Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time…

Rachel, lost and alone in 2012, travels back to 1966 to repair her lost timeline with the help of Charlie, now 50 years old but still in love with her.

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.

The Swinging Sixties are in full flow, Birmingham is being rebuilt and England are hosting the football World Cup.

The temptation to stay there and live with Charlie is overwhelming, but Danny is there too, and the World Cup betting sting he’s carrying out on the city’s bookies brings them all to the attention of a local gangster, a corrupt politician, a cop with a grudge and a cabal of mysterious time travellers who are determined to prevent the past being changed.

In the end it’s hard to care about correcting the past when you’re in danger of becoming the foundations for a new high rise.

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 53,000-word novel is the third part of the Touchstone story – a self-contained adventure set during the Swinging Sixties.

LENGTH: 53,000 words / 236 pages

WARNING. Touchstone is suitable for ages 14+

Buy the ebook at:

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

Available soon in ebook at :

Order a signed copy of the paperback direct from the author, with personal dedication…

Reader comments on Touchstone parts 1 and 2

“Although the Touchstone books may have been written for a younger audience, I assure you; if you are a true fan of time slip reads these will not disappoint! Each went by far too fast and I find myself waiting in anticipation for the next installment. Rachel and Danny, along with the characters they meet on their ‘journeys’ are real, likable and completely caught up in the craziness that’s so drastically changed their lives. Delightfully, Andy Conway has a unique way of throwing in twists and turns when least expected. For the price, you won’t be better entertained, and soon, you too will be as hooked as I am. KUDOS Mr. Conway… Now get cracking on Touchstone 3!”

“I enjoyed this book. I have read a few time travel books but this one really got to me. I thought it was going to be a typical teenage romance but it certainly wasn’t. I had to buy the second book and can’t wait for the third. Absolutely gripping.”

“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…”

Touchstone parts 1 and 2 is also available in paperback…

Or order your own copy of the Touchstone 1&2 paperback signed by the author with personal dedication:

Touchstone Links

Touchstone (1. The Sins of the Fathers)

Touchstone (2. Family at War)

How the cover for Touchstone 3 was created…

But Fabien Cathelin had something else to say. He was studying to be a translator, taking his master’s degree in World Literatures and Interculturality and he thought my story would make an excellent project for his thesis.

Naturally, I was flattered and suggested that when he had finished his thesis, we might publish his translation as a French edition of the book and I would be happy to answer any of his questions about certain peculiarities of English and Birmingham argot along the way.

This proved to involve more conversations than I’d anticipated and it became a fascinating email exchange over many months that forced me to re-examine my barely realised intentions  and the breadth of allusions in even a simple ghost story.

Through this I confronted many aspects of the book:

•  Was Harold’s repeated substitution of Arr for yes a possible derivation of the archaic aye? A Midlands thing, very Black Country, where you still hear it all the time, but in the context of my inner-city Birmingham-set story, an old Brummie working class idiom; Harold being very blue collar and typical of that generation that first entered the workforce in the 1920s-30s.
• Would a direct translation of my title work in French seeing as it references an English song which would have no meaning or resonance in French? Therefore might it be better to make other allusions that might work? Hence Fabien’s choice of the French title L’Esprit du Temps (The Spirit of the Time) which works on a number of levels.
• Do the French know what the hell it means when I mention a Black Magic box?
• Is the title of the chapter where Jez ends his association with a Trotskyite sect (‘Splitter’) using the same word as the French subtitles for the Life of Brian scene from which it is a comedic quotation? (It wasn’t, and Fabien, a huge Monty Python fan, was aghast that he hadn’t spotted it. He immediately changed it from Scission to Séparatiste.)
• How do you translate the word loony so that it sounds like an old man calling someone mentally retarded rather than violently psychotic? (The word is dingo, apparently)
• It also made me realise that the final chapter is perhaps far too subtle for most audiences. Fabien’s confusion as to what it was actually talking about was echoed by students in Creative Writing classes with whom I’ve discussed the story. What to me, the writer, seems totally obvious (it’s Amy’s experience of riding in a plane; the only photo on which we ever saw her smile) can be interpreted in so many ways: it’s Heaven, it’s Jez’s girlfriend emerging from her depression, it’s Harold’s body being lifted into his grave. This could be catastrophic when a foreign translation can land on any one of those intepretations and make it concrete. Fabien had translated my “as they lift” to “as they lift Harold’s body”. A reasonable interpretation, but not my intention at all and I had to quickly explain to him what the chapter was really all about.

All of the above should make it obvious that the author’s collaboration in a translation is of paramount importance if any sort of fidelity to the original is to be maintained.

But there’s also a degree of trust and, in the end, I have to trust that he knows how to tell my story to a French audience much better than I ever will.

Fabien completed his thesis at Université de Provence in Aix-en-Provence with first class honours, and I hope will go on to have a great career as a literary translator, alongside playing bass in his local cover band gumfish.

Fabien Cathelin

“I’m pretty glad and proud of the whole project,” he says. “I don’t know if I told you how I came to translate The Very Thought of You. I was looking for a novella to translate for my thesis, so browsing Amazon I found The Girl with the Bomb Inside, hooked by the great cover, the storyline and the Joy Division reference. As the book was a little too long for my thesis and it seemed more interesting to translate a whole book rather than an excerpt, I decided to check the other books by this author, Andy Conway, who seemed to me brought something fresh to literature: a mood influenced by Thatcherism, industrial britain, and a style I could relate to, a literary equivalent to the image I have of the Factory Records era. A mix of desperation and humor.”

He felt The Very Thought of You would be the perfect book for his thesis, being an ebook, because while e-publishing is getting bigger and bigger in France, the universities are ignoring it. “Then the theme is very good and original. It crossed multiple genres and has great cultural value, it paints an interesting portrait of the state of social services in 1980s Britain, and the spirits of the people: again a mix of desperation and humor. Interesting thing, one of my supervisors compared Jez to Meursault in The Stranger by Camus. And finally, I thought translating an ebook would give some sort of promotion or give credit to an author who doesn’t have the financial means to get a huge publicity, and show that you don’t need to sign to a big publishing house to write good books.”

Now that Fabien’s translation is finished, I have formatted a new edition of the book, entirely in French and published it alongside all my others. I doubt if it will sell many copies on amazon.co.uk but publishing it there means it’s also automatically on amazon.fr and that’s hopefully where it will sell a great deal and give Fabien some material reward for his hard work.

It’s a dauntaing task, translating your works for foreign markets, and something that might seem way beyond the means of an indie writer, but when the stars align as they have in this case, it can become so simple.

You obviously need a translator who is both passionate about your work and willing to undertake months of unpaid work on the possible promise of future income, or be undertaking the work for another reason (a university thesis in this case).

Those things don’t drop into your lap every day, but by putting your work out there, publishing on Amazon (which automatically means publishing simultaneously in France, Germany, Spain and Italy), and being receptive to the people who take the trouble to write to you, you can make it happen.

My work is now published in two languages. Never thought I’d say that. And more to come, I hope.

While the main thanks go to Fabien Cathelin, of course, I’d also like to thank indie author David Gaughran, whose article The Profit-Sharing Translation Model provided a simple framework for the project and who was also kind enough to send me his draft contract agreement.

Useful Links

The Profit-Sharing Translation Model – David Gaughran

Thinking Global by JA Konrath

The next self-publishing frontier: ebooks in translation – at Paid Content

Contrary to popular myth, we do judge a book by its cover. But in the new ebook publishing landscape, the book cover is not entirely what we’ve always thought it was. Hopefully, this blog will give writers new to indie publishing an insight into how an ebook cover works and provide some hints and tips on how to go indie with book cover design that ends up looking like the dog’s… not the dog’s dinner.

I’ve used two very talented designers for my ebook covers before, with some great results, and I think great book cover design is well worth shelling out for if you want your books to look professional.

Most writers don’t have the time to learn the skillset required for effective book cover design (and if you’re one of those, you need to email Pete Bradbury or Ian Dodds right now and hire them to do your book cover), but if you have a little experience with Photoshop and a half decent eye for design, it’s not so difficult to DIY and get great results.

I’m currently putting together the cover for the latest installment of my time travel series, Touchstone, and it has stretched me to the limits of my Photoshop knowledge.

Touchstone part 3 (All the Time in the World) takes place in 1966 against the backdrop of the World Cup Finals, and the key image from the book, prefigured at the end of the previous installment, is a photograph of heroine Rachel having a picnic with her guide from the past and possible love interest, Charlie. Rachel is aware of the photo before the event has happened, and the whole story is leading her towards the moment when the photo is taken.

In order to set it up, I needed a couple of models. Step forward Sallyanne Moss and Martyn Nelson, a couple of friends I know from my Hot Ginger club nights. They had the right look and the clothes to make it authentic.

Next we needed a sunny day – something in short supply during Britain’s summer of 2012. When I texted everyone at short notice to call the photo session, it looked like the perfect evening.

As soon as we set up, though, the rain began to fall again, giving us a frantic five minutes of shooting before we had to run back inside.

With a small selection of digital photographs in hand, it was time to make them look like they hadn’t been taken in a mate’s back garden on a dull, rainy evening. This is where Photoshop comes in.

Photoshop can be very daunting for a beginner. The problem with it is there are so many tools it seems impossible to ever master them all purely by playing around. But help is at hand. Whatever it is you need to do with your images, there is probably an online tutorial for it. Everything I needed to do for Touchstone 3 – and there was a lot – was explained in easy to understand terms in various tutorials once I’d done a bit of Googling (see big list of links at the biottom of this article).

So I learned how to get rid of the big blonde streak in Sallyanne’s hair, how to use the Background Eraser to isolate them and their picnic blanket from the back garden; then how to do the same with a 1966 iris blue MGB Roadster; and finally how to assemble them in three layers: the couple, the car and a nice backdrop of a meadow behind it all.

Difficult stuff, but all pretty easy once I’d found the online tutorials I needed.

Once I’d done all that I needed to make it look like an old photo. Step forward Pixlr-o-matic. This is an iphone app that will retro-ise your photos, but it now works through their web site as well so you can just upload your picture and then run it through any combination of pre-set exposures, film stocks and frames. A great free tool if your covers tend towards the retro look.

After trying out many combinations, I settle on the Harry-Wave-Soft combo and the photo starts to look much more like the evocative retro polaroid that is a key part of the story (it also softens the edges and hides a lot of the clumsiness of the montage).

Once my photos were fixed, I laid them out in Photoshop using the Createspace book cover template. This is because I know that Touchstone 3 will be released as a paperback, so it’s best to design at the large format HD size needed for that and then shrink down to the much smaller ebook cover size. Much more difficult to go in the other direction.

So I’m designing my entire book: front, back and spine, and I like the look of it. I think it conveys the period and the relationships in the story and gives a strong impression of the tone.

I will only need the front cover for my ebook version, and this is what it will look like…

And here comes the problem – and the essential difference between our traditional notion of a book cover and how ebook covers actually work.

My paperback cover works well, but when I shrink it down, all the detail is lost and it loses its effect.

Why shrink it down at all?

Because 99% of people who encounter your ebook online will never see your cover at its full size. In fact, this is about the size at which most people will see your ebook cover, assess it, and maybe make a decision to click-through and read more about it before buying……….

That’s right. The reader will probably only ever see your ebook cover at thumbnail size in a list of titles that fill a page.

An ebook cover is not really a book cover at all – it’s more of a button that invites the reader/customer to press in order to find out more and hopefully click-to-buy.

So even though I’m going to keep the above design for my paperback run, I have to accept that I need to design a different cover for my ebook version.

The solution, I feel, is to zoom in on the photo and make the image/thumbnail/button all about Rachel and Charlie. So here’s a sneak preview of the Touchstone 3 ebook cover, which will be available to download for Kindle and other ebook devices very soon:

I hope it works.

It’s been a steep learning curve with Photoshop, but with each new cover I design I think I’m learning more and more.

It’s not for everyone, but any indie publisher with a bit of design experience will find they can get great results with trial and error.

LINKS TO EBOOK COVER DESIGN RESOURCES

Massive book cover design articles archive – Joel Friedlander’s exhaustive list of articles and blogs on various aspects of ebook cover design

Monthly e-Book Cover Design Awards – Joel Friedlander’s invaluable monthly look at the best and worst ebook cover designs

56 Absolutely Brilliant and Intriguing Photoshop Video Tutorials

Pixlr-o-matic - vintage-ise your photos

A chilling new short story (10,000-words) in the vein of Andy Conway’s other timeslip novellas Touchstone and The Very Thought of You.

Buy the e-book at:

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

Available soon at:
 

Reader comments

“A ghost story set on Dartmoor at Christmastime. What a spine-tinglingly perfect setting for a ghost story. Three friends, Zara, Liz and Sian rent a cottage in a Dartmoor village to spend Christmas together, a mixture of country pubs and moorland hikes. Things don’t quite to plan however…  The three women with a complicated past could take the book into a dreary (for me) chicklit direction, but it actually gives the ghost story its bite. It might arguably be described as a present-day M.R. James as thoroughly malevolent ghosts wreak havoc on our heroines.  The Christmassy High Street in Totnes was nicely described, though I didn’t quite get the feel of a brooding wintry Dartmoor, but in the space available it’s a cracking little ghost story.”

“NOT to be read at bedtime! Glad I read this in the morning – at least I got my sleep in first. I shall think twice about going to Devon again!”

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.

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.”