All you have to do to enter is go to the Amazon page for Lovers in Paris, use the ‘Look Inside’ feature to read the first few pages and find the answer to this question:

What present do Sandy’s workmates give her as she sets off on her blind date in Paris?

Send the answer to mail@andyconway.net before midnight this Sunday (12th February). I’ll choose a winner randomly from the correct entries and endeavour to mail the copy out on Monday so it will reach you on Tuesday.

If you’re really feeling confident you might want to include your postal address and the dedication you’d like me to write when I sign it.

Bonne chance!

As we run up to Valentine’s Day, you won’t read a better story to get you in the mood. You’ll probably love it so much that you’ll immediately go and order a copy of Lovers in Paris, the collection of stories that Montmartre comes from. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

In this 10,000-word short story, vintage-obsessed English girl Sandy travels to Paris on New Year’s Eve for a blind date with her French pen friend, but ends up being entertained by elderly barman Claude when her date doesn’t show up.

Don’t delay. Download it for your Kindle now before the free offer ends.

Get it free for your Kindle until midnight Sunday (29 Jan) at:

   
and at Amazon Kindle stores in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Reader comments

“Imaginitive, surprising and sweet…”

“I’m not into romance books or short stories in anyway, shape, or form. I got this because the title caught my eye and because I’ve been to Montmartre in Paris several times. I just wanted to see how the story described it. Shhhhhh. I really liked this story. It was pleasant, nice, and very touching. The description of the streets and surroundings made me feel like I was there again. Kudos. A fine read. Highly recommend this one.”

The Very Thought of You has had an option offer from a Hollywood producer, which is pretty amazing for an ebook novella that had only been on sale a month and sold about 25 copies when he got in touch (he was back in touch again this week, promising to get the project moving again once Thanksgiving was over).

I also published the first two parts of my teenage time travel adventure, Touchstone, one set in 1912, the second during the Blitz. This week I’ve been outlining the rest of the series, all to be published next year, and it looks like it will run to six in total.

And all three are selling. Which brings me to the thing that made me smile this morning. I checked my Amazon sales and noticed The Very Thought of You had moved back into the Time Travel Romance Top 100, and what do you know – there it was at number 33.

And there were the two Touchstone books, at numbers 32 and 35; all of them forming an adulatory cluster around one of my favourite time travel books: Audrey Nifenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife.

It’s just one of those daily delights I now get to experience as an indie-publisher (now, if only Audrey’s book can drag them all along with her into the Top 10, it would make my Christmas).

But there’s a more serious point here. And it’s one that writers should print out, take to a tattoo parlour and have inked onto the back of their hands so they can see it every time they sit down to write.

People keep asking me how I got a self-published ebook novella on the radar of Hollywood. Well, the true answer is, I didn’t really do anything. It just happened. But my theory is this: Amazon’s category system is actually creating online communities for highly specific genres. Whatever your interest, you can go straight to a Top 100 chart on Amazon for it and never have to look anywhere else; which delivers a headshot to the zombie meme that no one will ever be able to find anyone’s books now so many are being published.

So if you’re into time travel romance, you’ve probably bookmarked the Time Travel Romance chart, maybe even saved it as a button on your iphone, so you can go straight to it and always see what’s new.

And that’s what I think movie producers are doing. If you’re a producer who’s looking for new stories in a specific genre, you can monitor an Amazon category chart and see what new writers are publishing – novels, novellas, short stories – and you can see pretty much straight away what might interest you.

Self-publishing is the new slush pile and you almost don’t need to go chasing Hollywood anymore. If you’re writing something interesting in a certain genre, they’re going to come to you.

Was it only this March that I announced to the world that I was publishing my first ebook and there would be another ten before the end of the year?

Seems like last week.

When I first announced it, it wasn’t 11. I thought, hey I’ll get ten titles out before Xmas, the idea being to get a firm footprint on Kindle in time for the holiday season increase in ebook buying. Then I looked at the titles I had and thought. I could probably do 11. Then I had the crazy idea to do 11 before 11 November 2011, because, hey, it’s a cool concept… Little did I know the amount of back breaking work it would entail.

But I did it. I published 11 titles in 9 months. Five novels, four novellas and two shorts.

Nine are published under my own name, while two are out there under pseudonyms, because half way through the year I came up with the idea of running an erotica imprint based around a certain character in one of my novels.

That’s what’s been so amazing about plunging into this indie-publishing world: I write a lot more than I used to and if I get a crazy idea for a new story or imprint, I can get it out there quickly and have people buying it almost as soon as it’s released.

And I’ve even got a paperback out. Through Createspace, I’ve been able to provide a paperback option for The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal and have been getting plenty of orders for signed copies from football fans.

The UK audience are slowly buying my titles. I’m currently selling about 2-3 ebooks per day, but I know that number will go up. I’ve seen all those nice new £80 Kindles stacked up in Tesco. More and more people will have them this Xmas and when they do, they’ll be looking for ebooks to order.

So I see this as a serious career move. It’s already garnered Hollywood interest. Next year it will make me a living.

And I’m going to carry on publishing. I’ve got another five titles lined up for next year, plus I’ll be continuing with the Touchstone time travel series.

I’ll be writing at a more relaxed pace though. No more crazy deadlines.

But how did I do it?

Simple. I had most of my stories already developed, either as unpublished novels or screenplays. I’ve basically spent the year re-writing and editing. It’s sort of simply putting out my ‘backlist’ if you will, although with tons of re-writing.

I listened to people who were already e-publishing. I checked Joe Konrath’s blog every day to give me the regular kick up the arse I needed.

I bought Dave Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital. It tells you everything you need to know about actually doing it: it analyses the revolution that’s going on in publishing right now, spells out the economic choices for you, tells you how to edit and format, and it contains the testimonies of 33 e-publishing success stories. It’s even available on his site as a free PDF. I still bought the ebook after reading it for free. It’s that good.

I had a team of writer/editor friends who were willing beta-readers. They spotted most glitches and offered a lot of constructive advice on each book. Thank you, guys. You know who you are and you are all gods and godesses amongst men to me.

I had a good book cover designer: Pete Bradbury.

Oh, and I wrote every day. Four pages was my minimum. It didn’t matter if it was 4 newly written pages or 4 edited pages. That was what I did every day. Some days I did more. A lot more (especially during the last couple of weeks).

That’s how I did it. And that’s how you can do it.

It’s Disneyland for lovers; a place to indulge in a romantic fantasy world. But  if you fell in love with someone in Paris, could you trust your feelings? Would  it have a real future? Or should you just get out of there and fall in love  somewhere where it’s safe?

Five couples try to find the answer on New  Year’s Eve in the French capital.

By morning they’ll know.

Meet Me in Montmartre. English girl Sandy travels to Paris on New Year’s Eve for a blind date with her French pen friend, but ends up being entertained by elderly barman Claude when her date doesn’t show up. Meet Me in Montmartre is already published as a single volume short story, but contains an alternate ending in this novel.

Le Shuffle. Mismatched English couple Marcus and Jemma are on the Eurostar train
to Paris on New Year’s Day and bump into Marcus’s old flame, Hélène, and her boyfriend, Didier. A bilingual cat and mouse game ensues, with both Jemma and Didi jealous of the Marcus and Hélène’s friendship. The tensions between them erupt into a fight, which reveals a secret that tears both couples apart.

Paris Match. Irish student Jimmy falls in love at first sight with Belgian student Celeste when he crashes a ceremony for students from all over the world. But the event is sabotaged by French delegate Jean-Paul, who drags all the boys on a pub crawl of his favourite Parisian bars and brothels, his antics causing Jimmy and Celeste to spend the whole New Year’s Eve trying to reach each other.

But Suzanne Valadon Isn’t There… Americans Kyle and Trudy argue over his obsession for a long dead artist as they take the Paris tourist trail. But Kyle has another obsession… the Parisian film student, Lisa, whose address he has in his pocket.

One Night in Paris. Alec, in Paris on business, chooses to jump off the train at the
last moment and stay in Paris to look up sexy, funny, playful Irina, ‘the one that got away’. The one he let get away. They resist the clichéd Parisian love affair, even though they’re living in one. Slowly, through the day, they tentatively reveal their feelings.

Buy the e-book at:

Buy the paperback at:

Reader comments

“Funny, witty, with characters you want to root for. And if you’ve ever been to Paris and stayed near the Gare du Nord and Montmarte then you will enjoy this book even more. If not it may even inspire you to visit and experience a random romance for yourself… Good book and good writing.”

“The description of the streets and surroundings made me feel like I was there again. Kudos. A fine read. Highly recommend this one.”

“Imaginitive, surprising and sweet…”

Buy it at:

Find out more about this time travel Blitz story here…

Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a pair of mismatched History students who stumble upon an old gravestone that catapults them back in time.

Dealing with the catastrophic fallout of their previous encounter with Amy Parker in 1912, they now race to locate Amy during the 1940 Blitz and become caught up in the nightly German bombings of Birmingham and their chilling aftermath.

Touchstone explores a city’s dark past: a gritty world of real danger where every action has an unforeseen consequence that can ripple through generations.

This 20,000-word novella is the second part of the Touchstone story – a self-contained adventure set during the 1940 Blitz. It contains some disturbing scenes of death by bombardment and fire, including the death of a baby, plus minor discussion of adult themes, such as illigitimate birth.

Buy it at:

Reader comments

“A brilliant teenage time travel drama that manages to be both intelligent and action-packed. Leads to a climax that takes your breath away…”

“A really cool concept that rattles along like an express train. It’s never too long before something interesting happens, so it’s turn, turn, turn. Ideal for mobile devices like Kindle…”

I volunteered to be a guinea pig for new story tool Constellations, when script editor Hayley McKenzie innocently asked me if I’d like to take part in one of the workshops at this weekend’s London Screenwriters’ Festival. They needed a writer who had a problem with a script. My characters might be psychoanalysed in the session, she said, but not me.

I said yes. Why not? And came up with Learn To Croon, my ‘swing band with one last shot to make it’ script. I thought my problem with it was that I had ten characters to introduce in the first ten pages and couldn’t quite manage to do it, and this is what I told Constellations practitioner Richard Tierney an hour before the session.

He smiled and asked me a bit more about the story and we talked about the relationships of the characters to each other and to the music. But I was fairly confident that the workshop would be about solving my ‘how to squeeze 14 pages into 10′ problem.

Was I in for a surprise.

Over a hundred people gathered for the session and, after clearing a space in the middle of the room, Richard asked me to tell everyone about my story as briefly as possible.

This bit is important. You have to understand that everyone in the room knew very little about my story if you’re going to appreciate the magic of what followed.

I told everyone that my film was about a down on their luck swing band competing for a battle of the bands competition – the prize being a residency that would get them out of their shitty jobs. They had their one night of glory ten years ago but are now a mess and most of them don’t believe in it anymore. Main character Lou, the band leader, is the one dragging them kicking and screaming to the prize. He’s helped by Miranda, a music student who works in a care home and who’s found Lester, a 90-year old Afro-American jazz trumpeter still obsessively poring over his old scores from the 1940s. The band want the scores, but Lester doesn’t trust them to respect his work.

This was pretty much what everyone in the room knew about my story, including Richard, who led the exercise that followed.

He asked me to start choosing people in the room to represent Lou, Miranda and Lester (and one person to represent the band) and to place them somewhere in the space. Amazingly, there wasn’t a mass walkout at this point. I chose a few groaning victims and pushed them to where it first felt right, even though I thought it looked a bit crap and I’d probably done it wrong.

Then I was told to sit down and take notes.

Richard then asked the ‘representatives’ how they felt about where they were in the space, and thus began the remarkable adventure of a group of strangers who didn’t really know my characters, talking about them as if they really were my characters.

‘Lou’ noted immediately that he was at the head of a triangle comprising himself, Miranda and Lester, but the band were outside of it, and he felt intrigued by Lester and wanted to know his story. ‘Miranda’ felt close to Lester and felt she had a direct line to Lou but the band were in her way. ‘The Band’ felt vulnerable, exposed and not sure why they were there. ‘Lester’ felt scared: everyone was behind him and he had no relationship to any of them.

Which is pretty much how all those characters feel at the start of my story. 10 out of 10 for accuracy and a few bonus points for crystallising it all so neatly.

Then Richard asked them to think about where they all were a year before the story begins and, at the count of three, to go to that space.

CLICK. Lester didn’t feel as excluded and felt closer to Miranda. The Band were more excited and felt closer to Lou. Miranda felt she had more ambition. Lou was desperate to make it, felt threatened by Miranda and didn’t want the band to break up.

Gulp. So now the ‘representatives’ are telling me things I didn’t know about my characters. And these things come with the shocking force of revelation. How do they know all this?

Now Richard asks me to choose another person to take part, but this person isn’t representing a character in my story, they’re representing a concept. I have to pick someone to represent ‘Music’. I choose someone and put her where I think it feels right (again, I go with my first instinct and think it’s probably crap).

Now everyone gets to say how they feel about ‘Music’. Lester needs to be closer to her and still doesn’t trust Lou. Miranda feels like she enjoys a privileged access to ‘Music’. The Band feel Lester is between them and the Music and they feel intimidated. Lou is worried that they can all do without him. ‘Music’ herself feels that Lester really knows where she is and she’s very happy that MIranda is also close to her.

Blimey.

My characters are now telling me things about their inner lives I had no idea about. For me, it’s a great session, but I’m wondering if it might be boring for everyone else. I’m expecting a mass walkout at any moment. But people stay, and the atmosphere is intense.

The process continues. New representatives are added such as ‘Insecurity’, ‘Talent’ and a mysterious one chosen by Richard that is never identified but immediately disturbs almost everyone in the constellation.

We skip to the end and they all find themselves in a very pleasing space. Lou has forced himself to be in the middle of it all and thinks he’s achieved everything. Lester is at the end of the line and thinks he might be dead. The Band are triumphant and feel closer to Lester. Music feels she should be closer to Lester but that he’s gone. But Miranda still doesn’t feel quite connected and wants to be closer to it all.

So we work on Miranda. Her problem is she can’t see her Talent, and Insecurity is in her peripheral vision and freaking her out.  Her Talent feels neglected by her and wants to fight back.

So they’re asked to skip to where they see themselves at the end of the story and we find that Miranda now can’t see her Insecurity and has Talent staring her in the face and likes it. We add Lou to this and I place him by her side, slightly behind her and at an angle. I don’t know why, it just feels right.

Miranda feels good about him being there. insecurity wanted her to confront him, but he can see she’s moved on. And Lou feels great; he can see her Insecurity but he feels he’s now protecting her.

I did get something in my eye at this point.

And there our session ended. My story was in another place, and I had a much more profound understanding of who my characters really were and how they felt at every stage of their journey together.

It was obvious from the reaction in the room, the high attendance at the chat with Richard that followed, and the amount of people approaching me the rest of the day, that this session had really struck a chord (no pun intended) and that even the scores of people merely observing, were deeply affected by it.

I think Richard might argue that no one was a mere observer and that everyone in the room, in some way, affected the process. It’s hard to argue with that when you see something so profound and can’t actually put into words what actually happened or how it happened.

Constellations seems like a mystical, alchemical process. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does, and works incredibly well, and even Richard can’t tell us why it works.

I’m still reeling emotionally from it a day later. And more importantly, I feel my characters are too. I know this because I know them so much more now.

Script Constellations are a safe immersive way to examine any story. Examining in this way allows you to see hidden aspects of the story, its structure, as well as the attributes and  motivations of your characters. With a facilitator in charge, a spatial representation of your story is created, and then manipulated. Manipulated to allow you to see the story from many perspectives, experimenting with different endings, alternate back stories, and experiment with many versions of your story.

For mor information see Script Explorers

So it’s very strange to win an award for one of my own DIY ebook designs. Strange, and totally bloody brilliant!

I put together the cover of Meet Me in Montmartre myself for two reasons: it was only a short story release, not a novel, and it saved me a bit of money.

My limitations as a Photoshopper forced me to be simple, so much that I knew the book cover had to be comprised of a single photo + typography, no fancy montage of elements, because i simply don’t have the skills to handle that… and, perhaps by accident, my lack of skill forced me to keep it simple.

It was hard to come up with the right image to capture the story of a blind date in a Paris cafe (oh why hadn’t I spent my recent holiday there taking photos of lone women in bistros!), but in the end I decided to focus on a few simple props featured in the story: a coffee cup and the bundle of air mail letters tied with a red ribbon. I actually created a mocked up envelope in Photoshop, bearing the main character’s name and address, to go on the top of an original pile of old letters.

The photo was taken on my girlfriend’s dining room table, standing on a chair, and with nothing more than my iPhone and the Hipstamatic app to give it a warm, sentimental look. I took about 20 photos of it.

After that it was a matter of picking the right one and zooming in on the right detail, then adding the title (Rage Italic LET, a nice handritten font that I think is both elegant and heavy enough to stand out). My own name is in the font (Delicious, I think) and positioning chosen originally by Pete and kept for every subsequent cover.

I really didn’t think it would stand a chance when I entered it into Joel Friedlander’s e-Book Cover Design Awards competition for September 2011. I’ve been following Joel’s blog for a while and his passion for great design is inspiring but also daunting for a dilettante like me.

So I was surprised when Joel commented on the cover in the ‘nominations’ stage (he listed all 200 covers entered) and said Andy, you could have been standing on your head and this cover couldn’t have been better. From the “warm, sentimental” look to the perfectly-chosen typefaces, it gets everything right.

Praise indeed. But there were still some very professional covers in there, and several that took my breath away. So it was another great shock when I found myself listed as one of the five winners!

Joel wrote: The casual romanticism of this e-book cover perfectly matches the story of a blind date in a Paris cafe. With nothing more than an iPhone and a little imagination, the author shows that a great cover can be right in front of us if we learn to look.

[Unfolds speech] So, I’d like to thank my iPhone, the Hipstamatic app, Lorna for her coffee cup, table and the chair I stood on, my Mum for the air mail envelopes she sent me 20 years ago…

But seriously, there were a few people who took the time to look at the original design and texted me with their comments and suggestions for improvements. This led to some minor changes in teh  sizing and positioning of typography, and the only re-touching of the photo I was capable of attempting: lightening it slightly so the words ‘me in’ would show up a bit more.

Without their feedback it wouldn’t have looked as effective and probably wouldn’t have won a design award. So a big thank you to Lorna, Zoe, Sarah, Kim, Danny and Jim.

Does this mean I can call myself a prize-winning author now?

But here it is. Outside Left, the online international pop culture magazine, have just announced their Andy Conway Week.

This all came from editor, Paul Lamont, who I met through friends of friends at a party. He told me how much he liked Girl With the Bomb Inside and I thought he was just being polite, but he continued to be so vocally enthusiastic about it that I just lost it. Instead of whipping out a fountain pen to sign his Kindle, like this kind of thing happened to me All. The. Time. I just got embarrassed and ended up muttering thank yous into my plate of bbq. So when he asked me if he could do a week devoted to my 11 Before 11.11.11 mission, I was not only surprised, but also incredibly flattered.

The last time Outside Left devoted a week to an author it was Mark Piggott, before that Kirk Lake and Joe Ambrose, and in his introduction to Andy Conway Week, Lamont calls me a British Wells Tower, so it’s pretty amazing to be compared to writers of that calibre.

The week kicks off with The Most Girlful Beauty in Town, an erotic, Lolita-asque extract from my postmodern campus novel, Train Can’t Bring Me Home.

There’s more in store, including a lengthy interview and their infamous Happy Shopper questionnaire.

So go over and have a look. And while you’re there, remember to ‘Like’ and tweet it.

I’ve got a literary empire to support and I could do with the hits.

Thank you.