Guess that applies to Australia/Canada as well. There are some authors who get published there who do not fly here in the US.
Is it simply marketing? Culture/Sensibility? Language differences?
I think it comes down to the size of the market. The American market is huge, so it doesn’t have the need to look further a field. It is the same in movies and music.
There are also some popular American authors who never become as popular in the U.K. Who knows exactly why this is true in each case? To some degree it’s a difference in culture, to some degree it’s a difference in which author gets marketed more heavily. I don’t think that language differences have much affect.
I wrote:
> I don’t think that language differences have much affect.
Sheesh, I know better than that. I meant to write:
> I don’t think that language differences have much effect.
Yeah, since the US and UK are both English speaking countries, I’m also betting that language difference isn’t the problem.
Fibber, I’m thinking in terms of the more casual way Americans are accustomed to speaking than the English, specifically. If you have any English friends, you may be startled to hear one of them ask you for a fag, for example. Little things, perhaps, but things which make the cultural artifacts like books less accessible (in terms of dialogue, narrative, etc.) to people who don’t speak with the same everyday vocabulary or use language in the same way.
I don’t see any evidence that differing slang affects what authors are popular. An analogy might be Monty Python. There might be Americans who didn’t like Monty Python because the style of humor was different from the typical sort on American TV (at the time that Monty Python was filmed). But the British slang didn’t bother anyone that I know of. Indeed, some of the biggest American fans of the show were baffled by a lot of the slang, but they still thought the program was hilarious.