Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author: The Complete Webinar | Yeadon Public Library

This is the complete webinar Richard Lowe presented on January 10, 2019, hosted by the Yeadon Public Library with attendees in the library and connected online, lightly edited for readability. Audience questions are included where Richard restates and answers them; setup chatter is omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

Welcome and background

Richard Lowe: Welcome to Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author. This is being recorded, and there will be a replay posted. If you have questions, there’s a chat box, and I’ll unmute periodically for questions. This is going to go pretty fast, so take some notes. And if you stay to the end, I’m going to give away a copy of my book, Make a Living as a Self-Published Author, for free, plus a special offer on my training courses.

My name is Richard Lowe, and I’m a professional ghostwriter and author. I love writing business books and memoirs to help people. Business books mostly showcase the client’s expertise and credibility and tell their story: I just finished one for a cleaning supply franchise, another for a dentistry franchise, and I’ve written books on artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. I’m about to start two memoirs, which have a whole different feel and style of ghostwriting than business books. I fell into ghostwriting by accident, and it’s a lot of fun helping people get their story out. Not every writer can do it, because you have to write what the author wants written, not what you want to write; the author pays for the book. Of course, I’m not mindless in the process: I have a responsibility to guide them, to say, what you want to say there is probably not right for your audience.

I’ve just started my 64th, 65th, and 66th ghostwriting projects, all since 2013, three significant books at once with the ink not even dry on the contracts. I’ve also written and published 63 books of my own [113+ as of 2026] on a huge range of subjects, and two became Amazon Kindle bestsellers. Those 63 span business books, computer books, survival, a science fiction story, a book on zombies, coloring books, even Sudoku puzzle books; I wanted to get a feel for everything. I’ve authored well over a thousand blog articles and posts for companies who paid me to write them, and I’ve written about 300 LinkedIn profiles, usually for C-level people.

Before I was a writer, I was Director of Computer Operations for Trader Joe’s for 20 years: about 400 computers under my direct control running the corporation, plus the laptops and desktops in the office and the warehouse systems, and the staff to run all of it. In 2013, I left to become a writer: jumped off the cliff with a little bit of a parachute, because I’d wanted to do it since I was six years old. It was scary, and if I’d known what I didn’t know, I might have thought twice. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was ignorant and learned as I went. Before Trader Joe’s, I was vice president of consulting for two computer firms, Beck Computer Systems and Software Techniques, back in the eighties, and I was senior designer on SCADA systems, the control systems that run the water supply, for North Las Vegas, Ojai, California, and New Haven, Connecticut.

My two bestsellers were Focus on LinkedIn and How to Sell on eBay, which still sells on its own. I wrote Cyber Heist, a computer security book, for KnowBe4, a large up-and-coming security firm, and I aided in writing Digitize or Die, about how the Internet of Things will affect the world.

I worked in corporate America for 33 years, and I got really tired of it: the stress, working for somebody else, the push and pull. I had a little cushion, so in 2013, I quit and moved to Florida. I started a science fiction book, then jumped into ghostwriting, worked for somebody else’s ghostwriting operation, then started my own company. My first love is writing books; the ghostwriting pays the bills, and it’s genuinely fun converting somebody’s story into the written word.

Why is this the best time in history to be an author?

Richard Lowe: Believe it or not, this is the best time in history to be an author. In the past, you had to find a publisher and an agent and be connected; the process was convoluted unless you knew somebody, and traditional publishing today still works that way, and it’s slow. Or you’d use a vanity press: you paid to print 5,000 copies, filled your garage with boxes, and then you got to market, sell, warehouse, and ship them yourself. A friend of mine, Scott Howard, a speaker and graphic artist, printed 5,000 copies of his large-format children’s book in China ten years ago, and he’s just now selling out of them. He loves the book, and the book is awesome, but that’s a decade of boxes.

Times changed with the Kindle, the Nook, and the e-readers, and then the bigger revolution: print on demand. On Amazon, when somebody orders your print book, it’s printed right then and shipped. No stock, no inventory, no garage. Amazon can sell one copy of your book and make money; you sell one copy, and you make a little money. That was never true before. Publishing used to depend on whether a publisher believed there was a market for ten thousand copies. Now you have complete control over your manuscript: the formatting, the size, the fonts, color or black and white in print. You can write about virtually anything within the platform’s terms and conditions.

We are at the beginning of a golden age for writers and self-publishers, and you’re on the doorstep. The tools are still somewhat primitive: KDP, Amazon’s author side, has limited covers and formatting unless you do it yourself. But that’s going to change as these systems get more powerful. It literally lets everybody on the planet publish anything within reason. If you want to publish a Gothic romance with vampires fighting Frankenstein monsters on Mars, you can, and no publisher can stop you; the only question is whether it makes money.

A question from the room: yes, Amazon accepts InDesign files, and you can also use Word; the way you format it is the way it appears. The templates Amazon provides are just the size and some fonts. I’ve used Lulu as well; you can upload a Word document there now, and it’s relatively easy.

Your brand comes before your book

Richard Lowe: The first big topic: your brand. Selling a book is a difficult prospect, because people don’t buy just a book. They buy a brand. They buy Stephen King’s books, Agatha Christie’s, Louis L’Amour’s. When you think Stephen King, you think horror; Louis L’Amour, Westerns. If you’re Joe Smith trying to sell “how to be a vampire” among all the other vampire books, you’re going to have a hard time. What differentiates it? So you build a brand: a name people recognize, or a series, the way the Dummies books are a brand. Your focus is not marketing the book; it’s marketing the brand. Joe Smith writes vampire romances, and when readers find one, they want the next one and the next one.

Be a professional

Richard Lowe: Being a professional means putting out a professional image: a professional photo, a properly written bio, working on a schedule, appropriate attire, as if your writing were a job, because it is. Be punctual and keep your word: if you tell a publisher the manuscript arrives April 2nd, deliver it April 1st, and build a reputation for delivering early.

Understand grammar, spelling, and style; they’re your primary tools, and if you have trouble, take classes. I highly recommend the Chicago Manual of Style, the best style book out there in my opinion. Here’s what I do: I read a section each day, three or four pages, a few minutes to half an hour, and clear up one more thing: how colons are used, how apostrophes work. And don’t depend on the spell checker: it won’t catch “to,” “too,” and “two.” Never depend on a grammar checker or spell checker; they’re just tools. Learn to do research: Google is your friend, and so is the library; there’s a lot in the library that isn’t online yet.

Schedule your time like a job: three hours, lunch, three hours, dinner, a couple more hours, done, whatever your schedule is, and keep it. Let family and friends know you’re not to be interrupted while working. That’s one of the real problems of being an author at home: people think because you’re home, you’re accessible. You have to tell them: no, I’m writing, unless the place is burning down.

Set priorities and goals with dates. Writing the novel is one priority, but there’s also the blog, the promotion, the cover, the copyright page, learning how to upload to Amazon or Lulu or Smashwords. When does the cover need to start? When do you learn the platform? Put dates on it all and make it happen.

And make the biggest decision: is this a profession or a hobby? If it’s a hobby, you do it in free time and enjoy it, and none of the rest applies. If it’s a profession, it’s your job. Take writer’s block: it doesn’t really exist. It’s a barrier in the mind; there’s no physical wall. If you told your boss at a regular job, “I don’t feel like working today,” how would that go? If writing is your profession and you get writer’s block, you deal with it, work through it, and keep writing.

The daily disciplines

Richard Lowe: Set a word count every day. When you get up in the morning: how many words are you going to write? Two thousand is a good place to start; three or four thousand is better if you’re making a living at it. My goal is 5,000 a day, but I’ve been doing it a while. Meet the goal and allow no excuses, just like a job. And raise it slowly: a thousand a day for a month, then eleven hundred, then twelve hundred; if that’s too much, drop back and try again next month. Don’t do what I did and jump from five thousand to ten thousand in one leap. That didn’t work.

Writers publish. A professional writer doesn’t write forever into a drawer; the objective of writing is for other people to read it. Your job is to write your works and publish them.

Maintain a blog, even a simple one, with an article at least once a week, three to five hundred words. And by the way, blog articles don’t count toward your daily word count; that’s for the work you’ll publish as books.

Build an email list. You want a list of people who’ve expressed interest in your books, because when volume two comes out, you tell them. That list is gold.

Post often on social media, but not “buy my book” posts. Post the journey: I’m writing this science fiction book, and the main character is this. Ask questions, even ones you know the answer to, because you’ll get lots of opinions and engagement. I posted recently: I’m writing a book with a woman antagonist, and I’m not a woman; ladies, how would a woman act in this situation? I got back a lot of response. Questions work, and polls work really well; Facebook supports them. That’s how people start to know your brand, and it snowballs. And watch out for trolls: people who post hostile comments. Do not feed the trolls, ever. Ignore them and they go away; feed them and they come back.

Outsource what you’re not good at. I’m not a graphic artist, so I hire my covers out. Fiverr is one place; there are others in every writing group. But be careful with rights: make sure the contract gives you commercial rights, which on Fiverr is usually an extra ten bucks, and never pull images off Google, because you don’t own them; they’re stolen. Buy from stock photo sites or use the free ones. You do not want your book to sell 50,000 copies and then have the image owner demand you take them all down, or sue for a piece of it.

On publishing platforms: Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and Amazon overlap, so make sure you don’t publish the same book to the same store twice through different aggregators. Amazon’s exclusive ebook program locks you out of other platforms for 90 days. I like Draft2Digital; I think it’s one of the best, and it gives you access to Apple’s store, which you otherwise can’t publish to without a Mac.

What to write, and the tools to write it with

Richard Lowe: Sometimes you bang your head on the wall over what to write. Open your eyes. Cruise the library and the bookstores and see what others have written. Go to meetup.com, search “writer,” and find critique groups and writing groups. Cruise Amazon. And take trips: I used to go to Renaissance Faires; if you want to write fantasy, go to one. Want to write science fiction? Take a trip to NASA or watch a SpaceX launch. Actually go do things, and the ideas come to you. And if that doesn’t work, there are writing prompt books; mine have 500 ideas each for five genres, each a couple of sentences you can build a book around.

Choose and learn your tools: Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, whatever suits you, and pick one. Microsoft 365 online is absolutely free and works like Google Docs, only far more powerful. Keep in mind all the platforms want Microsoft Word format for upload.

Set your writing routine and your place. I’ve got my little office with books all around me and cases of butterflies on one wall, literally. It’s very comfortable for me. Lock the door; nobody comes in unless there’s an emergency.

Look at voice dictation. It takes getting used to, because you have to enunciate carefully, but it can triple your speed. Dragon works very well: first Dragon learns you, then you learn Dragon.

Learn to proofread. Some tricks: read the book out loud, front to back. Then read it out loud back to front: last paragraph, second-to-last paragraph, and so on. You will catch more errors. Then read it silently once more. Then send it to a proofreader; you’ll find them on Fiverr and elsewhere, anywhere from five bucks per thousand words to a hundred.

And write, then edit. Do a brain dump: write the chapter as fast as you can without editing, then come back in the afternoon or the next morning and edit it. If you write and edit the same paragraph over and over, you’re shifting between two parts of the brain, and that’s one of the things that leads to writer’s block. I keep a little side document for notes that come up and return to them later.

Thick skin: critique, trolls, and the grammar Nazi

Richard Lowe: Creative people run into invalidation constantly: critique, criticism, “why don’t you have a real job,” Amazon reviews that say “this book was garbage” and nothing else, which is about the most worthless comment of all: what’s garbage about it? You’ll get it from family, friends, and strangers, and once you’re better known, you’ll get trolls trying to ruin your day in your own comment threads. Toughen your skin. There are people out there who do not like creative people and target them; they’re very small people with very small minds. Ignore them.

Pen names and the brand mistake I made

Richard Lowe: When I began, I figured: I can write about anything. So I wrote computer security, survival, fiction, coloring books, all under my name. Don’t do that. Keep one genre, or a limited set, per name, so readers know what to expect from the brand, and use pen names for the rest. If my primary brand is dragon fantasies under Richard Lowe, my Westerns go under another name, and if I wrote romances, I might even use a woman’s name; you’d be surprised how many romances are written by men. I didn’t use pen names at first, and it was a mistake I’m now correcting.

Work on your bio, then come back a week later and work on it again, and again a month later. Keep it current, consistent everywhere, and in multiple lengths: a few lines for the radio host who calls, a page for the magazine. Have them ready and you’re ahead of the game.

Once you start getting known, make videos. Fiverr has templated book videos for ten bucks; later, a professionally produced video runs about $500 a minute, and once you’re making money, that should be one of your first investments. And contact the media: write press releases for anything press-worthy, a book signing, a speech, donating books to the Girl Scouts. They may not come, but the press release goes on the web, and you start to become known.

What is an author platform?

Richard Lowe: The author platform sounds complicated, but it’s simple: it’s the way you reach your audience. For me, it’s my blog, plus some Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For some people it’s video; for some it’s public speaking or book signings; for some it’s a mixture. Choose based on two things: what works for you, and where your audience is. Love being on camera? Do video. Hate it? Don’t. Love writing little articles? Blog. Love taking pictures? Pinterest and Instagram. And match the audience: cookbooks and coloring books work very well on Pinterest; a book about computer security won’t, but it works very well on LinkedIn. I know authors who do 50 speaking engagements per book and love it, and authors with YouTube channels and thousands of followers. I look at the speakers like they’re crazy, because I hate doing that, and that’s the point: pick yours.

The blog you own

Richard Lowe: You’ll find people who say you don’t need a blog. Here’s why you do: you own it. On Facebook or Instagram, you own your content, but you don’t own the platform, and if they decide they don’t like the shape of your feet, they can ban you and close your account, and your content is gone with it. Get a domain name related to your brand: your name, your series, your pen name. Self-host if you can; buy it, don’t use a free one. Even if all you do is put up two pages, get started, and add to it weekly or monthly. Post links to the blog from Facebook, so if you lose the Facebook account, you haven’t lost the content. The same logic applies to Twitter and LinkedIn. YouTube is the exception because videos are big, but keep copies of everything on your own system.

Networking: your readers are the network

Richard Lowe: Networking is super important for authors and even more so for freelancers. And here’s the thing: your primary network is not other writers. It’s your readers. If your book is about dragons, your network is readers who love dragons, and you should be building it from the day you start writing. You have a secondary network of people who help you: publishers, other writers, cover artists, writing associations.

Meetup.com is an awesome resource for local groups, and being in person matters, because we writers tend to be sedentary; at least I do. Writing critique groups are one of the most important things you can do: once your draft is edited and proofread, join one, read your five or six pages, and get critique from everyone in the room. Out of 15 people, half a dozen will be worthless, some will be okay, and a few will be really good. If you don’t like the group, find another; most cities have several.

Keep the money coming in

Richard Lowe: If you want to be a professional author, you want money coming in, and that means: write as many books as you can. Quality matters, but write them fast and get them published. Don’t lollygag, don’t postpone, and if one book stalls, start the next, because quantity translates to income. Look at how many books Stephen King has written. My favorite author, Mike Resnick, has probably written 200 books; none of them individually makes a lot of money, and together they make a career.

The purpose is to write books, publish them, and promote them, not to have them sitting on your computer. They don’t have to be perfect, and all the perfectionists want to strangle me right now, but you will never be perfect. There will be grammar errors in your book; I don’t care if it’s proofread 40 times. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Yes, the grammar Nazi will find the error and write a bad review. Big deal. Move on. In the self-published world, if you find an error later, you republish it just like that.

Watch your statistics. Are you meeting the word count goals? Are you making the income you expect? This book made $200 last month and $50 this month: what happened? Maybe the cover’s wrong, the title’s wrong, the promotion stopped. If you don’t have the statistics, you won’t catch it. And avoid scams: there are so many out there, courses promising fortunes. Some training is awesome, and some of it I wish I hadn’t bought; I probably have a hundred of those on my disk drive.

Audience questions: paths, audiobooks, pricing

Richard Lowe: On self versus traditional: traditional publishing is very difficult from a standing start with no connections, and it’s hurry up and wait. One of my ghostwriting clients: we finished the book a year ago, it’s just now going to the editor, and it’ll publish around July: a year and a half. But traditional is the easiest way into libraries and bookstores. What you probably want is to mix the two: self-publish a few books first to get your feet wet, get the kinks out, and get those first bad Amazon reviews out of the way, because your first book probably won’t be well received, and so what? You can fix it and republish it. Get past the first and second book to reach the third and fourth, and once you’re good enough, a traditional publisher might pick you up. Though a publisher picking up a self-published book is extremely rare: Twilight started self-published, and it took a quarter million copies sold before a publisher grabbed it.

Control follows the path: self-publishing gives you 100% creative control. Hybrid, where you pay and they publish, costs you money and some control, and I don’t recommend it. Traditional takes most of the control in exchange for distribution.

On audiobooks: all my books have audiobooks, 27 of them, through ACX, Amazon’s audiobook platform for authors, and it’s free: on the royalty share plan, the narrator gets half and you get half. I published all 27 that way, and they bring in about a hundred bucks a month. It’s not a fortune, but I didn’t pay anything for it; the only expense is a slightly different cover. I recommend every self-published book also become an audiobook.

On pricing: look at other books in your genre, see what they’re selling for, and price the same or slightly less.

On advances: yes, traditional publishers pay advances, and in the ghostwriting world, that’s frequently how my fee is paid.

On length: ebook readers are tolerant of shorter books. I’ve written ebooks five pages long and ebooks 500 pages long, and they all sell. Believe it or not, you can make money on an ebook that’s a single page, if that page offers value to your readers.

Closing

Richard Lowe: My main site is thewritingking.com/; Fiction Masterclass is the training site; you can find me on LinkedIn; and coolauthor.com gets you copies of any books I’ve written. The slides will be available through the show. Thank you all for coming, thank you for the kind comments on the book, and next time the beginning will go smoother. It’ll be perfect.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.