Why is it that all the bestselling indie authors are based in the US (and, to a much smaller degree, the UK)?
I find this rather strange given that the English-speaking population of the rest of the world combined is much greater than that of the US (even though the US is the largest single market for books in English) and the fact that there are lots of extremely talented writers in other countries. I would have expected that at least a good number of Amazon bestseller indie authors I see would be people based in other countries, but it hasn’t been the case. I suspect it might be because books self-published by authors only tend to be visible within their own Amazon geographical sphere and are typically not displayed to US customers unless they are residing in the US.
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While a great many people speak English as a second language, and can thus enjoy reading a novel in English, the majority of people for whom English is the native language live in the US and the UK. (There's also Australia, Canada, South Africa and several others. However, Canada's population, for example, is half the UK's, and 1/10th of the US's. Australia's is even less.)
Now, a person for whom English is a second language might or might not be proficient enough in English to write in it, as opposed to just reading. Even if they are proficient enough, they would have to choose to write in English rather than their native language. Some writers might indeed choose that - Lavie Tidhar is one example. Others are writing in their native language, and the reason you don't see them is that (I assume) you're only looking for literature in English.
Now, I write in English, even though my mother tongue is Hebrew. One of the reason I made this choice is that the whole of the Hebrew-speaking population is about the size of the population of London. Percentage of fantasy/sci-fi (my genre) readers among them - about what you'd expect. So the readership I can expect if I write in Hebrew is miniscule. Now, a person writing in Chinese, or Spanish, or Russian, wouldn't face such a problem, right? So there's less cause for them to pick English over their native language. But that very reason is also the reason you don't see many people from my country as successful indie writers - there's less of us overall.
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