I was playing around with my reports on kdp today, and realized that I’ve had 4 downloads from Amazon.de (Germany) this month, and about 150 from Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom), plus over 900 from Amazon.com. I earlier posted on fb how thrilled I am to realize that means I’ve passed the 1,000 downloads mark–but now I’m fixating on the international part. At what point do I get to declare myself officially internationally awesome? 😉
Actually, what I’m amazed by is this: not so many years ago, it would have been damn near impossible for an American writer to have her book being read by people in England, Germany, etc within weeks of the book being released. I knew that e-readers were changing the face of publishing, but seeing those four German downloads suddenly made it sink in much more personally than it has before.
My book isn’t even available in German–I would, in fact, have to do a lot of research to discover how to find someone translate it into German–and yet it’s still sold a few copies in Germany. This is amazing to me as an author who has published only poems and flash fiction prior to this (under a different name), pieces that were well-received but by extremely localized audiences–and now suddenly there’s this chance that people literally all over the world might be enjoying something I wrote. Yes, the numbers are small, I know–but it’s still just very gratitude-inspiring to me. I just feel very lucky right now.
It also makes me wish America had better foreign-language-learning emphasis in schools, so I could do some translations!
Noelle Ryan 