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We caught up with Hamish to chat all about his whirlwind journey to publication that involved an exciting three-book deal with Pan Macmillan and selling the film rights. But these things don’t happen overnight. To understand how Hamish go to where he is today, we have to go back to the beginning.

JW: Hi Hamish, congratulations on such an exciting book deal. Can you tell us a little about your path to publication?

In March of 2020, Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown of the UK to prevent the spread of the Covid 19 virus and the business world that I was a part of shrugged its shoulders and carried on. At the time, I was working in the retail sector and shops remained open so Head Office and other functions found ways for the long working days to continue via endless Zoom calls.

By the end of the year, the seriousness of the pandemic had become apparent and the restrictions had become more stringent and so for the first time in thirty years, I found myself at home without a full schedule of meetings and an angry inbox brimming with unread messages.

This was quite refreshing for a couple of days and then as the novelty wore off, I found myself wandering around the house looking for things to do. The inbox was clear, the impossible to-do list had vanished and an idea that had been lurking in the back of my mind since my school days began to take shape.

It was Boxing Day 2020 and I came to breakfast refreshed and alive with energy. “I am going to write a book!” I announced victoriously (I may have used the word bestselling in this sentence). My wife and children laughed. It was the first of many reality checks that would happen over the next three years in navigating the very unique and often frustrating world of publishing a novel.

So, at aged 48, equipped with my ‘B’ in A-Level English and a huge pile of books that I had read over the years, my plan was set; I would dash off a beautiful manuscript, sent it off to a big publisher  and wait for the seven-figure advance cheque to arrive in the post. My only dilemma was whether to have Bollywood star Deepika Padukone in the lead role for the film or let the big guns from LA fight it out for Hollywood. This was the start of my historical series The Harveen Gill Mysteries. 

My solution to this impossible problem was simple. Cheat.

As the story began to take shape, I started looking into the process of getting my book published and realised that major book companies would not accept an unsolicited manuscript. It would have to be submitted by a reputable agent and it appeared that getting such an agent would be a task in itself. 

The best agents seemed to be getting hundreds of queries a week and response times went from non-existent to many, many months. Some analysis of deals announced over the last two years would suggest that authors with a South Asian background account for a little over 2% of all deals and historical fiction as a category accounts for around 3% of deals. I would be shooting at a pretty small target.

My solution to this impossible problem was simple. Cheat.

I looked for a writing community that would help to fill in all gaps in my knowledge and skill set. Joining Jericho Writers was an important step in this process. It allowed me to access comprehensive information on editing, refining my query and getting an agent without having to take the scary step of actually talking to someone (we writers can be a pretty reclusive group). 

I used the Jericho Writers agent 1-2-1 service to better understand what agents were looking for, and then used my own network to find people who were in the book industry.  I found that by being brave and telling people  about my journey and asking for help, a number of introductions happened that led to both the agents  that I worked with including the lovely Jane Compton who secured my deal.

Initially, The Muziris Empire, at 130k words, received detailed and mostly enthusiastic responses, editors taking time to explain why they were passing, but passing nonetheless. Entering competitions, working with a couple of beta readers and then finding an editor, the wonderful Holly Domney, who transformed the manuscript into a tight, all-action, historical adventure at just under 100k words.

The second round of submissions to publishers went much wider, to major publishers from both India and the USA as well as the UK. We had strong interest from the start resulting in a number of interested parties and a pre-empt from Pan Macmillan India into what had become a three-book series.

Looking back, there are so many things that I didn’t know at the start of the process and kind people that helped me along the way, so I am always keen to help other along their journey, especially those from traditionally underrepresented parts of the writing community.

JW: Is there anything you wish you knew before becoming a published author?

Looking back, there are so many things that I didn’t know at the start of the process that I wish I had. If you’re a writer, my advice is to:

• Get out to live events. The writing community is generally open and supportive, I found that meeting people really helped me on my journey.
• Join a writing community, ideally that has members that write in your chosen genre as they all have nuances. Historical fiction writers talk about the joys of deep research, staying true to history, best publishers for the category and other things that may not be relevant for YA writers for example.
• Enter competitions, especially those that give feedback. Writers often complain about the lack of agent comments on rejections. For many reasons this type of feedback can be misleading. Better sources of constructive advice can come from competitions, betas and writing groups.
• Get busy on socials: follow writers, agents, publishers. Do interact with their posts. Do not slide into their DM’s asking for help with your project straight away! It’s a great source of information and upcoming events.
• Refine and edit your manuscript. I have recently blogged about the query trenches and why writers may get into a loop of sending out the same query over and over. It took me many versions of both manuscript and query letter to get it right. Eventually I worked with the amazing Holly Domney on a developmental edit which really opened my eyes to some ways to improve the book.
• Submit to agents/publishers outside of the UK. AgentMatch is a great resource to find potential agents, looking at the latest #MSWL on X also put me in touch with some great people. My deal was sold outside the UK.
  Read, read and read. There is so much to learn from what is being published.
• Find your own routine and be kind to yourself. Lots of authors advocate for writing so many words a day and at set times. Everyone has a unique life situation and to be the most productive and creative, I think your writing needs to fit in with that. Don’t beat yourself up using someone else’s yardstick!
• Keep going, it can be a long process but, I believe in you.

Many kind people helped me along the way, so I am always keen to help others along their journey, especially those from traditionally underrepresented parts of the writing community.

About Hamish

Hamish Morjaria was born and brought up in North London. Having spent three decades in the business world, working for leading brands and retailers, he finally indulged his passion for ancient history and fast-paced thrillers to create The Harveen Gill Mysteries. When not writing, Hamish can be found watching cricket or walking his dog Simba during the day, and sitting in front of the fire with a cup of tea and a good book in the evening.

Hamish lives with his wife Kalpa, two children and dog in Buckinghamshire.

You can find more about Hamish on his website here or keep up with him on X/Twitter and Instagram.

Here’s a challenge that we all experience, a challenge that in some ways grows larger the more imaginative and effortless you are.

The challenge is simply this: what do you set down as your next sentence? Of the thousand and more things you could say, what do you need to say now?

So let’s say for example that you have an army veteran teaming up with a homeless guy to buy a lottery ticket. They discover that the ticket is worth £1,000,000. (This example, as so much else in these emails now, is inspired by something from Feedback Friday. That said, the way I develop the example here is all mine, for the sake of illustration only.)

Let’s say that the setting is on the street outside the shop where they bought the ticket and that your point of view character is Ed, the army veteran. How do you proceed next. Here are things you might consider talking about:

• The view down the street, perhaps ending in a view of docks, the glitter of water.
• Or the same, but ending in a row of boarded-up shops and the loom of a huge cylindrical gas-holder.
• The look of the ticket itself. The feel of it in the hand.
• A memory of childhood poverty
• Something to do with odds: more likely to be struck by lightning than to get a big win, that kind of thing.
• Something to do with odds, but from Ed’s army days this time. A companion-in-arms killed by a freak shot, perhaps.
• Or Ed’s own role as an army trainer, always calling on the men to consider the risks of any action or non-action.
• Or something in the relationship between the two men – a laugh? An embrace?
• Something to do with a future of money. A holiday Ed might have dreamed of. Or a burden of debt that can now be shed?
• Something purely random. A seagull that flies into a patch of sunlight on an awning, holding a stolen cherry in its mouth.
• Something that touches a romantic or sexual nerve – Ed thinking of a former girlfriend? Or a woman he fancies but has been to shy to properly talk to?

And so on. You could go in any of these directions and none of them are wrong.

In a funny way, you only have to list them out and you build a scene that starts to cohere in a somewhat collage-y, scrapbook-y way. Somehow, even the contradictory views (the gas-holder and the glitter of water) can be assimilated into something that feels real.

So what? Do you put them all down, then scrap the bits that don’t feel so strong on the page? Or just write the first three sentences that come into your head? Or you set yourself a rule? One line on setting, one line on action-in-the-present, one line on memory or reflection?

In looking at your Feedback Friday stuff, one of the commonest issues I see has to do with this exact issue. What people choose to set down in their text isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s not exactly right.

Sometimes the issue is that the reader is being asked to look in five different directions all in one paragraph and the result is confusing. Other times (and most lethally) the reader is being asked to look in a direction where the character would not be looking, with the result that the scene in question pulls away from the character and diminishes them.

As a reader, you feel that issue in your bones. One page like that, you can manage. Three, and perhaps you’re still reading. Ten pages like that? And – well, no one knows, because that reader is no longer reading that book.

And that’s the solution. Your golden thread.

Stay close to your character. Always. No exceptions.

So take our lottery-winning veteran, Ed. He’s just won the lottery. He has a ticket in his hand.

Be him.

What does he see? Think? Say? Do? Experience? Remember?

You could still go more or less anywhere. Any of the bullet points we started with could plausibly go into this moment. But how you do it still matters.

Here are two passages that pick up on that seagull / awning / cherry image. First, a version that works fine:

Ed looked across the street. A patch of sunlight had struck the white awning over the greengrocers. A seagull was perched in the sunlight with a glossy red cherry in its mouth, a cherry stolen from the crates below.

Ed felt the curl of the ticket in his hand. The seagull. The light. The cherry. The ticket. None of it quite felt real, except for the booming wash of a tide which kept saying, “you’ve won, you’ve won.”

That passage gives the reader a dissociated Ed, one where the shock of winning means he’s no longer thinking or feeling quite straight. Not just that, but by combining a bird, some sunlight and a stolen cherry into a single image, we offer up some good metaphorical meat to the reader. Free as a bird, something stolen, a glossy round fruit, something about to take flight? You can mix up the exact sauce as you fancy. That might or might not be how you’d want to write this scene, but it’s a perfectly viable route.

Next, a version that doesn’t work.

Ed looked across the street. A seagull was sitting in a patch of sunlight on a white awning. It had stolen something, a cherry, from the greengrocer’s shop below, and had the fruit in its beak, owning but not eating it.

Stolen fruit. In Fallujah once, Ed had been patrolling with a comrade of his, a sapper called Aaron. Some IED had blown the corner of an old bank building apart, injuring a couple of people and killing the stallholder who had sold fruit from a wooden cart just outside. Ed and Aarron had picked up some fallen fruit – a pomegranate, Ed remembered, some oranges – then got into an argument about whether that counted as theft as not. Aaron had been from a dirt-poor background, always treated Ed – pharmacist dad, nurse mum – as something like a Rolls-Royce driving toff. Aaron had had his arm torn off five days later. A mortar attack from a house that had supposedly been cleared. It had been Ed’s job to tell Aaron’s parents.

None of the content there is necessarily wrong for the book in general. But where’s the lottery ticket? How is Ed thinking about Aaron and mortar attacks and fallen oranges right here, right now?

We’ve basically lost the character and that means we’ve lost the thread of any actual story.

That’s one kind of failure, but the possibility of failure is endless.

Here’s another example.

In one of my books, Fiona is in a cave. The cave is flooded – it’s a big lake, essentially, but an underwater tunnel leads to the outside, so she dives through the tunnel and escapes.

Suppose I had just written, “I saw there must be a passage out, under the water, so I emerged onto a little patch of sandy soil under a low cliff.” That feels wrong, no?

Fiona is not some all-action Special Forces type for whom these things are standard, so it’s absolutely critical to my explanation of her movements that she reflects on the experience of swimming underwater through a tunnel of rock. If I don’t put that reflection into her mind, then the reader will be just perplexed. It’ll feel to the reader like a scratch on a record, some important bit of information simply missing. I was going to quote from that passage here, to show you how I do it in practice, but that tiny moment – escape from the cave – runs to more than 400 words, because the swim mattered to Fiona so it had to matter to the reader.

Follow the character. Your golden thread.