Promo in OTHER English Speaking Countries

As the UK is only a fraction of the size of the USA, it's not surprising that your sales are correspondingly lower here. But there are still things you could do to promote your work here without actually coming here.

One thing that I've seen work well is working with other authors: swap blog articles or run promotions for them on your blog and you might well see some reciprocal sales. If you can team up with writers who have a good internet presence then you'll really benefit from their efforts too.

If I were you I'd consider redesigning that website, by the way. It's pretty but you have so many images on it that it takes forever to load for me, and by the time it has loaded I've lost interest in what I'm looking for; and it's a bit difficult to read, too, because of the fancy fonts. Simple might be better.

One more thing about your website: That grey text against the pale pink background is tough to read if your eyesight is a tad dodgy. Maybe darken it slightly?

But I agree that the site as a whole needs tidying. Not major surgery, just a bit of cleaning up.

Regarding the pink against grey: I showed it to my sons earlier, who are colourblind, and they couldn't read it at all.

I'm not colourblind, just getting old. But I was definitely struggling. There was one part I had to highlight to read.

Old Hack said:

Regarding the pink against grey: I showed it to my sons earlier, who are colourblind, and they couldn't read it at all.

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Slightly off-topic, but I hadn't even thought about that as a factor in design. Thanks for pointing that out.

A lot of colour combinations are difficult for my boys: they both have profound colour-blindness, and have trouble with several colours.

Red on black? No good. Pink on grey or blue? Again, impossible. Hot pink on dark blue or purple? Hopeless. The best way to ensure that they can read your website is to have dark text on a light background, and avoid fancy fonts.

Perhaps I should hire them out as website beta-testers.

Old Hack said:

A lot of colour combinations are difficult for my boys: they both have profound colour-blindness, and have trouble with several colours.

Red on black? No good. Pink on grey or blue? Again, impossible. Hot pink on dark blue or purple? Hopeless. The best way to ensure that they can read your website is to have dark text on a light background, and avoid fancy fonts.

Perhaps I should hire them out as website beta-testers.

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Hmm, thanks for mentioning that. Brings up a good point.

This is a really useful site for checking your site in terms of colourblindness. It's also worth googling for accessibility checkers and running your site through a few. I had a bad habit of not bothering with Alt text for images, but the realisation I was making my site harder to use for people using readers shook me out of it.

SBibb said:

Hmm, thanks for mentioning that. Brings up a good point.

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Ah... it certainly does.

Oh, to be slightly more on topic - if you can afford the postage, make competitions international. You have no idea how frustrating it is to see amazing competitions and giveaways for books I really want that I can't enter*. If you're books are listed at the Book Depository, it does free worldwide shipping.

*It is even more frustrating when it's apparent the person running it hasn't even thought about it, and puts up "US and Canada only" two weeks in because they've suddenly clocked they're getting international entries.

Someone in Australia won my last giveaway, too. Be warned that it can take up to 6 weeks for mail to arrive there with standard airmail postage (which was still really expensive). I didn't realize that and it made both me and the winner very nervous!

nkkingston said:

Oh, to be slightly more on topic - if you can afford the postage, make competitions international.

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Legal issues are another reason not to make competitions international. Canada is one of the worst for random rules regulating these things, which is worth knowing. Here's a good article explaining some of the problems. How to run a website contest without going to jail.