An American survey by Spier’s of New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher’s Web site, but 23% of readers have visited an author’s site.
The Spier’s survey was only small but found that half of those asked said they had purchased a book as a gift within the past year.
According to the survey, 86% of those who purchased a book as a present bought at least two books.
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Ex-con Jeffrey Archer has signed a new book deal. He’ll deliver three novels and a book of short stories over the next six years, including A Prisoner of Birth, “the story of a man wrongly imprisoned for murder who escapes in a rather ingenious way,” and a novel based on George Mallory’s 1924 attempt to climb Everest, to Macmillan, for £12 million.
Makes me want to weep.
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Take the questionnaire over at the political compass site and see where you stand on the left wing/right wing; authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. Or maybe you know already . . .
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Dec 16th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Jeffrey Archer, I had quite forgotten about him. 12 million pounds, eh? Those sure are figures to compete with the hippest and trendiest TV and film personalities. While we always cry that literature never gets the financial and artistic benefits as other, more commercial forms of entertainment, this once again proves it does… once it has become just that: bland entertainment and ego worshipping. Sad.
As for the questionnaire, I hate doing those: they’re hard and never nuanced and obviously I do know their outcome in advance. I was happy to see, though, that I rank with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. Sounds like interesting company, wouldn’t you say?
jb says: Hi Nils, yes, take the meaning away and anything that might make an audience think and you’ve got a product that could make millions.
And I ended up in the same quarter as you after the questionnaire. Not many of us over here, these days, but, as you say, the company is definitely interesting.
The problem with those kind of questionnaires is that they don’t make it possible for you to slip off the graph altogether.