This Is Us! (Book Community Census Results 1)

In January, I launched a large survey for book bloggers and book tubers to gain some oversight of our wonderful community. When it closed in May, the survey had almost 390 responses – which, whilst a little way from my target of 500, is still an impressive number of responses that hopefully mean the survey is somewhat representative of the community. Below is a breakdown and commentary of the first batch of results – who we are and where we come from. To stay updated with the remaining results, or be notified when the 2016 survey is lvie, you can sign up to receive email notifications here.

In some cases the percentages have been rounded up or down.

Age Unsurprisingly, 15-25 years old is the most popular age to be with 60% of the share! I was expecting a slightly larger response with the under 14s – they only had 11%. < 14(11%) 15-18(32%) 19-25(33%) 26-30(10%) 31-40(10%) Remaining: 2% prefer not to say, 1% 41-50, 1% 50+.

Sex/Gender An unsurprising result: 88% of all booktubers and bookbloggers are female. This question was meant to map sex rather than gender, though I should have made this clearer in the question. Something to keep in mind for next year! female(87%) male(12%) Remaining: 2% prefer not to say, 1% intersex.

We identify as… This is a little more interesting. 76% of us said they were straight – a further 17% were NOT heterosexual. This is a complete contrast to survey-based guestimates of LGBT+ populations in the UK and US, which are approximately 1.5-2.3% of national populations. That means the LGBT+ community of bookbloggers and booktubers is roughly 7 times larger. bi(9%) gay(4%) straight(76%) n/a(7%) Remaining: 2% asexual, 2% other, 1% genderqueer.

Of those who consider themselves gay, 68% were male; 25% female and 1 candidate preferred not to say.

Of those who consider themselves bi, 87% were female, with only a few respondents of male or unspecified sex.

We’re based in… The US and UK take the lion’s share, though in part this is to do with the language and nations it was shared in; I know that the Philippines, for example, has a very strong book community, but it doesn’t really register here. Australia(4%) Canada(5%) United Kingdom(30%) United States(43%) Other Nations(18%) Remaining: 1% Germany, 0.5% Netherlands. Traces of: Belgium, France, Sweden, Slovakia, Portugal, Romania, Noway, Denmark, Ukraine, Serbia, Poland, Belarus, Austria, Singapore, Russia, South Korea, South Africa, Trinidad & Tobago, the Philippines, Panama, Mexico, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Chile.

We are a… Now we come to questions relating to bookblogging and booktubing. It’s unsuprising that bookblogging takes the majority; it’s been around longer so has had more time to build more momentum. It will be interesting to see how these figures change over time. Of the remaining, some were readers, or bookstagrammers and others had mistakenly completed the questionnaire. This was a multiple choice question, so some people are active in more than one medium. bookbloggers(67%) booktubers(37%) other(15%)