There is something slightly strange about watching an advertisement for your book get a better response in another country than it does at home.

That is where I am right now with Sovereign Knight.

My recent BookBub advertising has been performing best in Canada. The newest campaign has produced a few clicks there, while the United Kingdom has been quieter. Earlier advertising in the United States produced plenty of impressions but very little response.

I will admit that bothers me more than I expected.

I live in Oregon. I spent thirty years in the U.S. Army. A great deal of what I know about leadership, military organizations, responsibility, command, and the difference between authority and competence came from those years. All of that found its way into Sovereign Knight.

The novel is set far in the future. There are ancient warships, interstellar governments, forgotten history, political conflict, Marines, fighters, admirals, and a civilization that has been lying to itself for a very long time. It is not the United States Navy in space, and I did not want it to be. But there is a distinctly American military sensibility behind some of the way I approach command and responsibility.

So yes, I want American readers to find it.

That does not mean I am disappointed when somebody in Canada buys or clicks on the book. Quite the opposite. If someone in Vancouver, Toronto, London, Sydney, or anywhere else decides to spend time in this universe I created, I am thrilled to have them.

But there is something personal about wanting the book to gain a foothold at home.

The funny part is that the actual sales tell a somewhat different story from the advertisements. So far, my books have been selling in the United States. I am at roughly fourteen copies sold, including three through Barnes & Noble, and I recently received my first five-star review.

Yes, I know the person who left the review.

I am still keeping all five stars.

What I have not figured out yet is how to reliably reach American readers who do not already know me.

That is a very different problem from writing the book.

When I was writing Sovereign Knight, I could control the work. If a chapter was wrong, I rewrote it. If a character did something that did not make sense, I fixed it. If the military structure was weak, I rebuilt it.

Marketing is different.

You can create an advertisement that looks perfectly reasonable, put it in front of a thousand people, and watch a thousand people keep scrolling.

Then you change six words, show it to somebody in Canada, and suddenly they click.

The new advertisement I am testing uses a much simpler hook:

Twelve Houses Rule. One Was Erased.

That line gets much closer to the central mystery of the book than some of my earlier advertising did. Humanity believes the Twelve Houses have always ruled. Ancient Meridian systems remember otherwise, and Captain Teren Vaust finds himself standing in the middle of a history powerful institutions would rather leave buried.

Canada is responding to that message.

Now I want to find out whether the United States will.

I am deliberately waiting before launching the next U.S. BookBub test. The Canadian campaign runs through August 25, and I want the final numbers before I make another decision. On August 26, assuming the new creative continues to perform, I will take that same advertisement and give it a clean U.S.-only test.

Amazon is already running a separate American campaign using tightly targeted military science-fiction searches. It is beginning to get more impressions, although it still has a long way to go before there is enough data to tell me much.

For once, I am resisting the temptation to keep changing things every few hours.

The advertisements need enough time to tell me what readers are actually doing.

I still believe there is an American audience for Sovereign Knight. Military science fiction certainly has one. Space opera has one. Readers still enjoy stories about command, duty, politics, massive ships, impossible decisions, and civilizations with secrets they would prefer remained forgotten.

I just have to figure out how to introduce my book to those readers.

Canada may have given me the first clue.

On August 26, I get to find out whether it works at home.