Real estate books are a dime a dozen...one book is hard to pick, but don't pass up the E-Myth Revisited...but get the audio book and play at 2x speed...the author sounds like he could die at any moment...still a good read ;) Good luck! 

My teammate and I usually tag team it to speed things up as far as tripod movement and capturing goes.

However, BP seems to speed up the process quite a bit. 

I believe it's an advantage to do a live in flip as you can go at your own speed and make improvements on your own schedule and even do some of the work yourself and gain some experience. 

Do you want to be an active investor or is a passive role more your speed?

support teams on the ground are everything we live in Ontario and invest in Ohio we travel there a lot ti see what is happening and plan on purchasing a summer home there that we will air B&B when we are not there, We are currently active in Dayton  and Cleveland  there have been a few speed bumps along the way but love Ohio .

at that level its a hobby business like @Joe Splitrock says.. decent CPA that does a lot of real estate work.PM is the most absolute critical aspect of out of area rental investing hands downand when you have time you may want to find a local handyman in the markets your in and have them on speed dial.. and negotiate in your lease that you can do your own handyman work. this will save you a bunch. some PM's may allow it others may not. 

If you attend these you will speed up your learning path.  

To speed up the learning process try and attend local reia’s and meetups in your area.  

And without knowing it, you just finished week 1, in hyper speed, of my 6 week Mindset Calibration course.