As somebody with only a couple of years of Indie Publishing to his name, it is easy to be distracted by relative size of market rather than where the actual opportunity may lie.
There is only so much time and resources an Indie writer can assign to a given region. Most of us work entirely alone and do all of the writing, editing, book cover design, blurbs, Amazon publishing and configuration, marketing and advertising, so focus has to be of the Laser variety.
We are also, incidentally, in charge of the vast amounts of procrastination, self-doubt, self-loathing, vanity and bluster that writing and self-publishing a book requires.
As a writer of English language books, regions such as Europe and Asia are immediately disregarded by most authors, translation services just don’t make good financial sense to most of us.
I haven’t historically done much advertising. It can be costly if you get it wrong and marketing a single book is hard. But now there are three in my series of travel adventure memoirs I am thinking of piling the revenues they make back into some Amazon ads. Hence the need to know which region(s) to target.
You can check them out by clicking on the image below. Feel free to buy a copy or read for free on Kindle Unlimited.
Well, the USA is clearly the largest market—by far. The population of the USA in 2022 was a staggering 333,287,557.
By contrast the UK was 67,508,936.
So, historically, the USA and the UK would have been my primary focus, and to be fair, the USA always will be. It just cannot be ignored. The UK is a large market but for me it’s been a tough one to crack, even though I now live there. I cant figure it out and for that reason, for the moment I will set it aside.
But here comes a surprise. I recently spent more of my time doing a breakdown of book sales and KENP reads by region and up popped Australia. And not just the odd sale or read, this country of only 25,978,935 people, surprisingly, to me anyway, makes up 30% of my revenues. (I suspect Amazon includes New Zealand in their “region” assignment but that still only adds another 5 million people).
The additional plus here is that the incredibly intelligent and discerning people who make up the Antipodean nations tend to give me my best reviews. I always said that Australians and New Zealanders were my favorites.
And, let’s be honest it is relatively small but still substantial to me. I think it’s worth a crack and see how some ads run—whaddaya think?
It just goes to show that data analytics even in an industry where the job is really supposed to be about creativity and entertainment, just cannot be ignored.
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