Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine receiving almost 800 responses to a survey I launched seventeen days ago. One hundred maybe or, if luck intervened, perhaps two hundred but certainly not the 795 as reported an hour ago.
Before launching, I had the good fortune to have Sarah Johnson of Reading The Past agree to write about it on her blog. I also knew of groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Goodreads where I could post a link and I planned to connect with friends via email and post on my blogs and Twitter (@histfiction). But even with these various avenues, I knew that surveys typically have very low response rates.
The survey is designed to discover more about those who read historical fiction and those who do not – demographics, story preferences, favourite time periods, reasons for reading or not reading this genre, sources of recommendations and so on. Since I write historical fiction, I thought the information might be helpful to authors like me as well as others in the publishing industry. I imagined a few follow on blog posts and a tidbit or two of insight into those who love historical fiction. Instead, I have reams of data to sift and sort and formulate into conclusions; a degree in statistical analysis might be helpful!
Sarah’s endorsement on her blog and on Facebook created threads into other blogs. Twitter – both mine and Sarah’s – led to retweets. Friends passed the survey on to other friends. Carol K posted it on her blog, EdiFanoB posted it to folks in Europe, a friend of my husband gave it to his librarian wife who wanted to send it around to other librarians and so it went reaching folks in India, New Zealand, Australia, South America, Asia and elsewhere. Absolutely fascinating.
More to follow.
Note: this post also appears in One Writer’s Voice.
7 Responses
Looking forward to results and your analysis. Brilliant.
Thanks, Carol. I’m at my desk pondering how to analyze results. Imagine sifting through 563 responses to ‘who are your favourite authors’ and finding insights 🙂
Thanks, Carol. All I need is some time to crawl through the numbers and write-in comments 🙂
Yes, I’m looking forward to results too. Excel?
Actually, SurveyMonkey offers quite a few analysis tools. I do have the challenge of looking through 563 written in responses on favourite author, 589 on favourite blogs/websites and so on. Could be my life’s work! Perhaps Jerome de Groot would be interested, although I was less than enthusiastic about his book on the historical novel 🙂
Congratulations on the success of your survey and for sharing the results! Will your results include the ages of the people who read nineteenth century and WWII era historical fiction?
Hello … thanks for your interest. I haven’t cut the data that way. Do you have a particular need to see it? I might be able to figure slice and dice the survey that way.