By Jorian Gardner
JACK Heath is 21, shares a modest apartment in the inner north and is an internationally published author with three books to his name and a fourth on the way.
He treats his writing as a full-time job and sits every day in a big, brown chair writing until the battery on his laptop drains.
“It’s my only job, actually!” he says. “It is good enough for me to live off.”
Jack says his readers tend to be in their early-to-mid teens as his characters are 15 and 16 themselves and research shows that young readers tend to read a little up from their age group.
“But I have fan base up until people in their early 20s which is great, so it’s broadening,” he says.
What motivates his writing?
“Bad action movies! Oh, and good action movies, too!  But good action movies are so much harder to find,” he says.
“I get the most ideas when I am exercising. You know how they say active body, active mind? I go jogging, usually. I am not that co-ordinated really, so jogging is about as good as it gets for me. But I think if you work up a sweat you can get your mind functioning better – it’s better than sitting in front of the television eating chocolate, anyway.”
The relaxed and intelligent young author has had a fantastically successful run since his first novel, “The Lab”, which he started writing at 13, was released a few years ago. 
It featured a secret agent Six of Hearts, who returned in his next novel “Remote Control”. He is now working on his third book in the series, but in between has released a new one, “Money Run”.
“I didn’t want to get pigeon-holed in sci-fi for the rest of my life,” says Jack. “I want to show I can do other things.”
“Money Run” sees the young writer still writing for his early teenage fan base, but is a departure from the Six of Hearts character. It’s the story of two teenage geniuses, who are professional thieves in their spare time. They hatch a plan to steal the $200 million secretly hidden in a billionaire’s building. There are hit men, theft and a sinister agenda revealed.
“I think a big part of my success was that I came along at the right time,” Jack says.
“Fiction, (for a younger audience) was primarily issues-based – there was a lot of stuff about eating disorders and parental divorce and that sort of stuff – just teenagers being unhappy basically, and I wasn’t interested in that. 
“So I started writing my own book about robots, and people shooting one another and explosions and things like that. It turns out that I wasn’t alone, and because I was a kid when I was writing it, the things I was looking for were the same things that many other teenage readers were looking for.
“My first book, ‘The Lab’, comes out in the US in November and I am pretty sure that it’s going to do well over there. So, hopefully, it’ll grow bigger.
“I had a fan send me a letter from Turkey once, which is surprising because my books are actually not yet published in Turkey.”
What about all those “six-figure book deals” we hear about in the publishing world? A soon-to-break-internationally author on his fourth book deal; surely he is starting to rake it in by now? 
“They would be wrong to think I am a multi-millionaire or something,” he says, smiling. “I live in a group apartment. Hopefully, over time when I build up my catalogue things might happen faster – and then, perhaps, I will be able to buy a bigger TV!”