Selling the same book in more than one country
Switch a book on at a print-on-demand service and it is usually on sale in several countries before you have thought about any of them. That is a real advantage over every other way of publishing a first book, and it means a handful of settings you skipped past are now decisions you have made.
None of what follows is tax or legal advice. Tax treatment, price rules and contract law differ by country, and those questions belong to somebody qualified where you sell.
What actually differs by territory
Price. You set a price per market, not one price that gets converted. A store offering automatic conversion is giving you a starting point, not a decision: a converted price lands on numbers no shopper there recognizes, and the same book supports different prices in different countries anyway. Pricing a self-published book covers choosing the numbers.
Tax. Whether the price a reader sees includes sales tax or has it added at checkout depends on the country and the retailer, and so does whether print and ebook are treated alike. So the price you set is not always the price displayed, and comparing shelf prices across two countries is not comparing like with like. Your own obligations are a question for an accountant.
Where the book is printed. For a print book this decides delivery time and shipping cost, because print-on-demand routes each order to a plant that can serve the buyer. Where a market has no local facility for your binding and paper, copies are printed elsewhere and shipped in — which is why a book can be fully listed in a country and still take two weeks to arrive. Printing in more than one country covers the mechanism.
Rights. If you have licensed a territory to anyone — a publisher in another language, a regional edition, an audio deal with a territorial limit — you must exclude that territory from your own distribution. It is not a formality that lives in the contract; it is a setting on the title in your printer or distributor account, and remembering it is your job every time you add a channel or upload an edition. Translations and foreign rights, for a self-published author explains how the rights separate.
Metadata that travels badly
The description and the fields around it are written once and read everywhere, which is where a worldwide book most often gives itself away.
- A description written for one market. A national broadcaster, a bestseller list or an award that means nothing outside one country reads as noise everywhere else. Prizes and sales figures are worth keeping; local shorthand is not. How to write a blurb that sells the book is the full treatment.
- Ambiguous dates. 03/04/2026 is two different days depending on the reader. Write dates out, or use year-month-day.
- One system of measurement. A non-fiction book full of inches, pounds and Fahrenheit is harder work than it needs to be for most of the world's readers, and the reverse is equally true. Pick the system your main readership uses, or give both where the number matters. A trim listed as 6 × 9 tells a metric reader little; Metric trim sizes, and books printed outside the US has the equivalents.
- Currency in the description. "Only $12" is wrong in every market that does not use dollars, and wrong in yours the moment you discount.
Paste the same strings into every store, market to market, for the reasons in Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book.
The spelling question, answered honestly
Authors agonize over whether a book sold in both the US and the UK should be spelled one way or the other. The choice matters much less than the consistency.
Pick one convention and hold it across the whole book: the text, the front matter, the back cover, the description, the series name. A consistently US-spelled book reads to a British reader as an American book, which it is allowed to be, and the reverse is just as true. Neither costs you readers. What costs you is spelling the same word the American way on page 12 and the British way on page 300, or a description that does not match the sample. That reads as carelessness, and a reader who spots one inconsistency starts hunting for others.
So choose, write it into your style sheet, and check it once at the end. A second localized text is a real job with real costs — two files, two proofs, two chances to upload the wrong one — and it is rarely worth it. The style sheet: how a series stays consistent is where the decision belongs.
In the Cover Maker. The ISBN and barcode options reserve the barcode area, draw the blank box where KDP prints its own symbol, or add a real EAN-5 price add-on in US dollars or pounds sterling against a valid ISBN — so a book on sale in several markets can carry a barcode with no price baked in. Start your book → · about the Cover Maker
Barcodes carry one price, in one currency
The five-digit block beside the barcode encodes a price, and its leading digit is a currency code. One symbol, one currency: there is no add-on that reads as dollars in Chicago and pounds in Bristol.
That is why a book sold in several markets usually carries no price in the barcode at all. The main EAN-13 is the ISBN and works everywhere; the add-on is optional, and leaving it off costs you nothing outside physical bookstores that expect a shelf price. The euro is the specific trap, because it has no standard leading digit. Barcodes, and the price code beside them has the detail. The same logic applies to the artwork: a price set as type on the back cover cannot change without a new file.
Reviews and rankings do not travel
Reviews are usually per-store and often per-country. Ninety reviews on one national storefront may show as none on another, even inside the same retailer. Nothing is broken — it is a reason not to read a quiet foreign market as a failed one.
Rankings are per-store and per-category, computed against the other books in that market. A chart position in a small country is not the same achievement as the same number in a large one, in either direction.
So judge each market on its own sales, and check the listing is correct there before blaming the market. Check the listing the way a stranger would is the routine for that.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Going wide, or staying exclusive · More: Printing in more than one country · Distributors, aggregators and who actually sells your book