A regular commenter on the Guardian newspaper’s book site, real name Matthew Spencer, has been given an opportunity “above the line” to implement his idea of a 32-writer knockout tournament to find the Great American Novelist. The idea and the rules he has devised – an author must be an American who has produced four great novels during the last 100 years – have attracted some criticism for their arbitrary nature. There’s no doubt some truth in these criticisms: the requirement of four great books certainly means some marvellous writers and books have missed out, while F Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller not making the top 16 seeds seems odd to me. But so what? It’s fun if you like this sort of thing and educational for those of us who are nowhere near as knowledgeable about the American literary oeuvre as Mr Spencer.

My main thought though is what a great idea head-to-head knockout novel writing is as a sport! Monty Python got there first with the sporting potential (“Oh dear, it looks like Tess of the D’Urbevilles all over again”), but they missed the opportunity of literary greats grappling like Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the film version of DH Lawrence’s Women in Love. Who wouldn’t want to see Dickens and Hardy or Amis and Rushdie going at it mano a mano? You could put a Jane Austen versus Charlotte Bronte contest on pay-per-view! Well maybe not, but direct comparison can be illuminating and perhaps improve our understanding of which writers we like and why.

One of the best ways to understand one writer’s limitations is to look at another’s strengths. For example, selecting at random a passage from PG Wodehouse or John Le Carre and putting it up against an excerpt from The Da Vinci Code will demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to write non-literary fiction and still craft intelligent, attractive English, but that Dan Brown doesn’t. Contrast the characters and the coherence of the plots of say Philip Roth’s Indignation with Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and in my opinion you learn a great deal about who is probably the greatest living American writer (clue: It's not De Lillo). In pitting Ernest Hemingway against James Baldwin ("the pick of the first round clashes, Gary") we may acquire an understanding of who is the better writer, or at least arrive at a better appreciation of the two 20th century titans’ respective merits. Good luck to Mr Spencer on picking a winner for that one.

So with the Olympics now having started, and quite magnificently, in London, Rio needs to find a way to follow what let’s hope is a great Olympiad. What better way than by introducing a new sport that will be like no other at the 2016 Games?

The first reviews of my book are up on Amazon - a 5-star review on Amazon.com and a 4-star one on Amazon.co.uk. My thanks to both reviewers for reading the book and then taking the time to offer their thoughts on it. “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” has also been picked up by the US-based book group The Eclective and highlighted in its wonderfully named Books That Don’t Suck feature. American vernacular aside, all I ever aspired to was to write a book that “didn’t suck”, so I am very pleased!

More specifically, my aim was always to write something that was entertaining (“one hell of a funny and entertaining read” - US review) AND educational (“I learned a great deal about Samurai and Japanese history” - ibid). In other words, “Light reading on a crucial transition in Japanese history” (UK review). It is great to think that for these two readers at least those goals have been met.

Very grateful if others would also consider writing a review, or alternatively clicking “Yes” on the “Do you agree with this review?” button for the two reviews, if of course you do agree.

I’m aiming for this to be a regular feature, but I’m going to be a bit restrictive in the types of book I talk about here. This site is supposed to be related to my own writing, historical fiction, Japanese history and self-publishing. Just as I do not suffer from a dearth of opinions about politics, football and many other topics but don’t air those here, I will limit the selected books to those with at least some connection to my chosen themes or are self-published.

That established, there is no better way to start off than by discussing David Gaughran’s “Let’s Get Digital”, the book without which I would not be here today (sitting in my living room blogging to an audience of dozens). It's a well-written and thoughtful self-published guide to self-publishing. Mr Gaughran is an advocate for online self-publishing who avoids the zealotry of the convert and pays due respect to other opinions, all the time being clear in his own belief that the world has changed and for the better. You don’t have to agree with every point made to believe that we are only at the beginning of the transformation of the publishing industry.

“Let’s Get Digital” is at its most persuasive when the virtues of the new world for unpublished writers are extolled. The argument that exciting opportunities now exist for aspiring writers to get their work into the public space is made forcefully, and I am sure I am not the only person to have taken the plunge after reading this book. If you are currently umming and ahhing about self-publishing, “Let’s Get Digital” is strongly recommended.

Where I am less persuaded is the argument that a “death spiral” has begun for the printed book. The logic goes that as e-books increase in popularity they cannibalise print sales, forcing booksellers out of business, making print books harder to find and therefore less popular, increasing the popularity of e-books and so on. This convenience effect is compounded by a cost effect - print runs are reduced, forcing up costs and thus prices while e-books get cheaper because their fixed costs can be spread across greater volumes. It seems to me that this doesn’t separate the impact of the digital revolution on publishing from its impact on retailing. Bookstores may well be in trouble, but this doesn’t mean print books won’t sell - they could sell mainly through online retailers. And modern printing methods and the small share of final price printing accounts for should prevent current price differentials from widening further. E-books no doubt are here to stay and will grow further, but I’d bet print will retain a large share of sales even in a digital world.

This point aside, “Let’s Get Digital” is an excellent book and David Gaughran an interesting, intelligent commentator on the changes now underway. His prose is also of sufficient quality that this book makes you want to try his fiction, and I have now purchased his South American historical novel “A Storm Hits Valparaiso”. His blog is worth a read too if you are interested in self-publishing. David Gaughran's central message is positive and inspiring:

“The most satisfying aspect [of self-publishing]? The freedom to write whatever you like and publish it when it’s ready. It’s a great time to be a writer.”

Hear, hear.

The British novelist Julian Barnes had an article in The Guardian the other day that is worth a read. My opinion of Barnes has gone up recently having read his very good Booker Prize winning “The Sense of an Ending”, which I prefer to the couple of his earlier works I read, and the first half of the article is a nice stroll through his confessed bibliophilia-bordering-on-bibliomania. In the second half, he goes on to consider the impact of the digital revolution on brick and mortar bookshops and the printed page.

I should say that while I disagree with Barnes’ conclusion, he represents the sensible wing of those uneasy about the changes wrought by the internet on book retailing and publishing. Just as there is an extremist fringe of those who welcome the recent upheavals, revelling heartlessly in the current disarray despite the damage to many customers and employees of traditional bookshops, there is a hard core Luddite tendency whose members abhor the impact of digitalisation in all its forms, perhaps best represented by the poor man’s Philip Roth, John Updike, whose poem Barnes quotes in the article:

“For who, in that unthinkable future
When I am dead, will read? The printed page
Was just a half-millennium's brief wonder …”

Note the conflation of reading with the act of reading the printed page. For what it’s worth John (yes, I know he’s deceased), I bought your books on my Kindle. Barnes thankfully expresses a greater optimism, but this still leads him to argue that the e-book will never completely supplant the printed page. So? And why is that the question? Surely we should be asking whether the changes of recent years will lead to a better overall set of reading options? 

In my opinion we are moving towards a book market where the mid-market chains will have vanished and most light fiction is read on e-book readers, but where niche bookshops (and yes, Amazon) thrive and customers focus their purchasing of physical books on quality products that they want to keep. Barnes in his article seems mostly to agree and veers away from an unnecessary either/or approach, but then at the finish asserts that for the “serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.” 

As if we have to choose a single format for our discoveries. As if format would make any difference to the impact of say Anna Karenina. It’s not book versus e-book, it’s about more books you can buy and more easily, more choice of format, and ultimately about more reading. The future is bright (so dim your screen a bit if you like).

Recently I spent a few days in Hakodate, a port city on Hokkaido, the northernmost of the main Japanese islands. In part I was there to research future Milligan books; Hakodate is steeped in the history of the Meiji Restoration era and the Battle of Hakodate was the last stand of the pro-Shogunate forces (while the Shogun himself had thrown in the towel by then, some of his former followers were not in the towel-throwing business). Fascinating to visit and my compliments to the local government, who have done a good job of preserving and recently restoring several of the historic sites.

Below is the “Goryokaku”, the five-sided castle of Hakodate at which the last drops of blood were shed in defence of over 250 years of Tokugawa rule. It’s a stunning design – based on European calculations of the fewest number of gun points needed for maximum visibility – and today is a tranquil park that belies its violent history. An observation tower, from where this picture was taken, now stands dominant over the site where Imperial power was finally consolidated.

Before that last chapter of what became known as the Boshin War, Hakodate had become the first Japanese port opened to foreign trade, a result of the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa extracted by Commodore Perry of the US Navy at the point of a gun. As one of Japan’s few windows on the world in the second half of the 19th century, there were several foreign consulates in Hakodate, including a British Consulate which operated at various sites until the 1930s. The final site has now been restored and opened as a museum, and nicely done it is too. The museum captures well the curiosity of the local population in these “long-nosed, round-eyed barbarians”, demonstrating something I have tried to show in my book: while the ruling class may have been hostile to Westerners, in large part because the latter represented a political threat to the former’s power, the ordinary people of Japan were mostly just fascinated by these strange outsiders. 

So self-publishing has its first real mega-success in “Fifty Shades of Grey”, which if you have until recently been living on Venus is the S&M erotic novel by British author EL James. Good for Ms James, and encouraging for other self-published authors. Ten million copies might be beyond the rest of us (five million would do me just fine), but it does show that through the internet and word of mouth it is possible to reach a wide market. Having said that, I don’t suppose I’ll be reading the book. Critical reaction has not been great and I prefer to get my own masochistic fix by watching the England football team. 

The Fifty Shades trilogy was originally developed on fan-fiction websites for the Twilight series of books, then removed and published on EL James’ own website. After a rewrite, “Fifty Shades of Grey” was released as an e-book and a print-on-demand paperback in May last year by The Writers' Coffee Shop, a virtual publisher based in Australia. The second and third volumes were released in the same way over the following months. Massive sales through this unorthodox channel led to interest from an orthodox publisher, Vintage Books, who re-released the series in a revised edition in April this year, which is the one that has broken the records. What the story seems to show is that while the traditional publishing route is still a big part of the story, it isn’t necessary to be traditionally published from the start to enjoy success.

Of course you have to have the right book, and congratulations to EL James for working out that sex sells – who’d have thought? Actually, that’s unfair. There are loads of sex-based books around but locating your book just this side of the S&M porn line so that respectable people felt they could read it on the train was a clever idea. Still, who would have known in advance it would enjoy this level of success, any more than that Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code or the Twilight books would sell as they did? The screenwriter William Goldman’s comment about Hollywood that “nobody knows anything” is just as apposite for book publishing.

We can now no doubt look forward to lots of writers imitating EL James in an attempt to generate at least a share of her sales. A depressing indictment of the lack of imagination and self-respect now prevalent. Anyway, on a more positive note, my second novel will shortly be out: “Fifty Shades of Milligan”, a sado-masochistic romp around 19th century Japan featuring teenage vampire Robert S. Milligan and his sidekick Miyazawa, the boy wizard. Buy while stocks (and whips and chains) last.