My writing group, TL;DR Press always has interesting discussions happening on Slack. One of the recurring topics is about the disappearing, diminishing market for fiction, especially short fiction.
Every time a small press or a magazine closes, we wonder if fiction as we know it is doomed in the future. We know lesser and lesser people who buy magazines, and everyone likes to talk about how the new generation is buying books less.
It’s no longer the world of Gen-Xers who just walked in to a magazine’s office and walked out with a well-paying job with benefits. Diminishing revenue streams for publishers means fewer jobs for writers. Even self-publishing isn’t terribly lucrative, and a lot of us know that as we publish our novels and short story collections on Amazon.
But how much of this doom and gloom is grounded in reality? We know people who read magazines and those who don’t, we know people who read fiction and those who don’t, and we know people who are happy to buy art, and those who are okay skeeving off free stuff off the internet. But who is who? And how many are in each category?
I thought a short survey might be in order, and Alex came up with a couple of questions. You can look at the survey here. If you can’t click through, it’s four questions:
What sources have you read in the past 30 days
Where did you read fiction from in the past 30 days
What do you read more of, Fiction or Nonfiction?
Where did you find your favorite publication?
The survey was shared on the TL;DR Press Slack channel, and on Twitter. It’s possible that a good proportion of the respondents were writers and others who are into reading, but I can’t confirm that as the survey was anonymous.
I hoped for a 100+ responses, but at the moment we have 52 respondents.
General Trends
Let us take a look at the results for all respondents:
This trend remained remarkably stable as the numbers kept coming in. A third of people read mainly nonfiction.
I find it interesting how search engines are a big source of finding a publication, though it makes me wonder what they were searching for. It’s also very interesting to me that no one surveyed had found their favorite publication through ads or Kickstarters, which were among the options I’d offered.
I also am pretty surprised at how large a percentage social media is. When you combine Twitter/Facebook/Other non-anonymous social media, and Reddit, you have more than a quarter of the respondents. Hence, it’s important to promote your work on social media!
Bookstores and Online Bookstores are neck and neck! People seem to use both to the same effect.
It was surprising to me that not everyone reads online newspapers or magazines, even when they are free! Especially since the number is lower than ebook and book readers, which take more time and energy. I talked about this with some people on the group, and Lyle suggested it was because we don’t sit down to read an online news article anymore. It just happens to us. We click on a link while scrolling. Or we get it in our inbox and we click on it if it seems interesting, and then we just skim through it anyway. There isn’t a concerted effort we put in to read free things online, and we don’t recall when we read online articles.
It also surprises me that physical and online magazines are neck and neck here!
When I look at this and the previous graph, the neck-and-neck relationship between ebooks and books stands out to me. This trend remained constant as the responses came in. Not everyone who reads ebooks reads books and vice versa, but only 3 out of 52 haven’t read a book or ebook in the past 30 days. One of them has read an audiobook, however, and another subscribes to online magazines, and all three still consume fiction.
I’m amazed so many people read free fiction online, which is not from a Wattpad/Medium sort of platform. It doesn’t occur to me to do so, unless it’s thrust in my face somehow. Are these big publications or small ones, I wonder.
There were two people who got their poetry fix from Instagram! I guess Instagram is a great place to share your poetry!
It’s heartening for me to see that as many people as who read a physical magazine get their fiction fix from newsletters. I ought to share more fiction on here!
Bookstore goers
Lyle wondered how many of the eBooks were from small presses or self-published works. That wasn’t in the data, but we can look at the converse. Let’s look at those whose favorite pub was from a physical bookstore. Physical bookstores rarely carry indie books.
So we look at the 10 people who found their favorite pub at a bookstore.
This crowd subscribes to fewer things online, reads fewer audiobooks, but has more of a chance to read physical magazines!
They also don’t read fiction from paid online subscriptions, and they are more likely to get their fiction from books, though they read both books and ebooks the same amount.
It strikes me that this crowd looks at online media as free stuff, and look toward physical books and magazines as real sources of fiction and nonfiction.
I guess we can conclude that if you want to reach people who are reluctant to spend money online, you have got to get to the bookstores.
On the opposite side, are there complete digital natives, who don’t read physical media? Filtering by that, I found 12 out of 52 respondents (nearly a quarter) haven’t touched a physical book or a magazine in the past 30 days. That’s a lot lower than I expected it to be!
Heavy Media Consumers
Then I looked at heavy media users - people who use >2 sources for media and fiction. This gets us down to 21 respondents (40%).
This crowd has nearly as many online subscriptions as they read physical magazines. Nearly half consume audiobooks (as opposed to 20% among all respondents).
They get fiction from a variety of sources as well. The interesting thing to me here is how books and ebooks are still predominating and have similar consumption patterns.
When you compare this against all readers, heavy media consumers find things from physical bookstores and from social media more, and from online bookstores less. Is this a blip in the data that doesn’t matter so much? Or does it mean something else? I don’t know how to interpret this data.
Fiction vs Nonfiction readers
The next axis I decided to filter on was fiction readers vs nonfiction readers. This value of a third of readers reading predominantly nonfiction stayed constant as the responses came in.
What is the deal with nonfiction readers? I filtered them out, and they are about 17.
Nonfiction readers seem like they consume more online. More ebooks than books.
See? They even get their fiction from ebooks.
Word of mouth seems to matter more with nonfiction readers. A couple of the responses got their favorite publications as gifts, even.
Now let’s look at fiction readers.
Here we see it reinforced again that fiction readers tend to be more grounded in the physical world. They read more books and magazines, and read a shade less online.
With this crowd, bookstores matter more, and word of mouth matters much less.
Who is reading magazines anymore?
Let’s take a look at the 11 people (21%) who do.
This crowd of people read less digitally, and are happier to read more physical media. So maybe you ought to advertise for your book in other physical media?
It strikes me how the rate of getting their fiction from magazines is the same as they get from podcasts and audiobooks.
The percentage of predominantly fiction readers in this crowd is much higher.
They discover media from both physical and online bookstores predominantly.
I similarly looked at those who subscribe to online publications (11 respondents). Nothing much stuck out from their consumption patterns, but I noticed that all of them are heavy media users (>3 different kinds of media consumed).
Takeaways
Let me try and summarize what I’ve found with this data.
Books and ebooks are still how you can reach the most number of people. Everyone knows books and ebooks, considers them a serious form of content consumption, and doesn’t mind spending money on them. In comparison, other media is long-tail and fragmented.
There’s a kind of a split in the respondents - those who are more into physical media and physical bookstores, and those who are predominantly digital. This is something to probe further in a future survey. My intuition wants me to connect this to splits between thinking/feeling, humanities/STEM reader/nonreader old/young splits, but I don’t have enough data to go into this. But as a rule of thumb, we could probably have two different target audiences (online/offline), and try reaching them in different ways (Twitter/bookstores)
Magazines aren’t quite dying, but their consumers are those who are consuming a lot of other media anyway, and are willing to pay for it. Maybe magazine ads are a great way to reach dedicated readers.
Writing things for free online is probably not a great way to be memorable on average, unless the platform is something people dedicate time to reading. I am loath to say it’s pointless to do so (because it isn’t), but when I have a choice, I’m going to pick platforms that are opt-in to push my writing.
I don’t think I’ve squeezed all the understanding out of this data, so I’m happy to discuss the data with anyone who might be interested. I’m also open to more questions on this, so we can understand this data better. I would also like to come up with a more comprehensive survey, so we can understand the landscape of media consumption better, and if you have any ideas, please let me know!