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    Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career
    Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career
    Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career
    Ebook69 pages53 minutes

    Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career

    By Charles Sheehan-Miles

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Would you like to be a full-time writer?
    With our expertise, we can help you reach that dream too!
    We’ve written twenty books which have been translated into three languages and sold more than a quarter of a million copies worldwide. But most importantly, we are living out our dreams.
    We quit our day jobs and write full time and you can do the same!
    The Indie Author Toolkit is a series of books designed to take you through five easy steps to launch your career as a successful author-publisher.
    This book includes proven and easy to follow guidelines to help you get started:
    * How to identify and avoid vanity-press scams designed to separate authors from their money
    * Learn about the massive changes which are shifting the publishing industry
    * Determine the best model for your business
    * Decide where and how to distribute your books
    * Learn how to be super productive even if you don’t have any time to write
    * Becoming an expert at publishing
    What are you waiting for? Get started today with the Indie Author Toolkit!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCincinnatus Press
    Release dateNov 13, 2014
    ISBN9781632020994
    Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career
    Author

    Charles Sheehan-Miles

    Charles Sheehan-Miles has been a soldier, computer programmer, short-order cook and non-profit executive. He is the author of several books, including the indie bestsellers Just Remember to Breathe and Republic: A Novel of America's Future.

    Read more from Charles Sheehan Miles

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      Book preview

      Become a Full-Time Author - Charles Sheehan-Miles

      Indie Author Toolkit

      Become a Full-Time Author

      Practical Tips, Skills and Strategies for Turning Your Hobby into a Career

      Andrea Randall and Charles Sheehan-Miles

      Cincinnatus Press

      Copyright 2014 Andrea Randall and Charles Sheehan-Miles

      Books by Andrea Randall and Charles Sheehan-Miles

      Nocturne

      Become a Full-Time Author: Practical tips, skills and strategies to turn your writing hobby into a career

      Books by Andrea Randall

      In The Stillness

      Something's Come Up (with Michelle Pace)

      Jesus Freaks

      Sins of the Father

      The Prodigal

      November Blue

      Ten Days of Perfect

      Reckless Abandon

      Sweet Forty-Two

      Marrying Ember

      Bo & Ember

      Books by Charles Sheehan-Miles

      Thompson Sisters 

      A Song for Julia

      Falling Stars

      Just Remember to Breathe

      The Last Hour

      Rachel's Peril

      Girl of Lies

      Girl of Rage

      Girl of Vengeance

      America's Future

      Republic

      Insurgent

      Fiction

      Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf War

      Nonfiction

      Saving the World On $30 A Day: An Activists Guide to Starting, Organizing and Running a Non-Profit Organization

      Become a Full-Time Author

      In 1984, at the ripe age of thirteen, I decided I was going to be an author. Not just an author, but a full-time author.

      In 2013, at the age of forty-two, I finally realized that dream.

      That same year Andrea went to work full-time as a writer, selling tens of thousands of copies of her books In the Stillness and the November Blue series.

      We would like to help you reach that dream too.

      Back in 1984, I was inspired by my love of words and stories. I’d gone through some tough years with my family, and I was an introspective and overly serious child. I escaped into fantasy worlds: Robert Heinlein, Marion Zimmer Bradley, JRR Tolkien and many more.

      That year, I wrote my first short stories—and received my first rejection letter. Not long after that I wrote my first novel, a 90-page handwritten piece of fan-fiction ripped right out of the pages of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld Series crossed with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels.

      I don’t have that manuscript anymore. I do have the novel I wrote my senior year in high school about a psychotic teenager who killed everyone in her circle of friends one by one. And the one I wrote after that, about an American student traveling and living in Jerusalem during the Intifada of the 1980s.

      Of course, no one has ever seen or heard of those books because they never saw the light of day. In fact, I thought I’d lost them forever, but an ex-girlfriend contacted me on Facebook in 2012 and informed me that I’d left them at her place twenty years. A few days later she mailed them to me. I have the paper manuscripts upstairs in the back of the closet now.

      Fast forward to the nineties, and I spent almost ten years completing the first novel I published, Prayer at Rumayla. The book is grim; it’s about the emotional and spiritual damage that comes from killing in wartime. It has a depressing, awful ending. And for several years I shopped it around to publishers. I got a lot of letters saying things like, Thanks, this is good but we can’t find a market for it, or Please learn to write. I got a lot of form rejections. Finally, in 2001 I gave up my dream of being able to write for a living.

      I published Prayer at Rumayla through a notorious vanity press (XLibris) figuring a few people might like it, and ran it by a couple of writers I knew to get their opinions. They gave good responses, and

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