I’ve hesitated to mention this until now, because, well, it’s nothing to do with writing, and it’s only about the little football team I’ve supported my whole life through thick and thin… mostly thin.

But there was something about what happened last Sunday that has made it more than that. Something in the astounded reactions from all over the world this week that has made me think this is bigger than it being just about my team, bigger than just being about football, bigger than ‘just a game’. (I know it is only all of those things really, but oh god, it feels like so much more now).

In case you don’t know it, the Premier League title was decided on Sunday and decided in possibly the most dramatic fashion ever witnessed, in the last minutes of the last game, in injury time, with a team needing to score two goals to claim their first title in 44 years. A team famous for perennial failure. Famous for their uncanny knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and looking for all the world like they were going to do exactly that yet again, being 1-2 down at home to a team that were only just hearing on their radios that they were safe from relegation.

But somehow, this time, they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and got those two goals.

More than one fellow fan said to me afterwards ‘Andy, if you wrote that as a screenplay, they’d reject it for being too far fetched!’, but I’m with the commentator who said in the heat of the moment: ‘Hollywood! Make this movie!’

Because this is one of those moments where life is pure Hollywood.

If you’ve never really been into football, or any sport, and you don’t really get what all the excitement and emotion is about, then watch this. It’s the moment where sport achieves the visceral power of the greatest art, be it opera, film, theatre.

Experiencing it live, at the moment it happened, it was merely our own little triumph. But all this week, the internet has revealed the larger story: that millions of people around the world were celebrating with us.

And this is where it becomes clear that our lives are a succession of competing narratives fighting for control of our existence. Because most of us City fans were convinced that the whole world hated us, resented our good fortune in winning the lottery of billionaire owners willing to fund a title charge. We thought this because the press told us that this was the story. No matter how much we claimed that this was the only way for any small team to break the hold of the cartel of clubs that have ensured their own dominance of the game since carving it up for themselves 20 years ago, that in fact, despite our millions, it is we who are the plucky underdogs.

Indeed, this is essentially the narrative of my own novel about supporting City and what it means to live with that failure your whole life (available from all good ebook stores and in paperback, people).

But it became clear all week that as Kun Aguero’s last gasp shot secured us the title, the world roared with us.

It was clear in the succession of match commentators around the world who screamed their delight, it was clear in the scores of grainy Youtube videos from bars and living rooms all over the world showing neutrals celebrating, the Sunderland fans roaring when news came through of our victory, the video of the QPR fans in our own stadium who, as soon as they heard that they were safe from relegation, immediately began roaring us on to score against them and celebrated when we did!

Fans from teams all over the world have congratulated us and said again and again that they have never celebrated another team’s goal like that in their lives; Argentinian TV are running the goal in every ad break and celebrating like their nation has won the World Cup (three of our players are Argentinian, including Aguero), and this is an account I’ve read this morning, typical of the many I’ve been hearing all week:

A friend of mine who lives in London isn’t a football fan at all and so wasn’t watching, but had the windows of her flat open and heard the roar go up and the cheering start from houses all around her. It made me realise all over again just how huge Sunday was, not just for us but for so many people. If Hollywood wrote a script about a final day, they couldn’t make it any better than the reality was.

There’s that Hollywood thing again.

Of all the Youtube videos I’ve watched again and again and again this week, still shaking my head in amazement, this is the best, and it truly captures what it was like to be a part of that moment.

Is it too late for the Oscar nominations?

Cheers. Andy
Man City fan since 1974

This was obviously annoying.

Why aren’t you embracing the digital ebook revolution!!? I shouted (well, thought, more than shouted).

But I can’t say I’m surprised. People still cling to the feel of books, the smell of books; the notion of books as tactile pleasures. I did that my whole life before I converted to the convenience of reading great books on my iPhone and Kindle.

So I have to say that, although I think it’s highly likely that ebooks will replace dead tree books over the next few years and reduce them to the status that vinyl records currently enjoy in the world (curios for a minority of buyers, sold by specialist shops), I do also see that paperbacks still have a place in the world, and that for a while longer people will still want them.

And that’s why I’ve worked hard to make five of my titles available in paperback editions.

I published them all myself through Createspace, a service that will manufacture your paperback book POD (Print On Demand), which means you order it online and your copy rolls off a conveyor belt somewhere and is posted to you.

This is an amazing breakthrough for the indie author. We can not only publish our works as ebooks and have them distributed internationally, we can now also handle worldwide paperback distribution very easily and cheaply. No warehouse full of stock, no remainders, no garage full of books for the author.

So, for all of you who’ve been wanting to read my books but are still flummoxed by all that ebook techie stuff, here’s your chance to own an Andy Conway paperback (or five).

The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal and Lovers in Paris have been out for a while, But they’ve now been joined by The Budapest Breakfast Club, Train Can’t Bring Me Home and a special ‘double pack’ edition of my first two Touchstone stories.

There are several ways you can order them:

• straight from Amazon UK or Amazon US, which is probably the most convenient,
• Or at the Book Depository site, which is definitely the cheapest (worldwide free delivery),
• Or you can get them straight from me, signed and with a dedication of your choice.

You see I’ve ordered a small batch of each for myself and have them sitting here waiting for the next email order to appear. This might be the quickest option (if you’re in the UK) as I sign them, package them and take them straight to my local post office and they usually arrive within two days.

You can read about the titles in the links on the left to see which ones take your fancy, or just go straight to the links below and one-click order them in all their lovely papery goodness.

Each title is £9.97. If you order more than one, I’ll try to package them together.

There’s your summer reading sorted.

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to…

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to

LINKS

Book publishing with Createspace

Why you should publish a trade paperback [Dean Wesley Smith]

How to Make a Real Book [a Catherine, Caffeinated]

Print on Demand—What Is It? [Joel Friedlander]
How Print-on-Demand Book Distribution Works [Joel Friedlander]

Formatting a book for print with CreateSpace in Microsoft Word part 1  [Gregory Mahan]
Formatting a book for print with CreateSpace in Microsoft Word part 2 [Gregory Mahan]
Formatting a book for print with CreateSpace in Microsoft Word part 3 [Gregory Mahan]

A lot of people in writing circles reject these easy paradigms as ‘formulaic’ and insist that great stories are much more complex than the simple 3-Act structure, and if you want to write great stories, whether in film or as novels, you’d be better off ignoring these structures and going with your gut instinct.

I actually like that point of view.

I’m a firm believer in the ‘vomit draft’. Sketch a vague outline of your story, know pretty much where you think it’s going, then start writing like crazy and don’t stop to think about it until it’s finished and it’s gone somewhere you never expected.

Only then, I think, is it useful to look at structure and see how something like the Hero’s Journey, or Syd Field, or  The Sequence Approach might help in solving some of the story problems and helping with the bits that don’t work.

So I’m not there in every class yelling ‘You vill all use zese plot points in zis exakt order or you vill be shot!’

But I’ve seen how telling students about these structural patterns and how they can use them as tools if they want to gives them an a-ha! moment. And it was great to be told by a novelist who took my screenwriting class that my guide to screenwriting structure had given her a breakthrough with the novel she was writing and allowed her to finish it successfully.

I think those patterns are there in all stories and not only that, but the human brain has an innate need to seek out those patterns and respond to them.

So that’s how I teach this stuff: here are the structural paradigms that you can see; you might recognise them in almost every film you’ve seen or book you’ve read; if your story doesn’t feel right it might be because you’re missing one of these elements; if it already feels right don’t take out a tool and ruin it.

I think we create those structural patterns even when we think we’re composing something randomly…

which brings me to the spooky little thing  I noticed about our unconscious need for structure…

A month or so back, I put together a backdrop of my book covers for my Twitter page. It was pretty simple. I dropped eight of my covers into a 2×4 grid and tiled it across the page. This is the grid below.

I did it quickly and didn’t think about it much. It is composed of works by three different designers: Pete Bradbury designed six of the covers, Ian Dodds the Lovers in Paris book at the bottom, and the Budapest Breakfast Club was done by me.

If I had one design concern in laying them out, it was to avoid the sepia/yellowy covers being next to each other, so I broke them up with the ones that tended to the blue end of the colour scale. That was it, really. Fairly random.

It was only yesterday that I noticed a much more interesting and entirely unconscious structural patterning at work. Can you see it?

Look closely at what is similar about each pair of images.

The first pair: each cover features a teenage girl’s face to the left foreground, with a male figure on the right background. Strange eh? And totally accidental.

What about the next pair? Not much similarity there… except both covers feature my girlfriend Lorna acting as model. In fact they’re the only covers on which she features, and I’ve placed them side by side.

Next pair. The two books whose only prominent feature is a building: Wembley Stadium for one, the Great Church in Debrecen for the other.

And finally, there’s nothing similar there is there? Well, how about each book cover features four human figures: two large, two small.

I may well be pushing it slightly with that last one, but I think the patterns are startling when you look at them.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that the structure you create unconsciously is probably going to be the right one and it might take you a while to see the pattern in it, but knowing a little about the structural patterns you might unconsciously create will help you a lot.

But this is not just any old e-book.

The novel has been given a bit of a makeover.  It’s now the INTERACTIVE SOUNDTRACK edition.

It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for a year now. A lot of my books contain musical references, so wouldn’t it be nice to hear the music as you read?

As The Budapest Breakfast Club is about a couple that bond over their mutual love of old swing tunes and every chapter title is the title of an old swing tune, there are now 70 links to those songs in the Interactive Soundtrack Edition.

This means you can listen to a sample of each tune on its Amazon mp3 download page to get a feel for it and even buy the tunes you like to compile your own soundtrack album. It should work perfectly whether you’re reading it on your phone, iPad or laptop (doesn’t work on my Kindle at the moment but might work on the Kindle Fire?): see a link, click on it, listen to the sample, download it if you like it, go back to the story.

It’s an interesting experiment, and I’m going to be adding some more interactive links to other titles of mine soon.

But for now, you can try this one out for FREE until midnight Friday (2 March) at:

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

Reader comments

“Introducing every character through their life’s one perfect moment is a beautiful technique…”

“It’s a fast-paced, modern indie-rom with a gritty edge that will appeal to both men and women… Lots of fun and delivers several emotional punches…”

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:

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

Buy the paperback at:

Or get a personalised signed paperback :

Please write this dedication..

Please mail to

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.”

Reader reviews for Meet Me in Montmartre…

“Andy Conway has created a gem of a story about the many faces of love and expectations on a perfect night in Paris. If you have a shred of romance in your soul, or if you’d just like to have some, come away to Montmartre on the last night of the year, and experience it for yourself. “

“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.”

Buy it at:

Find out more about this time travel Blitz story here…