Graham Brown is an author and entrepreneur. In 2012, he and his family took the Location Independent plunge, sold everything and traveled the world.
“When I mean everything, I mean everything – cars, furniture, clothes – the lot” he says.
Since then the Browns traveled New Zealand, Japan, Fiji, Hawaii, California, Florida, London, Cyprus, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote.
In 2001 Graham Brown published his first book The Mobile Youth: Voices of the Mobile Generation. His latest book is called Fire Your Boss, Sell Your Car, Travel the World. He hopes that with his books he’ll help people achieve their travel dreams too.
Today Graham Brown is making a stop at our blog and what we’re dying to know is how he turned his hobby into a business.
– So, how did you decide to pursue a writing career?
“They say writing teaches the writer most. I was traveling the world a lot in business and visiting exciting places like Japan and India so I encountered many stories on the road. Writing was one way of collecting and sharing those stories with others.
I am a non-fiction writer and I write about technology, culture and travel. As you can imagine, a lot of people are interested in these frontier markets so there was a space for someone to packages those stories as books, and that’s how I became a writer. I published my first book “The Mobile Youth: Voices of the Mobile Generation” back in 2011.
I really enjoyed the writing process, I learned a lot. So, it’s turned from a hobby into a business.”
– Was getting published hard?
“I chose the self-publishing route. Unless you are J.K.Rowling or Malcolm Gladwell, self-publishing is the future. It’s a lot hard than using a publisher but it forces you to become a better writer and learn writing as a business (rather than as a hobby).”
– Are your characters based on people you know?
“The stories I write are all based on real people. In my book “The Mobile Youth” I share the lives of 10 young people in different countries – from the favela slums of Rio in Brazil, to the hectic urban sprawl of Tokyo. I changed all their names for privacy reasons but everything in their stories – from the gang violence to complex family realtionships – is based on real lives.”
As for my latest book Fire Your Boss, Sell Your Car, Travel the World it’s a personal journey, a life experiment with living and working anywhere in the world. Everyone in that book is real, sometimes too real!”
– What genre is your books?
“Travel, culture, psychology, anthropology.”
– Which of your books is your most favourite?
“Fire Your Boss, Sell Your Car, Travel the World has to be my favorite because I put the most into it. I spent 2 years writing the book and thinking about what experience I could share from my world travels that would help others follow their dream too.”
– Do you have a specific writing routine?
“I’m getting better, learning from the masters like Stephen King. I find that a set time to write doesn’t work for me, rather I now try to write in short bursts of 20 minutes. That keeps the motivation and creativity high.
I believe everyone has a story inside them, they just need to find the write tools and environment to release that story. Travel is a great way to do that. There is nothing more conducive to writing than staring out of the airplane window down on the world below or nursing a coffee in a cafe in a foreign city.”
– What are your current projects?
“A lot of people ask me “how do I do that?” when I sold everything and traveled the world back in 2012, so my projects are based on helping people answer that question. As I’m now living out on a remote island in the East China Sea, I’m focusing on travel and culture. I expect future books to be inspired by my surroundings here.”
“Fire Your Boss, Sell Your Car, Travel the World”
BUY LINK
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N0B4WSW
A book and a cup of coffee 