FYA Birthday Survey: Results

Last month, FYA celebrated its third birthday with a fun pop quiz! Well, less fun pop quiz and more boring survey, but y’all must love questionnaires because a TON of you responded. And now I have a giant excel spreadsheet that I’m not entirely sure what to do with. I do love a good pivot table, though, so here are some of the results.

Who are you, YAngelists?

Let’s first of all acknowledge that this is not necessarily a perfectly representative sample size of our readership. This is merely a sample of our readership who is willing to fill out online forms. I also didn’t bother to calculate confidence intervals or run F tests or do any of the other statistically responsible things I should have done because I’m lazy and also remember very little from Econometrics at this point in my life. But whatever, this is a blog post, not an empirical research study. My point is, take all of this with a grain of salt.

Google makes some cool shit, y’all.

We didn’t ask the gender question because LOLZ. I know you’re all ladies. Except for you there. Hi Brian!

What do you want out of this site?

When asked how many times a day we should post you responded with an average of 2.9 posts a day. Which is pretty much what we do! Of course, the range of your responses was all over the map, so individually, few of you are getting what you want. But collectively, we all win!

Your top five favorite types of posts are as follows:

5. Author Interviews
4. TV Recaps
3. Movie Reviews
2. YA News
1. Book Reports

Thank GOD you like the Book Reports. Otherwise shizz was about to get real awkward in here, since that’s, you know, the primary purpose of this site.

A note on the other types of posts: we try to make sure there’s something for everyone. For instance, despite being one of the most popular kinds of posts, a number of you called for fewer TV recaps, leaving more room for other types of posts. It’s hard to find the right balance, but we’ll continue to seek your feedback to find out what shows we should keep recapping, and maybe try some different formats while we’re at it. People have conflicting interests, so we’ll try to accommodate everyone as best we can.

Let’s talk book clubs:

About 15% of the respondents are members of FYA book clubs. That’s SO AWESOME, you guys! 15% might not seem like a high percentage of you, but 1) that’s a large number of people and 2) 15% is like 1 in 7 of those of you willing to fill out surveys. 1 in 7 all reading the same book and getting out of your house every month to make new friends! THAT’S SO AWESOME, Y’ALL.

As for the rest of you, what, what, WHAT are you doing? Perhaps you have trouble navigating our new site, and need help finding things. I’m here to help! Let’s talk about this menu:

Just hover over the "FYA" tab and you'll find all sorts of goodies, like the book club page and the lexicon. You can also find different types of posts, such as book reports or movie-related things, by hovering over "categories," and our recurring series by looking under "features:

And if you’re not in a book club because there’s not one in your area, why don’t you start one? There’s a form for that, and I know how you all like forms. Or maybe you’ve already filled out a form, but there’s no one else in your area yet. Grab a couple friends and start a club anyway; soon, other people might show up. If you build it, they will come!

Now for the fun stuff:

But y’all. I am seriously concerned about your reading comprehension skills. I had to throw out a bunch of the data because like two dozen of you listed an FYA writer as your favorite young adult author. And yes, I want Erin to start writing YA books as much as you do, but willing it to be will not make it so.

Other comments or concerns:

There was lots of other great feedback that is hard to quantify here but will definitely be taken into consideration. We’re working on an FAQ page for some of the most common questions, but let’s address a few of them now:

First of all, THE SEARCH BOX IS FIXED. CUE THE TRUMPETS! It was actually fixed several weeks ago, but you might have missed that memo. Search away!

Second--the RSS feed! We tweeted about a chrome extension that allows you to view full blogs in google reader, but we've also been told that our own RSS feed will be fixed by tomorrow, so that problem is also solved!

Third, we're still working on getting the complete book report list updated. The reason it's taking so long is that we're trying to automate it so that we don't miss any reviews! But in order to do that, we have to go back in time and edit every single book review we've ever written. There are HUNDREDS. And so our beloved FYA interns, Caroline and Mandy, are working furiously to help us accomplish this. We owe them like a million champ cans.

Lastly, several of you expressed interest in having more guest posts. Well, in order to do that, we need more of you submitting Smarty Pants posts! Here are some guidelines to help you get started.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our survey, and keep your questions and comments coming!