Dry results, part 1: The Blogger

Round 1 of the Book Blogger Survey results is as simple as can be: the numbers GoogleDocs is kind enough to offer. The final tally of surveyed book bloggers amounted to 292 (a sincere thank you, once again, to all of you) and respondents for the most part offered their details as best they could (several contacted me regarding their "decline to state" answers - one was unclear as to what a "meme" was, and so on). I am aware that this survey is not exactly "scientific" - I received quite a few e-mails also suggesting ambiguity regarding a few questions. All of this will be discussed further in the coming weeks.

To begin with, the answer to my original question.

Gender:



The initial male/female breakdown I guessed when compiling the book blogger database came out to approximately 60:20, where 20% came out to be blogs with multiple writers or writers of unknown gender. The actual survey results showed numbers that seemed to follow this trend even as they tilted more towards Female. Instead, taking into account the essentially nonexistent number of "Decline to State" bloggers (1 respondent), the final numbers came out as 83% Female and 17% Male.

Age:

Participants were a tad less likely to share their age - 3 book bloggers voted "Decline to State". Meanwhile, the results showed a surprisingly varied range in age with one notable exception - book bloggers are not senior citizens. 13 respondents, meanwhile, admitted to being minors, suggesting that the "young people don't read" theory is quite a bit of nonsense (I invite these 13 to offer their own views on the matter).

Literary Studies Background:
This question was meant to help understand how many book bloggers are so-called "well-read" - have studied the great works, have learned how to manipulate the depths of "Ulysses", and so on. The results were actually fairly, shall we say, boring. It was essentially an even split between just plain higher education courses and a literary degree. One respondent correctly pointed out that "college courses" can mean a number of different things in different countries, however I will refer to this fully in a separate post later.

Profession:

This graph alone really doesn't say much. Not yet, at least. Further analysis should reveal some interesting trends, especially with regards to some of the other survey questions.

Affiliation:


I will be perfectly honest: I did not expect these results. I expected many more "decline to state"s (only 2%) and fewer "none"s (a clear 86% majority). More interesting were the freehand comments people left - asking questions such as whether free ARCs from publishers count as "affiliation", for instance. There will be a more complete post on the matter of this question as well.

Here ends the first half of the first round of survey results (covering "The Blogger" part of the survey). Tune in next week for dry results for "The Blog" part and a few more in-depth posts*.

*Once again, sharing and linking to the results is absolutely welcome and encouraged. Questions, comments, complaints can be e-mailed to [the name of this blog] at [gmail].