Canada, it has become one of my current obsessions. This may seem an odd thing to suddenly develop an obsession about but there is a reason, which is to do with another obsession, one I wish I could avoid but having finally got A Spider in the Eye published and out there in the big bad world I think it is forgivable that I find it hard to resist checking the Amazon sales chart far more often than is probably healthy. But sue me, I am a writer, I write for many reasons but not least in the hope of readers, so wanting to know how sales are going is natural. I want people to read my stuff and the easiest way to gauge if people are doing so is to see how well books are selling. Which by the way is a little better than I expected, though perhaps not as well as I would hope. But then we always hope, no matter how vain it may be, that sales are going to rocket off unexpectedly well. Let’s just say I am happy with them so far and leave it at that. with the exception of Canada.

I had never to my knowledge sold a book in Canada before last week, certainly not via amazon.ca, and while I put an amazon.ca link up on the scar of avarice post a couple of weeks ago I never really expected that to generate any sales, I just felt that perhaps Canadians get tired of other people (Americans and British people in particular) assuming they shop at amazon.com, and why should they not have a link up for their own site. Besides which, and perhaps not surprisingly considering the size of the place, my blog has always done reasonably well in Canada, it is the third biggest chunk of the blog’s readership. Therefore I felt I should make an effort, even if it was symbolic and put up the Canadian link.

Now it is perfectly possible that putting that link up had zero impact. It’s possible none of my Canadian blog readers even saw that post, but that wasn’t entirely the point of the exercise, it was more just in case they did. What I do know is this, for some reason, perhaps the cold weather encouraging log fires and curling up with a good book, perhaps because steampunk is bigger in Canada than I would have expected or perhaps just by pure fluke I am actually getting book sales in Canada all of a sudden. Not many, but then its early days for Spider still and not many sales is more or less a description I could use for all my sales, but what I am getting is more KENP pages (kindle unlimited and prime reads) in Canada than anywhere else, along with several normal kindle sales. Not just spider too, but Scar of avarice has done better in Canada than I expected as well. I am in fact doing remarkably well in the Canadian marketplace, considering I had never sold a book there before. I am almost, perhaps, maybe, unlikely as it may seem, having a little bit of a hit on my hands in the north of the North American continent.

So what’re the conclusions should I and other authors draw from all this, well it simple enough. If your a writer, don’t ignore Canada, it’s the third biggest English speaking market in the world, and yes I know a fair proportion of Canadians speak French, but even if you discount the French speakers (the majority of whom probably speak English far better than I do French), Canada is still the third biggest market for English books in the worlds, so if your doing a little publicity, having the common decency to put up some Canadian links now and again isn’t going to do you any harm. And also, and I think this is very important to say, much love to my Canadian readers, please keep on reading, and thank you so much for doing so.

Perhaps one day, If sales go far better than I have any right to expect, I’ll even one day make my way across the north Atlantic to something like this and take some books with me to sign and get to say thank you to some readers in person. (hey its a vain hope but vain hopes are better than none, and it’s not like I got to Whitby last year but one can dream)

edit.   It occurred to me this morning, that in a post about not ignore Canadian readers, I never thought to include a link for Canadian readers. Possibly I am an idiot, or because I posted this in the early hours I did not think it through entirely. With that in mind let me rectify this now…