OVER 1000 WRITERS ANSWERED // traditional vs. self publishing, genres, making money, & more!

hey guys i'm kate welcome back to my channel and a while ago i asked you guys to fill out this questionnaire over on my community tab i called it to your writing experience and goals with a little smiley face the questions were kind of an assortment of things ranging from a variety of topics surrounding like your aspirations for your potential publishing career if you've made money from writing previously what kind of genre you like to write in so i figured i would kind of go over the stats with you guys because i found them really interesting um yeah within the first like 36 hours i already had over a thousand responses which is freaking phenomenal i actually ended up capping it a few days later even though like responses were still kind of trickling in so we had a total of 1247 responses total to cover these stats so when i asked you guys how long you considered writing to be a passion or even a hobby the biggest chunk came in at 10 to 20 years which isn't super surprising if i looked at my analytics i think my age range tends to be around late 20s early 30s on average so for example i selected the 10 to 20 years i am 28 years old as of this filming oh i just turned 28 and a half and i would consider myself to have been writing kind of consistently since i was 13 so that's about 15 years and that's what i selected the one that really surprised me though was have you taken any kind of formal writing class i wish i would have asked if y'all went to you know college university what you majored in but i did not do that 42.3 percent of y'all said yes that you had taken a class so while it wasn't the majority it was such a close split and actually when i looked at the authortubers numbers moore had taken formal classes on writing which i don't know if that's surprising or not it's certainly interesting and i believe i had over a hundred authortubers or so that submitted answers so after i extrapolated out the authortubers and sort of separated the two groups of creators specifically and then viewers of the viewers 40.8 had taken a formal or traditional class on writing so no master class types but this was different from 56.5 of other tubers who had taken a formal class on writing um i'm not someone who has taken a formal class so this was just super interesting i am a little bit curious how many people went on to get potentially an advanced degree in writing this is something i've seen some famous authors do like i believe marissa meyer has some kind of masters in writing but it's obviously it's not necessary to be a good writer right it's just i just find it interesting i think a lot of stuff like this there's a time commitment and i think sometimes getting an advanced degree because you have to be putting in time for the degree it kind of gives you that avenue but again you don't need one 93 of you guys are already published or hope to be published one day we'll get into that stat a little bit more but yeah only seven percent of y'all have no aspirations to be published i think what i'll do the next time i have a poll is kind of guess what these stats are going to be ahead of time damn that plane's left the seven percent sounds about right to me i have had people in my comments say that they only want to write fan fiction and for them that doesn't count as being published so that's certainly still sort of writing for an audience there's some people who don't want to share their writing ever at all and it's just kind of this you know some kind of catharsis for them and this is where we get into the interesting bits right so it asks what avenue of publication have you pursued or are you considering so this is something to note is that though i had over 1200 responses i am pulling my audience so people that would have seen my community tab and decided to answer so there's already some kind of percentage of people that might have interesting stats that just aren't going to fill out a questionnaire but also if someone like alexa dud were to be you know pulling people because she talks a lot more about traditional publishing i think her answers would have skewed more towards traditional publishing than mine did that being said 37.3 of people wanted to be traditionally published only with 43 wanting to be hybrid which was the most popular answer now again i don't know if that's because i've been you know i've talked about how i want to be a hybrid published author you know fingers crossed as i can't control the traditional side of things and i don't know if that means other people who also want to be hybrid published kind of gravitate toward my channel or what it is thirteen point six percent want to be self or indie published exclusively and then six point one percent say none i don't wanna be published which in comparison with the full seven percent earlier is kind of an interesting dynamic don't really know what happened there entirely could potentially be that if someone doesn't want to continue being published and maybe their first publication was forever ago they weren't really sure how to answer there are a couple places here where i'm like i maybe wasn't as clear as i could have been but yes so once again once i pulled the authortubers away 38.13 of viewers wanted to pursue traditional publications specifically compared to only 29.5 so it's like 30 versus 40 but yeah only 30 of authortubers wanted to pursue traditional publication and i think that is sort of reflected in the people that i have seen that i've watched the one that really shocked me was do you want to use a pin name came in at 58.5 said yes so again this isn't that far off from like a 50 50 split but as kate cavanaugh as a pin name as i often talk about pen names i have to wonder if that has anything to do with it if me being more vocal about pen names as part of it because i know some authortubers who aren't as vocal but they use pen names like i know that those are pin names so it's just kind of interesting i'd love in some kind of made up world which can't be possible if we could multiple of us put out a questionnaire at the same time and see if that has any kind of determination if our audiences skew a little bit different i'd be interested like the courtney project if the courtney project did it how many more self-publishing people would she get for what age range do you write in i let people select multiple options 66.7 of people who watch my channel write in y a now they might write in other things but they definitely write by a followed by 55.6 percent right adult 52.4 right new adult and then 14.8 percent middle grade and 5.6 right children's our picture book now what genres you write in was another one perhaps like if you write in multiple genres please click all that you write in i had to do a little bit of correction of the numbers um which i'll flash on the screen because i left out two genres multiple genres but two that i write in which are contemporary and lgbtq plus i didn't put them on there and i write in them often so i don't know my brain was just like i'm trying to get as many as possible i don't know if i overcrossed some or what but it's fine thank you guys everyone for writing it in the most popular genres were fantasy romance science fiction mystery we got speculative fiction in there actually at a higher amount than i would have thought literary was also higher than i would have thought so it's just kind of cool i don't know that i see that represented all the time in the live stream so um it's just interesting to kind of consider for what type of writing would you do this actually inspired me i won't talk about it too much but i had an idea i had an epiphany from this one but 92.9 of people write novels now they might be writing other stuff but they definitely write novels 50 of us write short stories though like that's something i would have selected novels short stories novellas but i just found it really interesting that it was so high over 50 50.8 also wrote short stories so novelis was 35 poetry 26.3 i feel like authortube in general does not represent poetry nearly as much as people who selected that so it's just very fascinating essays for 16.5 screenwriting 13.1 epics 8.8 for have you ever written fan fiction 42.7 said no i've never written fan fiction the rest of us either have or are currently writing it and i don't know why i found that surprising i guess it's just based off of the writers that i talked to almost all of them wrote fanfiction and so for that to be such a high number that have not ever it's just so interesting to me that people started with this kind of original fiction um it's just we all have different paths you know and one of the answers that made me feel really good was that 70.2 percent of us have taken a break from writing longer than six months it's reassuring in some ways that it's okay you can take a break and the writing is always going to be there so then i have one of my first if you answered yes to the previous question let me know this kind of thing where i asked what the longest amount of time you've been away from writing is and the six months to a year was the main choice at just over 50 and this is where i should have done like six months to 11 months and then like 12 months to one year and then 1.1 years to two you know kind of thing but i overlapped them a little bit but once two years followed that then two to five and it just makes sense it's easy to understand how that would happen for have you ever been paid to write 21.6 percent of people said yes this is the one that i was really interested in when i take authortubers out of the equation and just compare the two twenty point two percent of viewers had been paid to write in some capacity versus the creators where 33.6 had been paid to write in some capacity and again self-publishing can be included in here so of the 269 responses i got that people have been paid to write and they could select multiple of these so they could have been paid to also freelance while writing articles on medium or while getting a traditional publishing contract so you could do multiple 42.4 said they worked as a copywriter or an essay article writer or some other kind of writer on a freelance basis 33.8 percent were currently or have been employed by a specific company so one company in a part-time or full-time capacity writing doing some kind of writing whether that's like ad copy or anything else so one company not freelance then 25.7 had self-published again these numbers differ from when i extrapolate out the authortubers which is a higher percentage 24.9 currently sell or have sold articles or essays to newspapers or magazines 11.5 had posted to websites like medium or others that pay based off of the number of views you get and then unsurprisingly 11.2 percent ever had a traditional publishing contract but that is 30 responses and it's really interesting to me because obviously if you look at authortube as a whole i think i can name three people off the top of my head that make videos that have or had traditional publishing contracts not ones that are currently pursuing it necessarily but like that already have it so like liz elsa and berry alexa dunn michelle schusterman and this is where i was training because i'm sure there's more but certainly not you know 30 of them making videos about it that i'm aware of so it's just kind of interesting it's still obviously less than self-publishing but it's not nearly as underrepresented as it is compared to people who are making videos about it and then for the last question which was do you currently have an authortube channel i only did that so that i would be able to extrapolate the data later and sort of see uh the difference but nine point eight percent of people have an authortube channel i really don't know what i thought the answer was going to be to that um i guess 10 isn't surprising if you look at based off of views necessarily but i honestly don't know i don't know let me know comment down below that might be like a normal ratio for other communities like the booktube community too i would be really interesting to see but yeah so nine point eight percent of people who filled out the survey did have it on youtube channel and then the coolest other thing was all these other questions other than the like if you answered yes kind of thing were required questions so i think that was like 13 14 or 15 that were required for you to answer but the last one was not required at all and it was if you could ask your fellow writers one other question what would it be and i got 719 responses which is so cool so i'm still kind of peeling through that data and i'm either going to use it to make another sort of interesting pull like this because there's some follow-up questions that i would like to ask or just make videos about it so it's very cool thank you guys so much for submitting your responses but please do comment down below let me know if any of these statistics sort of surprised you um again i'm gonna have to add that there's an asterisk here because it's just the people specifically who follow me and i think if anyone else had asked these questions the answer would be different even if we have some amount of crossover so um take that as you will yes let me know if some of the responses didn't surprise you at all um i think the ones that didn't surprise me a lot of people write fantasy that wasn't surprising and also let me know if there's any questions that you would love to know that i did not include in this particular poll or if there's an entire sort of little little if there's an entire sort of survey topic that you'd like to cover i did again called those like passions and goals and like experience um so it was kind of hodge podge together thank you guys so much for watching and i'll see y'all very soon with a new video bye oh that's what i should have said at the beginning the highest was 66.7 of people who watch my channel who filled out the questionnaire my goodness it's extra a lot today but thank you guys so much for watching oh yeah that's it

Channel: Kate Cavanaugh

Views: 9,589

Rating: 4.9547381 out of 5

Keywords: writing survey, writing, publishing, book publishing, writing novel, novel, nanowrimo, paid to write, copywriter, freelance writer, freelance writing, indie author, indie publishing, self publishing, author survey, writers answered

Id: ayBnWyIbQ5Y

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021