But that doesn't mean you have to set your book there, too, and please, not if you don't know a thing about the place. There is an excess of novels and films and TV shows about America. I just imagine myself eating DVDs like the Cookie Monster). This is because I have consumed a lot of TV shows and books and movies and everything else that is set in or is about America ('consumed'. I am Australian, and I have never been to America, and I can tell if you are writing a book about this place and you have not actually been there yourself. Things do not ring true if someone is writing about a place they are not familiar with. There are impossible uses of geography, because the writer does not know how long it takes to drive between, say, Portland and Seattle, because she lives in England. The characters use phrases that are not used in America, because the author is familiar with how people speak in England. I do not want to use Fifty Shades of Grey as an example, but it is such an obvious example that I feel it will illustrate my point quite well: it is set in America (I imagine because Twilight is set in America), but the author is English. You can tell when a novel is set in a country that the writer is not particularly familiar with.
Things I wish non-American writers would stop doing: set novels vaguely in America for no apparent reason, and get all of the details wrong.
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