My books

Kobo Long Weekend Sale: Baby up the Chimney for 0.99

12th February 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

https://www.kobo.com/en/ebook/baby-up-the-chimney

I’m thrilled to tell you that my historical crime novel, Baby up the Chimney, is in Kobo’s long weekend sale. The sale starts today and finishes on the 15th February (next Monday). Right now UK, Canada and US-based readers can grab the ebook for 0.99. That’s a whopping amount (about 75%) off the usual price of the e-book.

I hadn’t realised that this weekend’s sale would also include UK readers as well as Canadian and US readers, so if you’re in the UK, do please feel free to take up the opportunity to grab a copy at this rock-bottom price while you’ve got the chance! If you’re not a Kobo reader, however, read on because I have a “tester” freebie for you.

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Release Day for Baby up the Chimney!

21st August 2020 by claireladds Leave a Comment

It’s release day – finally – for Baby up the Chimney, and I couldn’t be more excited!

This novel has been a long time coming, beginning as a short story in 2010, developing into an unwieldy monster of a first draft by the end of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by 2014, and eventually turning into the book I am incredibly proud of today.

My ARC (Advance Reader Copy) readers gave me some fabulous feedback, which was enough to make me realise I’d done the right thing in completing this book. Then people started pre-ordering, and today readers have already purchased. Thank you SO much to anyone who has. I find it an immense honour and extremely humbling that someone wants to part with their cash to read my work, and I know that my feelings about that will never change!

In case you don’t know what the book is about, here’s the blurb:

Baby up the Chimney - an historical novel by Claire Ladds — Baby up the Chimney by Claire Ladds

One day. That’s all it takes for four lives to be changed forever.

London, 6th March 1971. Women pour into London to take to the streets in solidarity for equal pay and equal rights. But while public spectacle and a friendly call to arms pervades the day, in private, one family is about to find that everything they thought was the truth about their loved ones has the potential to blow their world apart. And one man, back from the dead, has unfinished business with them…

A novel of dark secrets, lies, betrayal and vengeance, in which the shadows of history, haunting memories and the truths they dare not tell come back to try and destroy them.

When the truth is not what you thought it was, do you ignore it? Do you try to rewrite history to protect those you love? Or do you seek revenge?

You can purchase Baby up the Chimney from the following stores:

Kobo

Add it to your Goodreads ‘Want to Read’ list

See it on BookBub

If you’d like to read more about my inspiration for this book, the writing processes, and all sorts of other little revelations – including how the Brontës made their way into the novel, I visited the Auto.erraticism blog earlier today to discuss it. You can read the post here.

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Writing what you know (Part 2)

14th August 2020 by claireladds Leave a Comment

I can’t believe that the release of my novel, Baby up the Chimney, is only a week away! It’s taken ten years, since I first wrote a short story with the same name, to get this book onto the shelves of Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble and lots of other stores. I don’t mean that I’ve been writing the same book incessantly, squirrelled away like a little hermit (and I say ‘little’ because I just about scrape five feet tall on a good day!). No, the original version of this book was originally written a number of years ago, although it has changed a lot since that initial draft.

I almost couldn’t explain it, even to myself, but this book became immensely personal in many ways. I obsessed over it for years, nothing I wrote made me feel like it was good enough, and I put it down and restarted it half a dozen times before biting the bullet the year, ripping it apart and rebuilding it, chapter by chapter. And then it dawned on me what the problem had been: it had begun to incorporate all sorts of things that meant a great deal to me, or I had experienced in some way, big and small, even though I fictionalised each one and placed them in the hands of completely fictional characters. And if you read the book, you’ll probably be very glad that they are fictional.

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