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Old 04-16-2023, 10:45 PM   #8
Elfwreck
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Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
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I technically use "social media" but the only ones I use are Tumblr and Discord, and neither of them is going to welcome publishers trying to advertise more. (Is Discord social media? I have no idea.)

A good portion of the questionnaire is useless - "what makes a publisher's website more appealing to customers" (or whatever the exact phrasing was) is not something you find out by asking individual customers what they like most, because plenty of people will say "I would buy things if they cost less" and then won't buy them when prices are lowered. Or they'll say "I'd buy more if there were reviews on the books" and again, that's not what actually drives sales.

DRM was not an answer for any of the questions. Format ("ebook, audiobook") was mentioned, but not filetype. (I'm not buying fiction in PDF.) And format was mentioned as an option - one factor among many - rather than "If it's not available in a format that's useful for me, I'm not buying it; doesn't matter how much I might want to read it."

It keeps mentioning "social media" like that's a single thing, or all interchangeable. Like there's no difference between "I follow some book rec feeds on Twitter" and "I'm in some private forums that have book discussions." (Note that publishers can see the former; they can't see or influence the latter at all.) (Most of my actual book recs in the last couple of years have come from a private chat focused around an online dragon game.)

It mentions "influencers" like there's any agreement at all about who those are.

It didn't even ask "how many books do you normally buy in a year?" So it's giving the same weight to answers from someone who reads one or two books in a year, based on celebrity recommendations on TV, vs someone who buys a few books every week based on recs at SBTB and the Hugo Book Club Blog.

This questionnaire will mostly serve to reinforce the biases that went into making it, because there's no options to mention different approaches to finding & buying books.
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