Dry Results, part 2: The Blog

Check out part 1 here or a compiled list of results here! Spoiler alert - part 2 is pretty interesting. Let's take a look.

Reviews:
I've long suspected that I'm in the minority regarding reviews. When I first started this blog, I decided to separate between book reviews and book thoughts. Though I sometimes write and publish reviews, I do not associate them with this blog. Soon after creating this blog, I realized that I was pretty much alone in this mentality. Almost every book blog I encountered was some form of a review blog. With time, I found many blogs that were different - publisher blogs, news blogs, and a few others that seemed to fall into no clear category. The survey shows essentially this: 73% view their blog as a "review blog", with only 14% explicitly pointing out that their blog is not for reviewing. The remaining 12% are unsure regarding the definition or don't want to apply a label. One respondent wrote "about half", another described it as "reviews and opinions on literature in general".

Genre specialization, and if so:
This number surprised me. I expected a lot more than 31% of blogs to be genre specific. 64%, however, do not view their blog as genre specific, and curiously enough, only 5% weren't sure how to answer or wanted to elaborate (the big bonus of having an "Other _____" option). But here's an interesting point - while a significant majority of blogs don't specialize, 9 respondents who answered either "Other" or "No" then offered a possible genre. And one genre seemed to lead the pack in terms of specialization - more on these two topics later.

Book-world news:
This one was surprising too, but in a slightly different way. 14% seemingly don't do news, while an additional 28% pretty much never post about book-world news. Not a majority, but a surprisingly strong block. 32% occasionally post about book-related news stories, 1-2 a month. 13% are casual posters of news, discussing these matters once or twice a week while 8% are a little more hard-core - 3-7 times a week. A tiny sliver, 1%, post extremely frequently about news - 8 or more times a week. 3% declined to state. These numbers indicate diversity among book bloggers, and fall in a rather standardly shaped bell curve. It appears that the average blogger writes posts relating to book world news on a monthly basis.

Memes:
This one was... less surprising. 25% of bloggers have seemingly never touched a meme with a ten foot pole, 26% rarely participate in them, and 17% occasionally (but perhaps not too regularly) participate in memes. 24%, meanwhile, regularly do memes - probably a couple weekly meme features. 4% are fairly big meme fans, participating in memes 3-7 times a week. No blogger goes too far, though - no one does more than 8 memes a week. 3% declined to state.

Review frequency:We already know book bloggers are overwhelmingly reviewers. 51% of bloggers post reviews 6 or more times a month, with only 3% never publishing reviews. Which, placed alongside the earlier question, reveals that quite a few of the "Not a review blog" replies are most likely of blogs with an interesting mix of reviews, news, thoughts and anything else. 13% of respondents publish reviews 1-2 a month, 30% get out a fair number of reviews per month at 3-5, and a quiet 2% declined to state.

Blog challenges:Fairly even, balanced responses. 38% participate in no challenges, 26% do 1 or 2 a year, 24%
participate in a fairly large range of challenges of 3 to 10, while 11% go long with 11 or more challenges per year. 1% declined to state.

Book tours:
The dry numbers for this question do not actually provide much information, but upon closer (upcoming) examination, reveal a few interesting points. 61% participate in no book tours, 14% currently host 1 tour on their blog, 15% do 2-3, and 10% do 4 or more. 1% declined to state.

Due to the length of this post, the final round of dry results will come in a separate post next week, so tune in for Dry Results, part 2: The Blog cont., and feel free to link others to the gradually growing compiled list of results!