Going after foreign sales

I’ve recently seen a couple of posts discussing the foreign market for ebooks. This post pointed authors to some online sites that would help American writers go after the UK market. This post on Indies Unlimited talked about Amazon entering the Danish market.

For some reason, I had not even thought of targeting foreign markets. Yes, I’d like to sell books here in the US, but there are a lot of English speakers out there, and many of them live in the UK, Canada, Australia and other countries. Deciding to make an appeal to them directly is probably not a bad move.

I guess the ultimate question is whether you make concerted efforts to get into these foreign markets or assume that if you sell well here, you’ll eventually catch on other places.  I’ve just started selling books, so I’m not sure the best approach, but this is certainly food for thought. If  you do choose to try some outside promotion, do remember that Amazon.com is only for the US.  Britain and the rest of the UK has Amazon.co.uk. Canada has amazon.ca.  I added the UK and Canadian links to my books page, figuring that was the least I could do. There isn’t an Amazon Australia. They just have to buy from Amazon.com. To see all the different Amazons, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=487250 to find it.

So, has anyone tried foreign marketing and had success? What’s your secret?