She did good back then, she did...

Ah, the good old days...

Reaching a whole new market...

Those were the days...

A Decent Ransom by Ivana Hruba

I'm telling you...

😂😊😃

Sliver Moon Bay Chapter 1

THEN

I like watching the ocean. The fascinating thing about it is that it’s always changing. You never know what you’re going to get. Then one day you get a glimpse of its true nature and you begin to wonder. How is it possible that everything has been like this, right in front of you, all this time, and you never noticed? And that’s when you start to see things clearly.

1

The ocean is green this morning and a little choppy. The wind’s picking up. The birds are out; waders haggle over same old while seagulls circle above, talking amongst themselves about the stupid waders haggling over bullshit down below. The beach feels lonely today with only the waders poking about in the sand, looking for good stuff to eat. Still, it’s all good until it starts to rain; big fat drops plopping down onto the sand, dimpling the water, appear, startling the birds and making me shiver. It’s going to be one of those days. And it’s only early. Lilian will be cooking breakfast right about now so it’s time to start my climb up the dune.

It’s heavy going this morning so I play a little mind game. I imagine he’s already up there, standing on the path high above, watching me, scowling under his hat. He’s following my every step as I trudge along the sand without looking up. For a little while but eventually I will look. Despite the sweat freezing my spine. Despite my imagination venturing into unchartered territory in this game of What If I imagine I like to play. What if I were a dog? A big one, with enormous, razor-sharp teeth and the right sort of attitude? What would happen then? —Course, if I were a dog, he’d be a werewolf. Game over.

I feel him up there. Looking. But I won’t. Look. Not until I can’t stand it anymore, which always happens when I’m about half way up the hill. And I’m half way up the hill now. —Yep, he’s right there. Our eyes lock. But this time I win. He turns and disappears up the path. Round one goes to Sarah.

I think about him on the way home. About the game we play. I’ve not told anyone about it. He hasn’t either. I think we both feel that there is no need for anyone to know. Who would I tell, anyway? Lilian? She’d only worry. She might panic and tell somebody and then what? —Exactly. I don’t want to leave Sliver Moon Bay. It’s been good to us. We all feel it’s good here. Chris goes on about it all the time.

‘We’ve really become a family here,’ Chris says, with a look, a poignant one, at me, every time.

What am I meant to say to this? —Okay, I get it, Chris. You’re tired of my teenage ways. I should just be the daughter I used to be. Well, dude. Things don’t work like that anymore. On a day like this we’re as good as it’s ever going to get.

Twenty minutes later we’re all sitting down to breakfast. Chris’s feeding Starling her eggs while Lilian and I eat ours watching Starling eat hers. Starling’s doing a great job smearing bits of scrambled egg around the tray of her baby chair. It’s really cute but Lilian’s watching her with her usual expression. Worried slash thoughtful slash whatever’s in the mix, medically speaking, at the time. Today it looks like Valium. Lilian’s calm today so I’ll be babysitting. Again. Ah, well. At least it’s the weekend so I won’t be missing school. Lilian’s leaning a little too close to the baby chair. She might cop a handful of egg in her face but my money’s on Starling behaving herself today. Today Daddy’s with us. Starling likes to please Daddy so she won’t throw a handful of breakfast at Mummy.

Starling’s looking super cute this morning, smiling at Chris and me, and managing to ignore Lilian nodding in her face with that hangdog expression. I wouldn’t blame her if she did lose her temper but she won’t. She’s a good girl today, sitting in her baby chair, opening her gob for Chris nice and wide. She looks like a baby bird, snug as a bug in a rug in her nest. She is a baby bird, just born but already pretty clued in. She’s learned the value of pity and learned how to work it, with those bulging black eyes and that translucent skin stretched over her big round skull topped with a handful of cotton candy hair, to get what she wants. Yes, that’s our Starling, a bizarre super cute baby bird, the size of a walnut but with the cunning of an old crow.

 Three years old she’s not your average toddler, but the doctor says there is nothing to worry about. She’ll grow just fine, he says, pats her baldy head like an indulgent grandad. He’s seen plenty of sickly little ones grow up big and strong, he tells Lilian, pats her as well, on the back of her hand, to reassure her. I don’t think he’s having much impact cause Lilian frets a lot, about the lack of visible improvement. Bemoans the lack of height, weight, hair, eyelashes. Wonders about the size of the skull. In a word she fusses, medicated or otherwise, and it’s a burden. It’s wearing us down though Chris bears with it most of the time. I refuse to listen. To me Starling is perfect. Always was and always will be. She’s my star in the sky, now and forever, a little starling knocking at my window. And I will always let her come in, for as long as I’ll live. I suspect that years from now I will wish Lilian could have seen it the same way, could have understood how it was going to pan out, from the day she gave birth to her—but it wasn’t meant to be, was it? I have a feeling I will wonder. For now it’s better to live in the present.

Starling’s chirping about something just now. To Lilian. So Chris takes this chance to serve me the usual. He’s going away for a few days to work on a fishing trawler so he has a lot to say to me.

‘Be careful at the beach with Starling, Sarah,’ he starts. ‘The surf’s going to be rough this week.’

‘I will be careful.’

‘It’s gonna be windy today. A lot more windy than usual.’

‘I know. You told me last night.’

‘Watch out for the tide.’

‘I will.’

‘And don’t let her wander too close to the water. She’s not to go near it, you understand?’

‘I get it,’ I replied and I may have sighed. I don’t know. I don’t remember but it’s entirely possible cause sometimes I just couldn’t help myself even though I knew it was disrespectful and this sort of behaviour set Chris off but Chris has said the same thing to me over and over for the past three years, every time he’s left home to go fishing, and I always felt there was no need to repeat himself so often.

‘Am I boring you?’ he turned to me, pausing with Starling’s spoon in mid-air just in front of Starling’s wide open mouth.

Well, what am I to say to this? —Exactly. So I shook my head. Chris stared and Starling thrust her head forward and her chin collided with the spoon. The egg splattered on the table and speckled the front of her t-shirt, and Starling began to cry.

‘Hope you’re proud of yourself.’

Again, what am I to say to this? Just then Starling raised her hands towards him, wanting to be picked up. He pulled her from her baby chair and the two of them disappeared into the bathroom.

It was just me and Lilian. I could tell she’d rather have had this over and done with. She began cleaning up the mess.

‘Don’t worry about it, honey. He’s just nervous about leaving us.’

Well, duh. Course he is nervous. He always acts mean before he goes away. Big deal. We’ve had a long time to get used to it. I only wished Lilian would stop excusing his behaviour. Chris and I never really got on and probably never will, ever; there’s always been this tension and Lilian knew it but it wasn’t as if she was prepared to do anything about it so why even mention it? It’s not like I ever held a grudge; I always told her everything was cool whenever she tried to apologize for him, just to stop her embarrassing herself. And me. So now I said that everything was fine and Lilian gave me a hug and we went about our business; Lilian cleaning up the breakfast things and me waiting for Chris to go.

He took his time. He came out of the bathroom, all sulky looking, with a sulky looking Starling in his arms. What a pair.

‘Lilian. Where’s the pink dress? She wants it now.’

Ah, the pink dress. Starling’s favourite. Chris brought it for her from one of his fishing trips a while ago. It has tiny little fishes printed all over it and Starling fell in love with it the moment she laid eyes on it. And now she wants it. I hope Lilian knows where it is.

But she doesn’t. She looks up from the dishes, confused. ‘Did you look in the basket?’

Chris gave her a look so Lilian left the dishes and we both began looking for it.

Well, we couldn’t find it anywhere. Starling sulked a bit but I told her I’d take her to the beach if she wore her blue dress so she put it on and looked happy about it. I only had to put her favourite sandals on and she was good.

Finally, Chris leaves, after kissing Lilian once and Starling about a hundred times. At fourteen I’m not expected to kiss him so it is just a nod and a grimace for me accompanied by a take care and see you soon. And off he goes, with his overnight bag and his fishing gear.

And we can breathe. When the cat’s away…

‘Sarah-honey, I’m gonna have a lie down for a bit, okay?’ The bedroom door closed behind her and then it was just me and Starling. We’re going to the beach.

Sliver Moon Bay is now available for download HERE.

Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking and Sliver Moon Bay: The Finding are now available to download from Smashwords

A little girl disappears. Her family is desperate to find her. Everybody wants to know. What happened?

Available now to download from the usual suspects all over the internet.

  

A family attempts to rebuild their shattered lives in the aftermath of their little girl’s disappearance.

 

 Available now to download from Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. for a very reasonable price.  

Cabbage, Strudel and Trams (Part 1: Czechoslovakia) available to download for free

Now available to download for free at Barnes and Noble. Click HERE and you're there.

A Decent Ransom

It will destroy you

A novella exploring the complex, multifaceted and often tragic nature of human love through three interconnecting stories of love, loss and betrayal. 

Young Phoenix lives with her mother in a small rural town, enduring a childhood filled with financial insecurity and emotional instability brought on by her mother’s immature outlook and turbulent love life. Forced to frequently fend for herself Phoenix is relieved when, after a particularly disastrous romance with Danny, a young itinerant musician, her mother takes up with the older and sensible Shawn, who brings order and financial stability into their lives, leaving Phoenix to concentrate on her developing relationship with her best friend Billy. However, the idyll doesn’t last long and things spiral out of control when Danny comes back to town, setting in motion a chain of events which will forever change their lives. 

Genre: literary, coming of age, drama

Download here 

Seriously?

A Decent Ransom is still a good book, you know, despite this silly cartoon...

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

It did. At one point, early on in my career as a 'book writer', this seemed to be a great idea to help promote my books. It didn't work out but I did have fun. That's the good news.
The bad news is that I have a stack of these cartoons left and I've been letting them loose... 

Still, a bad marketing idea does not detract from the fact that A Decent Ransom is a crack of a read... right here. 

Book tour memories

My first book tour took me places I'd never thought I would frequent. But I did make some lifelong friends while I was there...

 

 

Amazon Australia open for business

Amazon Australia is now open for business. All these here wonderful stories written by Yours Truly are now available to download for very, very reasonable price directly from Oz. That's so neat, isn't it? ;)

Click here to go to Amazon Australia.

Selling Books on Amazon – Is KDP Select for you?

What is KDP Select?

In a nutshell, KDP Select is a self-publishing program available to authors to promote, lend and sell their ebooks at no cost on Amazon.com. For a period of 90 days, authors give Amazon exclusive rights to their books; during this period, you cannot sell your book enrolled in the program elsewhere on the net in the digital format and you will have to put up your book for a free download for 5 days during the 90 day period. You can choose single days or use this promotional opportunity in blocks, or the entire 5 day period as one long promotion.

You might be thinking that the point of this promotion is for authors to gain visibility on the site and to drive up sales of their books, making money for themselves and Amazon. Not so. Amazon is a retailer, not a publisher. The point of this free download promotion is to supply Amazon customers who have bought Amazon’s Kindle e-reader with unlimited free ebooks, thus making the Kindle device a very attractive choice for the consumer. You can buy the Kindle e-reader and never have to buy a single ebook as you have unlimited access to a vast number of ebooks, on tap. Would you pay for a book if you could have it for free? — Exactly.

What are you gaining by enrolling your ebooks in KDP Select?

That’s the million dollar question. You might gain some exposure and gain readers, but what does this mean in practical terms? Your initial free downloads will be high; plenty of people will be downloading your free books but unfortunately the most likely post-promotion outcome is that this reader interest will not translate to paid sales in any significant volume, if at all. People will download anything for free, and your book will be valued accordingly, as a big fat NOTHING.

You might get some word-of-mouth and gain some residual sales, but the odds are stacked against you.
First of all, you are not harnessing an audience who is prepared to pay to be entertained; you are catering to people who are prepared to be entertained for free. These people are there for the free downloads only.
Second of all, Amazon is not actively promoting you as an author; the moment your free ebook promotion is over, so is your visibility on the site.
Thirdly, as a self-published author you probably don’t have a following or else you wouldn’t have to do free promotions; therefore, after your free promotion is over, you’re basically back to square one – no visibility and no incentive for Amazon customers to buy your product. Your book is buried under a mountain of other books on offer; unless someone specifically searches for your title by name and your author name, your book has no chance of being sold.

Will free downloads give you reader reviews?

If you are lucky, you might get a few. But the current market is saturated with free books so readers are getting lazy. Why give a review when you don’t have to? Like anything else, people are mostly moved to action when something goes wrong; for example, readers will post bad reviews on your book’s page if their free download had issues or they weren’t happy with some technical aspect of the transaction, which, of course, has nothing to do with your work, but it will get you a bad review, which BTW, you will find Amazon will be slow to remove. If they remove it at all.

This looks bleak, I get it and I’m sure by now you get it too. Given this state of affairs, is there anything you can do to help sell your ebooks through KDP Select?

Yes, there is. Promoting your kindle ebooks on Amazon need not be the soul-destroying, frustrating experience that it is for many authors who, given enough passage of time, begin to resent giving their creativity, knowledge, skill and hard work away for free, for no good returns.

You have to start valuing your work yourself. If you don’t, your readers certainly won’t. Put a price on your book, and charge it, at all times. To gain visibility and hopefully interested readers, publish short stories or only a few chapters from your books or the first book in a series in the KDP Select program and allow these to circulate for free, with a link to your book where readers can purchase it. You simply use the KDP Select to advertise your work, not to give the whole book away. Alternately, split your book into parts and give only the first one for free. End on a cliff-hanger so readers are motivated to purchase the rest of the story. After all, at some point, Amazon will want to convert this free download only audience to a paying one. So why not help them along? And if your 'giving it away' strategy isn't working, why not try not giving it away? This strategy isn’t a guarantee, of course, of a surge in sales, but if you’re not having many or any at all, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Remember, building an audience takes time, and very little sustainable success will happen overnight.

It goes without saying that you should have a Facebook page and Twitter account (for what it's worth, which may not be much but at least you'll feel like you're doing something) where you can promote your work, as well as a Goodreads account where you can blog about your books, and join reader-based groups. There’s not much point in joining groups of fellow writers; they’re all trying to do the same as you – promote their books. On the other hand, you might find that joining a writer forum to discuss promotional tips and strategies is just what you need to keep going.

The main thing is not to have high expectations or take the lack of sales or reader engagement personally. Just do your thing, do it well, and enjoy the journey.

Download The Chat and have a laugh

An eye-opening humorous tale of two merry widows going online to find love. Politically incorrect and not for the faint-hearted but definitely helpful to those thinking about joining an internet dating site. Based on a true story.

Now available to download from Amazon for a measly buck.

Reviews posted online will be much appreciated. Please, don't gripe about having to buy the novel The Dead Husbands Club to find out what happens next, or that you paid a dollar to download 17 pages. That's your choice. Keep in mind that this  is a promotion, after all. Other than that, say what you will.

Cheers, xxoo Ivana

My booksigning adventures

Find out what it's all about

Going on holidays? Read this.

A Decent Ransom: A Story of a Kidnapping Gone Right