What's your experience with Canada as a market?

[The Bass Bagwhan]

By default, my assumed best markets are the US, the UK, and everything else afterwards. But I wonder if Canada with 40m people is a better target than the UK with its 70m because the UK economy is a basket case?

Any thoughts?

[TimothyEllis]

More or less irrelevant.

AUS is 5.5%. Germany is 1.1%. CAN is 0.9%.

UK on the other hand is 14.8%.

As far as I can see, the CAN store has the same rank madness going on as the US store has, while the UK and AUS stores are madness free.

[Bill Hiatt]

I've never had business in Canada proportionate to the population. Maybe if I advertised there? But for me, it has come in behind UK, Australia, and even Germany and France.

[LilyBLily]

The only time I sell to Canada in a significant amount is if I get an international BookBub.

However, I signed up for Kobo Plus and it has earned me some nice little chunks of change. A bit more than coffee money, and I didn't have to do a thing.

[Crystal]

I haven't had success in really increasing my Canadian sales, but what I've heard from Canadians is:

You need to price lower, closer to the same as US or $1 more (i.e. a 4.99 USD book should be 5.99 CAD max but 4.99 would be better). Canadian readers won't buy books priced "the same" as US (closer to 6.99 IIRC).

[elleoco]

Any given book of mine is priced the same everywhere, except the non-U.S. ones are rounded off a bit to compensate for strange outcomes of straight currency conversion.

Keep in mind I don't advertise. I'm fortunate to have a very good word-of-mouth fan base that has kept sales of my backlist to 4 figures a month (barely) for several years although I haven't published anything.

Historical Western Romance
US sales are 10 times UK.
UK sales are 12 times Canadian.
Canadian and Australian sales are about the same.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

Wow, thanks ... that pretty much answers that one!

[alhawke]

You can feel the market by how easy it is to move up ranks. In the Amazon market, the US seems the highest saturated, UK comes second, then Australia and, probably, last is Canada. This means that competition is more fierce in the US Amazon market, but it also means that more readers are available to buy your book there.

In Kobo, it's flipped. Canada is their largest market and the US is the most scant.

I don't have a great feel for Apple's market. I'm betting it's similar to Amazon. B&N is US. GooglPlay is GooglePlay. (I've given up advertising with Googleplay. For some reason, I  can get lots of clicks for googleplay books with ads without any sales).

I wouldn't turn away from the Amazon Canadian market. The disadvantage is there's less readers, but it's also easier to keep a book hovering on bestseller lists. And sometimes ads work better in smaller markets because of less competition.