Reader Survey Results – Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post, sharing the results from my recent readers survey. I meant to post this last Thursday, but you know how the world can get in the way!

One aspect of the ebook revolution that really bugs me is the poor editing one sees in many books. Misspellings, grammar errors, typographic errors and incorrect word use are all too common. Poor editing can really spoil my reading experience (and lower my review rating, even for a book I enjoy). However, given the prevalence of this problem, I’d assumed that as an author, I must be more sensitive than most readers.

Not so, apparently. When I asked “Do you notice misspellings, wrong

words or other mistakes when you are reading?”, a whopping 95% said yes.

My next question was: “If you do notice these kinds of editing errors, how much do they affect your enjoyment of a book?”

Here are the answers:

A lot – it makes me really mad to read a poorly edited book

34.18 %

Somewhat – I try to ignore the errors

54.08%

Not at all – I only care about the story and the characters

11.22%

I don’t even notice editing errors.

0.51%

Clearly I’m not alone in my frustration with poor editing. I should have asked whether editing errors in one book would affect a decision to buy a second book by the same author, but alas, that didn’t occur to me.

Next I asked about purchasing decisions. Specifically, I gave respondents a list of different types of information and asked how often each one influenced their decisions to buy a book. I don’t think I structured this question very well. For almost every factor I listed, the most common response was “Sometimes”. The exceptions were “Author” and “Genre”, where “most of the time” was the most common response.

The other factors I asked about were price, recommendations from friends, reviews, excerpts, cover, blurb and book length. All these seem to have some influence, but none dominates.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this question was the large set of “Other-specify” responses I received. Here’s a selection of those responses:

Where I can buy them. For instance, I have never purchased an ebook from amazon. It's all from Are, Smashwords, B&N or direct from publisher.

Since I read most of my books from the public library, price is not a factor. However, when I find a book I love too much to live without it I will look for a good deal on it and buy it.

Availability as an ebook.

Recommendations from other authors I read

Quality of the writing

A lot of times I look at the 'if you like this book, you might like...' type things.

Interviews with authors -- one author mentioning another author

Reading the first page or part of the first chapter

Advertising - if it's promoted on social media or on the Kindle I will likely buy in. I'm vulnerable to blog posts about

books with links to Amazon :-)

Quality of writing

Sample texts are my #1 factor: if the first chapter (or even page) doesn't grab me, I won't buy or borrow the book.

Grammatical errors in the excerpt, blurb, or title

I will often choose free first books and then purchase the entire series if I like the characters or enjoy the writer's style. Then I purchase the backlist and new releases from that author.

In short, who wrote the book has a great deal of influence, but writing quality and marketing do have some effect. And yes, we authors can help one another by recommending each other's books to our committed readers.

The next set of questions I asked involved technology issues. One reason I ran this survey in the first place was to evaluate whether it would be worthwhile for me to use my tech expertise in order to create an author app. So I wanted some idea of how connected my respondents were, and how much that affected their reading and buying habits.

I won’t go through all the details, but here’s a summary of what I found out.

73% of respondents have a smart phone (about evenly split between Apple and Android)

67% have a tablet (Android dominates, but not by much)

Only 7% have ever downloaded a mobile app from an author.

Of those who downloaded an author app, 30% open it rarely and 18% have never opened it, even after downloading.

I think I’ve received a pretty clear answer. Better I should spend my time writing then programming!

I was curious about social media use. Here’s the results from asking about the most common ones.

Goodreads is almost as popular as Facebook. In the “Other” category, there were multiple mentions of Tsu and Tumblr.

83% of respondents have, at some point, friended an author on Facebook. 64% have followed an author on Twitter. (9% said they don’t use Facebook; 19% said they don’t use Twitter.) I conclude that social media are at least one way to reach some readers.

Just for fun, I asked respondents to compare their own reading habits to those of their friends. Here’s what I found.

These are definitely the readers with whom I want to connect!

My final set of questions involved readers' specific familiarity with my work, and their perceptions or attitudes toward me and my books. I won’t go into these results in depth, because they’re not really relevant to other authors, but I did find that quite a few respondents had never read anything by me.

Obviously, I’ve got my work cut out for me!

Thanks for reading. If you’d like more details about any of the data I’ve summarized here or in my previous post, feel free to get in touch.

Reader Survey Results - Part 1

My reader survey ended on Saturday, and I’ve been poring over the very interesting results. As promised, I’ll share the highlights here on my blog. It’s going to take a couple of posts, since there were more than thirty questions in the survey. Some of the results surprised me—and encouraged me.

First of all, though, I want to thank everyone who participated, and to congratulate Kelly, who won the grand prize of a $50 gift certificate. A lucky girl indeed!

I received a total of 201 responses. Of course this isn’t a random sample, since I recruited respondents from my mailing list plus asked my fellow authors (who likely have similar tastes to me, and write in similar genres) to publicize the survey. On the other hand, out of the 170 odd people who included their emails, I’d say at least a third were unfamiliar. Also, in answering my open-ended question “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name ‘Lisabet Sarai’?” quite a few people said, “Nothing. I’ve never heard of you before.”! So I clearly did reach some new readers.

The first two questions asked “On average how many books do you read per month?” and “On average, how many books do you buy per month?”

Here are the summary results:

Read: average 11.7, minimum 1, maximum 75

Bought: average 10, minimum 0, maximum 145

(I’ve got to figure out who is buying more than 100 books per month, and get them on my list LOL!)

In later questions, some readers indicated they only borrow books from the library or download free books, but on the other hand it seems the some people have a serious backlog of books they’ve bought but not read yet! This agrees with answers I’ve gotten on smaller and less formal surveys. Some people have told me that they’re really losing ground, with hundreds of unread books in their stack.

Good for authors, of course...

I then asked where they got most of their books. Up to three sources could be selected. Here’s a summary of the results in graphical form.

Amazon dominates, but it’s nice to see that physical bookstores are still holding their own, and both Barnes & Noble and All Romance have their fans. This question had an “other – specify option”, and I received quite a few responses, including Bookstrand, Audible, Harlequin, free books for reviews, free book offers, library sales, etc.

Publisher websites get more attention than I'd expected, more than B&N. I should probably have asked which publishers. 

I should mention that a few readers said they would never buy anything from Amazon. And in a later question about factors influencing purchase, several respondents said that where the book was available made a significant difference.

For the next question, I asked what fraction of the books they read were ebooks. For this population, e-reading clearly dominates print (though obviously some people are buying print as well, and about 8% are print-only fans).

The majority of people reading ebooks do so on dedicated devices like a Kindle or Nook, as shown in the following graph, but other mobile devices and even laptops still have some adherents.

Next I tried to get a handle on what lengths people preferred. I asked them to rate a set of lengths, from the ones they liked most (rated 1) to least (rated 5). Despite what some people have claimed about the attention span of today’s readers, longer works tend to be preferred—though every length has some adherents. Short stories are the least popular, followed by boxed sets.

Length	1	2	3	4	5
Short stories (fewer than 20 pages)	8.63%	11.68%	8.63%	23.86%	47.21%
Novellas (between 20 and 100 pages)	6.09%	15.23%	34.52%	36.55%	7.61%
Short novels (between 100 and 200 pages)	15.23%	37.56%	27.92%	13.71%	5.58%
Long novels (more than 200 pages)	61.93%	15.74%	7.61%	11.17%	3.55%
Boxed sets or collections (multiple novels per set)	8.12%	19.80%	21.32%	14.72%	36.04%

One issue that concerned me was whether my results would be skewed only toward people who read erotica or erotic romance. So I asked what percentage of the books they read fell into these categories.

The mean was 67.2 percent—so yes, erotic work is popular—but the range was huge, from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. (The standard deviation, if you know what that means, was almost 30.)

My personal answer to this question would probably be about 50%, by the way.

The final set of results I’ll share in this post have to do with the importance of various factors in determining a reader’s enjoyment. I’ve read some comments by readers (especially erotic romance readers) that suggested all they really care about are the characters. Certainly, the respondents in the survey find that characters are critical as shown in the graph below.

In the past, I’ve felt quite discouraged by this. In my own work, I’m at least as concerned with providing an original premise and an engaging plot, as well as with the clarity, beauty and emotional impact of the writing itself. (I seek these as a reader, too.) However, I have worried that readers don’t really care about any of these things. Based on the results of the survey, I’m wrong.

Plot is as important as characters. More than fifty percent of respondents find that creativity or originality strongly affects their enjoyment. And a whopping seventy five percent say style is very important!

I believe that a significant subset of the respondents were authors (who obviously would respect and value writing style). Still, I have to say I’m quite relieved. When I read some of the (pardon my French) crappy writing published these days, I worry that all the effort I put into my work will have zero effect on readers.

Clearly that’s not true. Of course, this doesn’t say anything about sales...!

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll continue my discussion of the results next week.