WARD RICKER

How do people find out about the books they buy?

Now that I have one book published and another well on its way to being ready I wish to know how to market my books. The obvious question that comes up when I ask myself this is, How do people typically find out about the books that they purchase to read? I was only able to find two websites that gave any information about this -- Forbes and Pew Research Center -- so I decided to do some of my own research by way of surveying the public. Since I am such a fine and wonderful guy (Ooops! My arm just broke!) I am sharing this information for free with any other wannabe million-seller authors.

I have done three surveys: a nationwide (U.S.A.) telephone survey, a verbal survey here in downtown Eugene, Oregon, and a written survey here in Eugene. I was only able to obtain a small amount (less than 50) of responses to the telephone survey after about 15 hours of being on the phone. The verbal survey, consisting of the same two questions -- What was the last book you purchased to read for pleasure? and, How did you find out that that book exists? -- got about the same number of results but in a shorter amount of time. I got the most results to my paper survey in Eugene, and so those are the results I am reporting here.

The survey consisted of a single "multiple choice" question as shown on the picture below:

I encountered people at random in downtown Eugene. When I handed them the paper to fill out I told them that I was looking for how they found out about the books they buy, not necessarily where they go to actually buy them. (I believe most people did not take the time to actually read the question at the top of the paper, so this was important to do.) People checked off however many responses were applicable to them. I collected 148 surveys. Here are the number of times each item was checked out of 148 surveys:

Word of mouth	122
Recommendation by professionals	46
Online search	66
Official notification	13
Social media	46
Traditional media	25
Find on shelf	83

Write-in ("Other") enties were:

(illegible)	follow favorite authors	podcast
Amazon browsing similar terms	found in free box at yard sales	podcast/interviews
anarchist libraries	friends	podcasts
author recommendations	garage/yard sales, thrift stores	prison
bibliographies famous authors, scientists, journalists, etc.	garage sales	random wanderings
book group	Good Reads	read books and bibliographies
book magazine adds (sic)	Instagram	recommendation
book stores	learned about the book from another book	research myself
browse	library	second hand stores
continue with same author	library shelves, too	second hand stores
discussion	looking up if someone has wrote a book	serendipity
don't buy them, they are just given to me	needed to catch some (illegible)	the Internet/Reddit
email lists I'm on tell me about them	New York Review of Books	through referencing or word of mouth
find in store	NPR
finding on the books themselves, back cover of other books by author	order

As you may note, some of these write-in comments probably equate to options that were already provided on the survey, but I am reporting the results exactly as I obtained them.

Although limited in scope (geographically, as well as in number of responses) the survey finds that word of mouth is the most common way that people learn about books. This agrees with the Forbes article, and somewhat with the Pew article, although the Pew article deals only with "remommendations", and does not address every way in which a person might find out about a book. The second most commom way of finding a book is by simply noticing it sitting on a shelf. Also, podcasts, libraries and other books were each listed three times in the "other" cateogory. These could also be significant sources by which people find out about books. (Presumably they would have been marked more often if they had been given as options in the main list.)

If you wish you may view the actual spreadsheet of the results.