I’m plugging a new study by Lambda Literary Foundation and St. Cloud State University. They’re surveying LGBT people about their book reading preferences (i.e. print books vs. e-books) in order to find out how to best reach LGBT readers.
I included the full press release below, and you can do the survey here.
I did it. It was fun. 🙂
The study caught my eye as an upcoming author who is batting around different ideas for marketing my work. As I filled out the survey, I realized how much my reading and book-finding habits have changed, in a really short span of time actually.
If you asked me two years ago, 100 percent of the books I read would be print. If you asked me one year ago, I’d say about sixty percent of the books I read were print. Today, that percentage has dwindled to about ten percent. I read books on my Nook almost exclusively.
And as a result, I’ve become a much different book-buyer and browser. I used to go to bookstores about once a month. Now, the last time I went to a book store was three months ago; and the last time before that was probably another three months back.
It’s sad on one hand, I think, for those of us Gen Xers who used to love browsing a bookshop, getting pulled in by an interesting book cover, and feeling like we were supporting Literature and independent booksellers with our purchases. Those shops are few and far between.
On the other hand, there’s something really encouraging about the growth of e-books and on-line bookselling. On-line booksellers offer sooo much more variety, and inventory. Â I’m often looking to read something specific, like ancient world fiction or gay fantasy. Searching on-line, I can usually pull up dozens of those kind of titles pretty quickly, and there are published reviews and reader reviews and sample chapters to help me decide which ones to buy.
I think the great thing is that readers can find “niche” literature like LGBT fiction much easier than they could five or ten years ago.
Here’s the press release from Lambda:
Lambda Literary Foundation and St. Cloud State University
Conducting International Study
of Book Reading Preferences of LGBT People Â
St. Cloud, Minnesota – What type of books do LGBT people like to read? How and where do they find the books that they like to read? Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) and St Cloud State University Collection Management Librarian Rachel Wexelbaum are conducting an international study on the book reading preferences of 21st century LGBT people to help answer these questions.
This is the first large-scale study of LGBT book readership conducted in the age of EBooks and mobile devices. Librarians, writers, publishers, educators, counselors, and others are often operating on assumptions of what types of books LGBT readers prefer, how they find those books, and how they read them, based on pre-Internet reading habits. The results of this survey will help determine how best to reach LGBT book readers.
To take the survey now, click here.Â
For more information about this study, please contact Rachel Wexelbaum atrswexelbaum@stcloudstate.edu.
