I swear, changing my Amazon book prices in Canada and Australia was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

When you publish a book in Amazon, you choose a price for the book. You then have two options—Amazon will set the price in all of its other markets based on the US price. This has been a no-brainer so it’s what I’ve been doing. And my Canadian and Australian/NZ sales have been non-existent, which struck me as strange because those are two big markets for English language books.

Until I read an article that said people who let Amazon set the price for their books in Canada and Australia/NZ are pricing their books out of the market. Most Canadians are willing to pay CAN$4.99 for an ebook, but Amazon had been pricing my ebooks around CAN$7.99 because of the conversion rate, and Australia was getting hit even worse.

So I went in and manually lowered the .ca and .au prices for all of my books to make them numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if an ebook cost 4.99 in the US, it now costs $4.99 in Canada and Australia which appears to be average for the market).

The proof in the pudding came last week when I participated in Zoe York’s Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day with Storm Season (Olympic Cove 1). The idea with this is to set one of your books free for a day (or a weekend) and let romance readers pick it up with the hopes that they’ll like it so much they’ll buy your other books. Granted, the bulk of readers are only picking up free books, but a small percentage of them will read through a series, and that can add up to decent income and new readers who will want your other books.

Anyhoo, I just checked my numbers for the weekend and not only did I give away a BUTTLOAD of copies, I’ve also been getting significant read-through of the Olympic Cove series. And whoop, there it is—someone in Canada is reading the rest of the series. This, after not making a single Canadian sale all year.

I need to check on average book sales in other foreign markets and see if I need to make adjustments there as well. My primary sales come from the US and UK, with a handful of French and German sales here and there (and someone in the Netherlands who’s reading through the Olympic Cove series—thank you, whoever you are). But there are a bunch of other Amazon markets—if my books are overpriced there as well, you bet I’m gonna adjust prices to make them more competitive.