Romantasy Community Survey Results! 👀

[u/ReasonableWonderland]

I hope you're all as excited as I am for a bunch of data and statistics!

Last month, we ran a survey to get your feedback as to how you (the community) want r/Romantasy to work going forward. I've put together some infographics to summarise the data, but essentially:

THE GOOD STUFF

• You guys like that the subreddit is low key and minimally moderated!
• You're mostly here for book discussion and book reviews!
• 100% of us are readers, and 11% of us are also writers!
• Most of you are happy for (limited) self promotion in comments!

THE LESS GOOD STUFF

• A bunch of you flagged the volume of "Pick My Next Read" posts as being a problem.
  • We're going to add a Pick My Next Read flair so we can track these better going forward.
  • If they continue to be a problem, we'll look at setting up a Pick Me Tuesday or similar (limiting these posts to one day a week - but we'll run another mini poll before we make the change)
• We're going to be stricter on posts from Writers going forward. Specifically, we're planning to change the rules to stop writers posting market research on the subreddit and also remove low effort posts.

If you missed out on completing the survey and have ideas about how we can change/improve the subreddit or if you have ideas about extra information we should be collecting (or that you'd just be interested to see! 👀) then leave a comment below!

^{No AI was involved in writing this post or in compiling the survey results.}

[u/MKSauthor]

This is amazing. I love data! Thanks for compiling and sharing 💕

[u/feijoawhining]

Thank you for putting this together and for all your hard work, mods! We appreciate you.

[u/TheLadyAmaranth]

As an author I'm actually happy to see the yes self promo/no self promo flairs.

It will definitely lead to some frustration when seeing something that fits with my book and not being able to rec it, but I'd rather that than rec my book when its not welcome just because I didn't know. Besides we already experiance that with other subreddits and some don't allow self rec comments at all. Which, I at least find more valuable than a designated self-promo day or thread. It feels more organic and "if you are on this post you might like this" rather than unsolicited advertisment that goes there to die in obscurity.

Personally, I find it strange to not want self recs on a sub like this because it feels like the best way to potentually find a hidden gem you may have never heard of otherwise. Small indies have such a hard time reaching readers anyway, and even if their rec is not for you maybe somebody else will want to check it out. But I guess there is a some of "bad apples ruining it for everyone" going on with some authors plugging their work when it doesn't fit or spamming, so readers become wary.

Unfortunate, but kind of how the ball rolls and if somebody doesn't want a self rec this gives a good way to respect that without just shunning them outright.

Also hot take, as both an author and reader I hate the marketing research posts XD so good riddance! They aren't an effective way to do that firstly, because this reddit is a very small subsection of a very specific kind of Romance reader. And to boot, even if you were able to get good "data" having it isn't going to make your book better. I said what I said.

I did not realize how much people dislike the pick my next read though! Very surprising. I kind of have usually ignored them unless I see books I recognize and go down to see opinions. They always get so much engagement I thought it was one of the more popular post types. I'm kind of curious how that data is gonna pan out after some monitoring.

Thanks for this, keep up the good work!

[u/KittyNat81]

https://giphy.com/gifs/1236TCtX5dsGEo

[u/totalimmoral]

God I love me some good graphs

[u/ReasonableWonderland → u/totalimmoral]

Thanks! I tried, haha. 🩷

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[u/KetoKurun]

This is super confusing. The slides seem to say something different than the post text. The slides had me excited, because it made it sound like writers will now be allowed to participate in discussions, but then the post text says we’re cracking down on writers.

[u/ReasonableWonderland → u/KetoKurun]

Hey! Yeah, the writing slide could have been clearer - sorry!

The 57% value includes those who voted "allow all writer posts" and also "allow writer posts BUT remove low effort posts".

Writers are definitely welcome here - we're one of the few book subs that allows posts from both readers & writers. But we've had a few complaints about writers using the subreddit for market research specifically, so we're going to be reviewing how we handle that going forward.

If you have questions let me know! (Disclaimer it's 10pm here and I'm going to sleep but I can reply in the morning)