I was thinking about the adjectives used to describe books, particularly in their publicity materials or the Amazon product summaries, and was wondering what are the most unintentionally bad adjectives. My personal non-favourite is “heartwarming”. 

I have two problems with this: first, it suggests that the reader is seeking something which directly lifts the spirits, by infusing them with positive sentiment, rather than lifting their spirits more obliquely by being a really good book. PG Wodehouse lifts the sprits, because he is clever and funny, but nobody would call his books “heartwarming”. Even, to take an extreme example, Jude The Obscure lifts the spirits, by moving you with its greatness as a work of literature, although admittedly you do have to get through about 48 hours of wanting to throw yourself out the window before the positive feelings kick in. In fact, is there anything of any artistic merit that could accurately be described as “heartwarming”? “Hamlet - a heartwarming tale of the ups and downs of a Danish prince”? “The Godfather - a heartwarming film about a close-knit Italian-American family”? I suggest not.

My second issue with “heartwarming” is it presumes my emotional response. I will decide how to react and at what temperature I want my bodily parts, thank you very much! For the same reason, I think it is a mistake to describe books as “hilarious” or “hysterically funny”. It seems to me both presumptuous of your audience and likely to be untrue for many, however good the work is. I’ve stuck with “humorous” for description of my book, since that describes the style; the reader can decide how funny (if at all) they think it is for themselves.

There is a marvellous slang idiom in Japanese used by teenagers - “Zenbei ga naita” - which means literally “All America wept”. They use this to describe things that are of no worth, because many cheesy Hollywood films are marketed in Japan with that hyperbolic slogan, so if you hear it you know the film isn’t worth seeing. The campaign for “heartwarming” to acquire a similar ironic meaning starts (and probably ends) here! Meanwhile, knowing that such irony is alive and well among the spiky-haired youth of Tokyo is enough to raise the temperature of your internal organs.

August’s Book of the Month is a self-published story from the American humour (or rather humor) writer PJ Jones, author of several spoofs and the funny but also moving farce “Driving Me Crazy!”. I shouldn’t like “Romance Novel” - I have a limited appetite for the spoof form, and it sends up not only romance fiction, which I don’t read, but also the Twilight series, which I have neither read nor seen. Nevertheless, I found this book very entertaining because Ms Jones is pitch perfect throughout, hitting the right notes (or should that be the right wrong notes?) time after time. It’s very difficult not to like any form of fiction when done this well. If you’re familiar with the originals you’ll get even more out of it.

The old British comedian Les Dawson used to be very funny with his intentionally awful piano playing, but he could only do it so amusingly badly because he could play well in the first place. “Romance Novel” is a bit like that: you can tell that PJ Jones can write well or she wouldn’t be able to send up bad writing so successfully. In addition to the narrative voice frequently reminding you how absurd the whole thing is, the character names are faultless - Smella Rosepetal, Deadward Forest, Snake Long et. al. - and the running jokes - the baby whose name keeps changing, the token black character who refuses to be a token, the virginal mother etc - don’t wear off. From the great cover to vampires' obsession with the Bee Gees (I always wondered who bought their bloody records), there is quality humour throughout.

“Romance Novel” is perhaps not for those easily offended, since it introduces explicit sexual conduct, flatulence and bad words not usually found in Mills & Boon (or so I understand), but if like me you only object to that sort of thing if it is gratuitous, then you won’t object here; these are used always to send up the conventions of romantic fiction. 

Nobel prize winner? No. But unsurpassable spoof fiction. 

I made a flippant comment on my Facebook page after buying works by other Japanese historical fiction writers that I was “checking out the competition”. The British writer David Walters, the first of whose Samurai Trilogy was among the books I purchased, asked (genuinely) if I thought Japanese historical novels were really in competition, and suggested that in contrast he thought they helped stimulate interest in this type of book and hence were complementary. I agree, and this interaction made me think a bit harder about the impact of one book on the market for other books, and indeed in which market it is that any given book is searching for readers.

The UK’s Monopolies Commission (and why was there only one? as the old joke went) used to look at whether certain companies were becoming too dominant in their market, which led to a great deal of work about how exactly you defined a particular company’s market. For example, is a bus company in the “bus travel” market or the “travel” market where it is also competing against train operators? It’s often not clear. The same logic applies with books. Is “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” in the “Japanese historical fiction” market, or that for “historical fiction” or even just “fiction”? If the first of these then the Samurai Trilogy is my “competition”, but if the market is general fiction then everything up to Fifty Shades of Grey is a “competitor” (and suitably I’m getting spanked by EL James, as is every other author).

So one question without a clear answer is about the market, but another is that raised by Mr Walters – to what extent do books and authors “compete” with each other anyway? This is where the book market differs from say the travel market. On the whole, people don’t think “I had such a pleasant journey the other day on Company A’s bus that I’ll think I’ll make a journey I wasn’t otherwise going to make and try out the bus (or train) of company B”. But with books that is pretty much what they do; a book that is a positive experience for the reader may well lead on to purchases of books of a similar style, or even of books of a different style too because the pleasure of reading has become more evident to the individual concerned. Anecdotally, I understand that this is the positive impact the Harry Potter series had on the teenage fiction market.

So given the capacity to expand the market, whether that be narrowly or broadly defined, I don’t think authors are in competition with each other. I look forward to readers of the Samurai Trilogy trying “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels” and vice versa. And if I put any of them off Japanese historical fiction for life, I’m sorry David!