The short answer to how my research is going is: very well and alarmingly. The longer answer takes more explaining. I have collected all of the data for the author inventory and have closed my reader survey to further data collection. I need to spend some more time thinking about what my results might mean and collecting some good industry numbers from sources other than purely academic journals.
To advance the portion of the study that deals with writers I collected the complete list of mystery titles due for release from HarperCollins within two months from the start date of the study. After removing multiple listings for authors I was left with a pool of thirty writers. They turned out to be good mix of newer authors and those with multiple best sellers.
After I started collecting data I had to make one change to my collection practices. Originally I was trying to determine whether or not the authors had Facebook pages. I ended up adding a category to differentiate between personal Facebook pages and profile pages. The former is more elaborate and often includes postings by the author. It is a more personalized space. The author, the publisher, or fans may orchestrate profile pages. They are simpler and never contain direct postings from the author. I found that writers had one or the other, or neither, of these options, but never both.
What I found is that authors are all over the map with regard to which forms, and how many forms, of digital media they use. The variable usage rate between authors isn’t much of a surprise. Most of the reading I have done has had a certain “bandwagon” feel. No one really knows what effect the digital age is going to have on publishing and everyone is afraid to be left behind.
Web pages have been nearly universally adopted, but vary widely in content. Blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts are less used. My initial impression of the data held a couple of surprises. The first is that many of the digital sites are seldom used. An author may have a blog but that doesn’t mean he/she is posting to it. The second surprise was that a current multiple best selling author had no digital media sites while Agatha Christie, who has been extremely dead for some time, uses all four categories tested.
I sent my survey cover letter to six different reading groups and have closed the survey with sixty respondents. My initial impression of the data is that survey participants have a low rate of usage of author’s digital media sites. I was surprised that the sorts of things they report wanting from such sites are informational rather than interactive. Much of the reading I have done has promoted the use of digital media to develop relationships and conversations between producers and users of digital media, but my data seems to suggest that the audience isn’t interested.
One possible factor affecting my results is that the survey population is relatively homogenous. In choosing reading groups I helped to insure that respondents were probable members of the niche market for writer’s marketing efforts, but a result is that they are mostly women and mostly older. I need to research the demographics of readership in the United States and use of online sites by older adults in order to situate my results.
My biggest current challenge, as I see it, is time. Currently I am trying to lay the paper out, order my arguments, and assign total percentages of the project to different sections. I am still uncertain how to present the inventory and survey data in the context of the paper and could use some direction.
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