an AI book, they’re written by people who are experts in the field, usually C-level, who wanted to convey their message to other leaders. They didn’t get into the bits and bytes and how AI works. Instead, they’re getting into more of the business, like, AI will have this return on investment. You need to go here. You need to do this. This is a gotcha. Worry about that. Find out your market. So it’s more about the leadership aspects of AI and how your company can prosper with it or not, versus getting into the technical, how does blockchain work or how does the metaverse work.

I don’t tend to write technical manuals. That’s a whole different thing. That’s where you just basically tell people. That’s one of the big differences. In a technical manual, you’re just saying it.

Rashad: Right. And putting it verbatim, exactly line by line.

Richard: And that’s why they’re so boring.

Rashad: Yeah. It’s like a how-to-change-a-tire book. They’re not going to give you the ups and downs of doing it. It’s just going to be: you need to proceed to the next step.

Richard: Unscrew this bolt, put it here.

Rashad: And this is going to sound, when people think of ghostwriting, they think that the person who created the idea may have not been original, so to speak. Whether you hear it in music or in a movie script, “they had a ghostwriter.” What’s the perception of having a ghostwriter, of somebody who has an idea? Is that accurate of what I’m looking at?

Method Acting the Author

Richard: It’s accurate for lower-level ghostwriters. For higher-level ghostwriters, people in my range, what I do is I interview my client and I get into his heart and soul. What I want to do is convey that in the book. I want to convey their heart. I want to convey what they really think. I want to convey their experiences, their knowledge, why they’re doing it. Really what makes them tick in that book, depending on the book.

And not so much, and that’s the difference. Because of that, it is them in the book. I’m writing the book as if I were them. I’m almost method acting in a way about their stuff. So it becomes their book.

There’s a lot of books out there that you might read, and that’s true, especially when you get to the celebrity ghostwriters who are very high end and get paid a lot. Their books are written from the point of view of the celebrity, and they do a pretty good job usually of conveying the celebrity’s life and times. I’ve done two celebrity books so far, both rock stars, and they’re interesting.

Rashad: Wonderful, wonderful. And this is me looking from the outside in, which is why I find this so fascinating. Does it get into an issue of credit? Obviously your clients are your clients. I’m not going to ask any specific examples, but just in general, when it comes to the industry of ghostwriting, and then somebody’s doing a book and then somebody from the back end who is a professional who does this for a living, does credit ever become a problem when it comes to ghostwriting?

Richard: You may need to have a good contract, an agreement, statement of work, whatever you want to call it. And that will outline it. Typically, when you start getting into celebrity ghostwriters, they’re usually journalists and they’re usually putting their name on the cover so they get credit. That means you’ll make extra sales because they know who that journalist is. People who haven’t been a journalist, haven’t won Pulitzer Prizes, their name probably won’t be on the cover.

I don’t want my name on the cover necessarily. I mean, I’d like it because it gives me something I can promote, but I’m getting paid. So that’s not my goal. None of my 54+ ghostwritten book clients have ever put my name on the cover. Sometimes they put it in the acknowledgments. But that’s fine with me. It is what they want. My role is like hiring a contractor to build a house. You probably don’t stamp his name on the house. Unless he’s Frank Lloyd Wright. Famous, famous architect. You’d probably stamp his name on the house.

Rashad: You’re like the stunt double, right? And I say that very respectfully because I enjoy action movies and stunt performers do a lot of great things. You see wonderful motion pictures, but there are some things the actor can’t, slash won’t, do, and it’s better suited to have a double. You still see a great finalized product as a consumer or as a customer.

Richard: You pretty much hit it on the head. My role is to do the writing and to translate their image, their thoughts, their emotions into written form. Sometimes that involves a lot of brainstorming. So I also take on the hat of coaching and brainstorming as we’re going through this. Sometimes they may not have an idea that will really sell or resonate with the public. So I have to help them, guide them to something that will. That’s part of my role too.

Rashad: Obviously, you’re heavily into technology, even though you’ve transitioned to your writing career. When it comes to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, things of current technology and modern things being utilized on a day by day basis now, what’s your take on the new artificial intelligence and cybersecurity trends that have been taking place?

AI Sits Near the Peak of the Hype Cycle

Richard: Artificial intelligence is obviously moving forward very quickly, and it’s still in its infancy. It’s actually in something that’s quite well known in the technical area, which is called the hype cycle. This new idea comes out, it catches on. Everybody jumps on the bandwagon, especially investors. You can see this cycle: goes way up in value and all this kind of stuff. And then, of course, it doesn’t live up to the hype. So it goes kaboom, falls to the ground almost to zero, and then it comes back up to where it’s supposed to be. Then it’s back to a normal and people are more sane with it.

AI is kind of near the peak of that hype cycle. Don’t know how close to the peak it is, but it will crash. The hype is always going to be “as smart as human beings, blah, blah, blah, take over the world.” No, it’s not. As soon as people figure that out, investment’s going to pull out and go to something else. That doesn’t mean AI is going away. That just means it’s going to come down to a more sane, normal place, and then something else will take over.

State-Sponsored Cyber Threats and the Need for Filtering

Richard: Same with cybersecurity. Right now, there are several wars going on. We have wars going on with Iran and Russia and a few other countries, North Korea. They are actively attacking United States companies and government and infrastructure. That is producing the area where AI can really help, because the amount of data generated to protect you is incredible. AI can help filter all that and say, oh yeah, there’s an attack here, with these others you can ignore.

Rashad: It’s funny you say that. I’ll never forget, about 10 years ago, I got an email saying my Netflix may have been compromised by a password. It’s one of those emails I just flippantly ignored. This was kind of spooky. I had an Amazon Firestick at the time, and the menu on my TV kept moving when I was clicking stuff, and it was randomly clicking separate apps. Just a week before that, it was telling me, hey, you may want to change your passcode. These are the countries that could have hacked it. One of them was Russia, one of the countries you mentioned. As soon as I changed my password, that stopped. I’m like, are you kidding me right now? It was controlling my TV. It was an out-of-body experience.

Richard: Hackers can get into your computer, your TV, computer TVs. Smart TVs are computers. Or your phone or anything else and do that kind of thing.

Rashad: It blew my mind. So sitting on the line of ghostwriting, and obviously we talked about artificial intelligence, you can probably see what I’m segueing to. What has artificial intelligence done to your profession?

AI as Digital Assistant, Not Writer

Richard: Artificial intelligence used correctly in writing and any creative venue is used as a digital assistant. Use it to help you automate and do those things a human being doesn’t need to do. Spell checking, for example. Or as a research assistant: help me find out about this. One thing I do is put in a chapter and I say, are there any redundancies in here? It’ll tell me, oh, you’re redundant here and here and here. Okay, good. I’ll go fix those.

I don’t write with it because AI is incredibly boring because it has no emotions. It’s not a person. So its writing is very, very boring. I can tell an AI-generated thing within seconds. Oh, that’s written by AI, right away. I’ve seen it so much it’s easy to spot. And it’s boring.

The Uncanny Valley Applied to Writing

Richard: One of the things, there’s a term in robotics called the uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means you look at, in this case, robots, and it looks human, but there’s something, your mind is going, this doesn’t look quite right. It could be as simple as there’s no hair on it or the hairs are wrong. Well, it applies to other things too. For example, in movies, when you watch a movie, especially Marvel movies now, the CGI can throw you off. You don’t know what it is. Something about this movie is wrong. Like Rings of Power has a famous example where the boat’s going through and it’s not going up and down. It’s on the ocean, but the background is stable. Your mind probably won’t pick that up consciously. Unconsciously it’s going, that’s wrong.

And that appears in writing too. You’re reading this thing and you’re going, this doesn’t read quite right. Uncanny valley. I haven’t really heard that term applied to writing very much, but the basic concept is: something’s off about it. In your mind it figures it out, but it doesn’t consciously seep up until you sit down and really look. Then you look at the movie and you see, oh, the shadows are pointing wrong.

Rashad: I’ve watched Foundation on Apple TV, and you can tell that CGI, that there’s not really a place of infinite sand and massive buildings where ships are coming down in, or Dune, but it’s those subtle things, like you said, like a boat, because it’s so subtle. They’re really on a set that’s about 30 feet, 40 feet wide with a green screen in the background.

Richard: Right. It’s all green screen now. Uncanny valley is a big thing and it’s really hard. People don’t understand that it’s there and they don’t think about it. The producers, the set builders, they probably didn’t even think, oh, this boat’s on water, it should be moving up and down as the water moves.

Rashad: Of course, what you see on the screen, the background should be moving up and down a little bit.

Richard: It’s not. Well, that’s not how water works.

Rashad: I’m curious, do you ever have to turn people down either because of subject matter, interest or any other reason as well, when it comes to ghostwriting opportunities?

Turning Down Revenge Memoirs and the FBI Informant

Richard: Oh, yeah, yeah. I turn down revenge memoirs generally. That’s where, say the wife wants to get revenge on the husband she divorced. Those have legal reasons why I won’t do them, obviously, and they’re not fun to write. I had one client, potential client, come to me. He offered me a lot of money. It was very early in my career. He wanted to write a book to expose, he was a confidential informant for one of the agencies, probably the FBI, embedded deep into the mafia. He wanted to expose everybody on every side with real names.

He said, “I’ll give you like $100,000 to write this.” I said, “Yeah, I’m not going to be able to spend that from inside of a grave.”

He said, “Well, I’ll protect you.” I said, “You’re coming to me, you want me to help you expose all these people, and you expect me to believe that you’re going to keep my name secret?”

Rashad: Wow. You know, that’s crazy. So basically he almost asked you to do like a Goodfellas kind of situation, right?

Richard: I said, “No, thank you.” Well, $150,000. “No, thank you. Go find somebody else.” I think it would have gone higher, but I wasn’t going to touch it.

Rashad: That was a smart move on your end. You’d rather just stay safe. You can’t put a price on that.

Richard: I was hungry back then and I definitely would have liked that project, but no. There’s also the occasional person who’s just, well, like a Karen, somebody who’s not easy to deal with.

Adult Conversations About Edits

Richard: One thing I stress to all my clients is we both need to be the adults in the room. If I say something dumb, or you don’t like what I’m writing, or whatever’s wrong, tell me. I’m an adult. I expect you to come back and basically mark up the writing and I want you to do it. If you need to mark it all up so there’s blood dripping from it, basically do that.

I heard a story of one person who came to me. He wound up hiring me. He came to me and he dropped the old ghostwriter because he handed the ghostwriter all of the changes and the ghostwriter actually broke down crying. It was his masterpiece or something. And the reality is, he’s not criticizing the ghostwriter. He’s criticizing the work. It’s not what he wanted. So the ghostwriter lost the business. I got the business, so I was happy. I’m not going to break down crying because you put red marks on my work. That’s part of the process.

Rashad: Do you have a challenge of getting personal information out of people? Because I’m sure there’s some very deeply embedded, either traumatic or personal items, relationship, family, et cetera. What type of care is involved when somebody wants to tell their full story, either inspirationally or biographically?

Richard: Never had anybody who has any problem telling me stuff yet. We have a non-disclosure agreement and I take it very seriously, because obviously it’s my business. Usually the problem is they talk too much. I have to limit the meetings to an hour. Okay, we’re getting close to the hour, but I’m not done. We’ll have another meeting later. So I try and guide the person to talk about what we need to talk about. People talk to talk. These are things they’ve never told people before sometimes.

Rashad: Got it. I’ve seen some books like Kevin Trudeau got legal action taken against him because he promoted certain items that weren’t true and he kept doing it. So what’s the legality of books when it comes to what you can do, what you can’t do, like, whether it’s proven medicine, that area seems a little unclear to me.

The Vitamin-That-Cures-Cancer Test

Richard: Just think of it without the book in the picture. If you were writing a book about some vitamins that cure cancer, you better be able to prove it because the FDA is going to come down hard on you. FTC is going to come down hard on you. If you’re slandering somebody, that could be a civil lawsuit. So if you take the book out of it and put it into the real world, the same thing could happen to the author.

Typically, I’ve never heard of a case where it comes back to the ghostwriter. Well, I’ve heard of one case where it comes back to the ghostwriter, and that was a celebrity ghostwriter who basically made stuff up. Obviously the client didn’t read the book.

Rashad: Right. They were just happy with the book with their name on it.

Richard: The general rule of thumb is you need to use your common sense as a ghostwriter. What is and isn’t something you could say. I use the real-life example. Do I in real life believe or think that this vitamin can cure cancer? No, I’m not an idiot. I mean, if you believe that, all power to you.

Rashad: No, we’re on the same page. I just was curious, what’s the limits of true versus, you know, because when Kevin Trudeau got legal action taken against him, I’m like, well, people do and say outrageous things and don’t get penalized for it. But I understand when you’re talking about a specific medicine or a specific cure for a specific item, that’s where it can get dicey.

Richard: They’ll come to you and ask for proof. How can you say this? With a vitamin, you could probably say it helps, we believe it helps reduce the risks associated with cancer. But you’ve got to be, there’s language you use to make sure that you’re covered.

Rashad: Instead of him, when he was trying to make a quick buck.

Richard: Yeah, I don’t generally do those kinds of books. I use my discretion and I’m not going to write a book about something that’s a scam or that’s sketchy. It’s just not me.

Where to Find Richard Lowe

Rashad: I saw a lot of the testimonials people did for you and the services you have to offer. Obviously, you don’t need me to be located, but for people who would be listening, where can they find Richard Lowe?

Richard: You can go to thewritingking.com. That’s T-H-E writingking.com. Either site will bring you to places to schedule a meeting all over those sites. Schedule some time to talk, half an hour, an hour, whatever you need. We’ll talk and you can do book coaching or ghostwriting. Book coaching is where you do the work yourself. I coach you through it. If you want to write the book, but you need help. Ghostwriting is where I do the work. Sometimes I do all the work, sometimes it’s more collaborative. It depends on the client. You can find me on LinkedIn too, Richard Lowe Jr. Connect with me.

Rashad: Let me ask you one final question. Has any movie studios or film studios, your clients are confidential, I’m not here to ask for that, but has anybody from an entertainment avenue ever requested your services?

Richard: No, not yet. That’s not an area I’ve really pursued. I wouldn’t mind. It’s not something I’ve been interested in. I don’t have the connections. But if somebody out there wants me to write a movie script, call me up.

Rashad: I’m just curious, because with all the technical prowess and the things you do, that piqued my curiosity.

Richard: I would love to go into that area. My understanding is it’s super competitive.

Rashad: Sure. I can only imagine.

Richard: Probably I’d have to know somebody.

Rashad: Sure. And if you were actively pursuing it, it seems like your pond is, for lack of a better term, feeding you well. I wish you continued success in whatever avenues you decide to dip your toe into. This is what the T.R.O.N. Podcast is all about, talking to fascinating people such as yourself with compelling stories, ideas, and past in life. I’m honored to have you carve out a little bit of your time for us.

Richard: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure. Great podcast.

Rashad: Appreciate you, Richard. Have a wonderful day.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

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