e-publishing in the US and the UK

I've noticed a trend in my sales recently. Despite the majority of my promotion and discussion being on UK websites, the sales for Secret of the Nexus in the US are currently about triple that of the UK. There are over 400,000 kindle books available on Amazon, and I'm remaining between 7-17,000 in the rankings on Amazon.com, but while starting out most days at 6-9,000 on Amazon.co.uk, I seem to slip to almost 24,000 by the end of the day. I'm an English author, and the word of mouth from friends and family to seven degrees of separation (by which I mean acquaintances of colleagues of friends become aware of my book, thereby ensuring purchases of genuine interest rather than support) is firmly rooted in my friends and family in the UK. So how is it I'm doing so much better across the pond? Don't get me wrong; I love that people are intrigued enough by my Amazon page that they buy the book wherever they live. I hope it continues and that people enjoy it and recommend it to friends. But still, curiosity beckons, and I wonder if I'm missing a trick that's working in the US that I could use in the UK. Or maybe it's something simpler.

At present, I tweet and write this blog, which I guess are globally accessible resources for people to find out about my book being available in the first place. But tweeting is a difficult promotional tool to use effectively due to needing followers to, well, follow you, and to not flood your tweets with reminders you have a book as this is sure to make followers leave. Like-wise, although I've had a couple of hundred page views of my blog since I started it six or seven weeks ago, I'm not sure how many of the readers here have then gone on to buy a copy of my book - although I hope some of you have, and enjoyed it. Please do let me know if you have.

Those are really the only semi-frequently updated, global means of people hearing about my book and being directed to it without stumbling across it on Amazon. The other means of promotion/awareness are Authonomy and Goodreads, one of which is UK based and (mostly) populated. I'd love it if there were other popular places a general readership/customer base frequented that they might hear about my book and be propelled to Amazon to have a look. But I think I'm already hitting them all.

So what could it be? That the story, though by an English author, is set largely in New York? That sci-fi-esque books are more popular in the States than here in the UK? Of course it could be as simple as here in Blighty we're just not big enough kindle fans yet to have e-books as our primary reading source. It's an odd prospect, given the number of ipads, iphones, and android phones I see all over the place. You would have thought more people would be switching to e-books now these tablets and smartphones are such a big part of even British life. But then maybe the Kindle itself is still really the only medium on which ebooks are read in the UK, due to the imperfect way ebooks appear on tablets compared to Kindle. There is certainly circumstantial evidence to support this theory - the kindle fire, Amazon's answer to the digital tablet, has still not been released in the UK This could simply be due to their sales people recognising the reduced Kindle sales in the UK compared to the US and therefore it not being worth investing in adaptations for the Kindlefire to work in the UK.

Time will tell, and I'm eternally grateful for the sales everywhere, especially those in the US. But I guess until my UK sales start to sky-rocket I won't have quite enough ammunition to take to a UK literary agent to tell them my book is already on the way to success, proven in the UK e-book market, and that that is the proof they should need to take me on as a client to get a print edition on the market.

As always - if you've read Secret of the Nexus, and liked it; please review it on Amazon and boost Greg Cross' visibility to the masses.

Cheers!