This article was written by Jason Arnopp and first published on his personal blog on 18 November 2012.

His latest novel 'Beast in the Basement' is available from Amazon here and was reviewed by Caroline Goldsmith for Byte the Book here.

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Yesterday, I made my book A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home free for the day on all Amazon sites.

As this was a first-time experiment for me, I thought it might be interesting to hold a quick 'postmortem' (as we always used to call the weekly examination of the last issue of Kerrang!, way back when I worked on that magazine).  This might also be useful for other Kindle authors who are considering the same 'free day' course of action.

First of all: a word on how you set up these free days on Amazon.  You have to join the KDP Select programme, which has been controversial for some.  It requires your title to become digitally exclusive to Amazon for 90 days, during which time Amazon Prime members will be able to rent your book for free (while you earn a fee for each rental) and you can also make your book free for a maximum of five days during this period.  You can then schedule a free promotion by entering the date and the price magically drops to zero (roughly) when you want it to.

The day went very well.  At the final count, I gave away over 1200 free copies of A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home in 24 hours, which strikes me as a result for an event with no paid advertising.  The book reached #3 in Amazon's Kindle Store Horror chart and #101 in Kindle's overall Free chart.  When you consider that Amazon now offers thousands of free books every day, the latter isn't a bad achievement (and in fact, in the early hours of morning, as the promotion was about to end, the book finally breached the Top 100 and hit #87).  Here are some worthwhile things to note:

• When you announce via social media that something's free, folk are more likely to very kindly RT a tweet or share a Facebook update.  This is almost certainly because they're no longer passing along a sales pitch, but instead offering their friends something for nothing.  An opportunity.
• Various sites are set up to tell readers about cheap or free ebooks.  It's well worth telling these sites about your free promotion in advance.  Some of the bigger sites require several weeks' notice, while a couple I encountered only wanted to hear about it on the day when the book was already free.  A few of sites which helpfully ran editorial pieces on the A Sincere Warning... promotion were Book Goodies, The Kindle Book Review, EFreeBooks.org and Snickslist.com. Some sites also offer 'guaranteed placement' features at the relatively low cost of $5 or $10.  Before you hand over cash to them, it's worth assessing their popularity by glancing at how many Twitter followers they have, for instance.
• A Sincere Warning... is a 10,000-word short story and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who seemed to read it straight after downloading.  Some wrote new Amazon reviews, which was great.  Many tweeted that they "won't be sleeping tonight", which is always a compliment for a ghost story.
• One thing I hadn't prepared for, was how grateful people are for a free book, even in this age of rampant freebies, legal or otherwise.  Plenty of people thanked me via Twitter, which was nice.  I tried to thank everybody back - and also those who took the trouble to retweet plugs.
• There was a discernible knock-on effect to sales of my other Kindle fiction book, Beast In The Basement, which began to shift more copies than usual and entered the Top 100 charts for Thriller and Horror.  The back section of A Sincere Warning... carries an advert for Beast, which may have been a significant factor in that knock-on effect.
• Many of the effects of a promotion like this may not be immediately obvious.  People may not read the book for days, weeks, months, years, before potentially spreading the word to friends or writing an Amazon review.  The main thing, though, is that your work is now sitting on the devices of a fair deal of people who might not otherwise have encountered you.  For instance, a few people downloaded the book via Amazon Japan, a market which I hadn't so much as scratched up until now.  Getting your work out there is important for any author.
• These promotions probably lose effectiveness through repetition.  If I ever run one again, it will be after Christmas.

Sorry if you missed the promotion.  You'll be glad to hear, though, that the regular price of A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home - a supernatural story which takes place in YOUR home - is a mere £0.96 (€1.18 or $1.49).  If you like, you can pick it up at the links below:

Amazon UK
Amazon US
Amazon Germany
Amazon France
Amazon Italy
Amazon Spain
Amazon Japan

Official page ScaryLetter.com also has details of the Bespoke Deluxe Paper Edition: a personalised, physical letter sent to your home address!  Nothing better to scare the life out of you.

Review by Tracey Sinclair.

Although more a novella than a full length novel, this tale of the Lancashire witch trials is gripping and compelling, though not a book for the squeamish. Winterson takes historical fact and real life characters (including John Dee and Shakespeare) and meshes them together into a dark, rich story of bigotry and magic, held together with a tattered thread of romance.

There is far more to mysterious cloth merchant Agnes Nutter than meets the eye, but even her otherworldy resourcefulness cannot save her from being dangerously drawn into a superstitious witch hunt and the merciless campaign to root out ‘Popish’ traitors in the wake of the failed Gunpowder Plot. Winterson doesn’t shy away from the politics behind such campaigns – and the way in which the poor and politically inconvenient were targeted – and the book’s matter-of-fact portrayal of rape and torture might make some stomachs quail, while the lurid descriptions of black magic rituals can seem a little overwrought. The majority of its characters’ lives are the epitome of the Hobbesian ‘nasty, brutish and short’, their deaths as squalid and pitiable as their existences, and this isn’t a novel to read if you are a fan of happy endings.

But for all its horror, there is idealism and even optimism in the story – there is a touching nobility in Agnes’ refusal to abandon her past lover (a witch who betrayed her) and her attempts to protect her current love, a Catholic traitor to the crown, even though she may be doomed by her efforts, and it is this belief in the redemptive power of love that stops The Daylight Gate from being overwhelmingly bleak. You may be left wishing that Winterson had delved deeper into the world she describes – it can at times seem like she is skating the surface of a universe that deserves more examination – but overall this is an evocative, original tale that will stay with you long after you have read it.

This month's sponsors BIC (Book Industry Communications) are expanding their suite of training and are happy to offer a 15% discount applicable to existing and any future training sessions. Simply enter the discount code BTBIC12 to book onto to any training course running until 19th May. Each training session has a 2 tiered price i) BIC members and ii) non-members. These tiers remain in place and the discount would apply to each tier. Details of their new and existing courses for 2013 can be seen here.

Not a BIC member? Join BIC before 19th December 2012 and receive 10% off BIC membership. For more information on membership and future courses contact Karina Luke on +44 (0) 20 7255 0516 or at karina@bic.org.uk
 

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Review by Justine Solomons

This excellent book deserves its place on this year's Booker Prize List. Moore’s is exactly the kind of writing I love: the editing is superb, with clean, sparse language that engages all the senses. And Moore is not afraid to show the darker side of humanity.

Fuch has just split up from his wife, and he goes alone to Germany on a walking holiday. The first hotel he stays at is run by Bernard and his wife Ester. Fuch carries a silver lighthouse perfume case which once housed an expensive scent. He'd crushed the perfume bottle in his hand just before his mother left him and his father when he was a little boy. Ester owns the same perfume, the scent bottle intact, but hers is housed in a wooden lighthouse case. This exquisite novel tells the story and the pain of these two lighthouse keepers.

Not since Anne Michaels' 'Fugitive Pieces' have I read a novel with such poetic sensibilities. The Lighthouse is a master class in writing, and more importantly editing, as Moore demonstrates the effectiveness of stripping back language to show a fictive reality.

There's been lots of talk about the ending of this book. I've re-read it and I'm still not a hundred percent sure what happened, but the book is enigmatic throughout and I respect it even more for it. Just as Haneke did with the ending of his film 'Hidden', Moore credits her readers with the intelligence to handle ambiguity. Within the casing of this book, be it silver or wooden, is the scent of uneasiness and menace. Stunning, stunning book—thoroughly recommended.

Review by Julia Newhouse.

Before the book launched in October, I heard about 'The End of Your Life Book Club', and knew it was something I just had to read. I had pre-ordered it, had grand plans of reading it in a weekend, and having my review done while the book was still new on the store shelves. That didn’t quite happen, because this is a book that begs to be read slowly and with care. It is personal and touching, and can’t be rushed. It is also a book about a loss, and one that I simply couldn’t read in one sitting. For that reason, here we are a month later.

The title of 'The End of Your Life Book Club' aptly sums up what the book is about. Namely, it follows the author Will Schwalbe and his mother’s two-person book club over the time when his mother is diagnosed and succumbing to pancreatic cancer. The books they love, and those that have touched them, offer them a chance to learn to appreciate each other anew, discuss life through literature, and take their minds off the tedium of waiting in hospitals and doctors' offices. This is, however, not a misery memoir. It is far from it. Will Schwalbe’s writing effortlessly conveys the love his family shares, and the journey they are all on alongside his mother. She is an impressive woman, who worked outside of the home well before it was a norm, was a dedicated humanitarian, and a wonderful wife and mother. The kind of woman she was is reflected in the fact that during her illness she was still devoted to her latest project: to build a library in Afghanistan. As the two discuss books with one another, the fact that Will’s mother is sick can fade for a moment, as you listen to what they have learned, and what can be learned from the written word. I had read a smattering of the books that the two discuss, but fear not if you haven't. I found their discussions on those I hadn't read just as enlightening as those I was familiar with. And as a bonus, a few have now made their way on to my 'to read' list.

'The End of Your Life Book Club' is different to anything else I have read in recent memory, and it is by turns touching, tragic, funny, and insightful. Everything comes together here to make this a unique, and special book. Two years ago, a close friend's mother passed away, and I bought him a book on grieving that he later told me he "hated" because "they don’t know what it is like" and had a "snarky voice". I can’t help but wish that this book had been published then, with its gentle insight into the losses we have faced, and those that are yet to come. This a book that I will long remember, and one that I will keep on my shelf, ready to lend to anyone who might need a little reminder about how to find good in the very worst of times.

One of our very own Byte the Bookers, Guy Ware, is just about to have his collection of short stories, 'You Have 24 Hours to Love Us,' published by Comma Press.

You can see him in action at The Book Club, 100 Leonard Street, EC2A 4RH on Sunday 25th November in a show entitled 'The Special Relationship.  As well as Guy, Alex MacDonald, poet and editor of 'SelectedPoems' will also reading. They promise film and comedy too and the event is hosted by Tom Basden.

Doors at 6pm, show starts 6:30pm. Tickets are just £5 and can be booked here.

Review written by Noella Bello Castro of Byte the Book, Book Club in Kentish Town.

Noella recently wrote a review of our book club for the Kentishtowner, you can read it here.

Buy this book here.

You’re a resourceful young woman in your twentieth year and you’ve received the best education money can buy.  Within two weeks of each other, both of your parents die in a Spanish plague epidemic leaving you barely enough money to keep yourself in stockings and fans.  What do you do?

Well, our heroine Flora faces this exact dilemma, but because of her background, breeding and education she’s not flustered by such trivialities.  She just hatches a plan to go and live off her relatives and gets on with it – which pretty much epitomises the way she deals with things throughout the entire novel.

Cold Comfort Farm is very funny, and a send-up of novels written about country life that were popular in the early 1930s, when Stella Gibbons was writing.  I like to think that she wiped away tears of laughter as she was writing certain bits - I certainly did when I was reading them.  Three pages into Chapter 1, when I read that Flora’s friend Mrs Smiling was ‘an authority on the cut, fit, colour, construction and proper functioning of brassieres’ I decided I was hooked.  I don’t want to spoil the novel for those that want to read it but the comic delights just keep on a comin’.

The setting is largely what you would expect in those sorts of novels but with a tongue-in-cheek twist.  For example we’re told that Mrs Smiling was fortunate to inherit a property in Lambeth ‘before the rents in that district soared to ludicrous heights, following the tide of fashion as it swung away from Mayfair to the other side of the river’.  Similarly there are references to TV phones and air taxis - although it is possible that Stella may have thought these would have been invented fifteen or twenty years into the future, when the novel was set.

While Cold Comfort Farm was, for the most part, enjoyable there were a few moments which let it down.  Stella’s portrayal of Mybug, a Jewish character (actually ‘Meyerburg’), was really uncomfortable to read and just about understandable because the novel was written at a time where people wouldn’t have known better.  And, while the novel is supposed to poke fun at long descriptive prose, some of the descriptions were just that little bit too long.

I think what I like the most about the book is that Stella Gibbons clearly doesn’t take herself too seriously, unlike the authors she is making fun of.  In her foreword to an imaginary writer she pokes fun at herself (but really him) because she comes from a journalistic background where she has learned to be concise rather than write overblown sentences.  And I think the bit that amuses me the most is where she uses asterisks throughout the book’s entirety to highlight sentences she feels are particularly impressive descriptively.

Apparently she ruffled a few feathers when Cold Comfort Farm was published.  This doesn’t surprise me – I think that was exactly her intention.

A few weeks ago, Byte the Book's founder, Justine Solomons, was interviewed by the lovely Viv Oyolu at Dream Corner. Viv talks to women about pursuing their dreams.  You can listen to their interview here.

This interview was first broadcast on ZoneOne Radio.

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Review by Lucy Foley.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t think I’ve have such pure enjoyment, such entertainment, from a book for quite some time as I did from Maria Semple’s wonderful debut.

It’s quite astonishing, actually, to think that this assured, experimental, thoroughly unusual book is a debut. Semple writes with the perfectly tempered, and wonderfully wicked, wit of a Jonathan Franzen or a Kate Atkinson (both of whom, in fact, effuse on the jacket). Take her portrayal of the passive-aggressive Seattle moms that the fabulously eccentric Bernadette labels the ‘gnats’. Or the terrible ‘progressive’ school that her daughter Bea attends, with its vomitacious grade system: ‘S (Surpasses Excellence), A (Achieves Excellence), and W (Working towards Excellence)’.

But Semple also writes with compassion for her central characters, with a deep understanding of their quirks and neuroses. These are, as Franzen commented, people in ‘real emotional pain’. The tight bonds that exist between the members of the little family at the novel’s centre feel authentic, forged as they have been by their great love for one another, and their mutual weathering of past disaster and tragedy.

When these bonds are tested by the machinations of the small-minded community that surrounds them, the reader feels it as an outrage. That Bernadette, Elgie and Bea might not overcome this new challenge to their endearingly dysfunctional brand of happiness is an awful possibility. It is imperative to keep reading, just to check that they’re all going to be OK.

This is my excuse, anyway, for reading the book in a greedy, antisocial, two daylong binge, the way one might normally consume a particularly compulsive thriller. I simply can’t recommend it highly enough.