118: An extraordinary journey to publication - with Amer Anwar

<p>We're all storytellers at heart in the fiction publishing world, right? Our guest this week, thriller author <a href='http://www.ameranwar.com/'>Amer Anwar's</a> personal story though is truly astonishing. Brought up in Southall in West London, Amer always assumed that someone from his background could never become a writer, until he won the coveted CWA Debut Dagger award for the opening 3000 words of a novel he'd begun writing at a creative writing workshop. Agents immediately clamoured for his signature. The only issue was, those 3000 words were all he had to offer. It would take him a further five years to finish that novel. His agent stuck by him, but couldn't find a traditional publisher to take it. So Amer published it himself, using every trick he could think of to promote the novel. It paid off, and that first book, <a href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brothers-Blood-Jags-Amer-Anwar-ebook/dp/B07BF8K7JM'>Brothers in Blood</a>, was picked out by both The Guardian and The Times newspapers as one of their books of the year. This is an interview you will not want to miss.</p> <p>Also this week, Rebecca reflects on a busy day at the London Book Fair, and there's news of <a href='http://www.hobeck.net'>Hobeck Books</a> new approach to judging submissions...</p> <p><a href='http://www.ameranwar.com/'>Amer Anwar | Author | Writing and Random Stuff</a></p> <p></p>