Answer: You are an American male in his twenties
Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific survey, I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.
Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not all readers are typical. Some are women in their 30’s from South Africa with graduate degrees; others are older, younger, or more international. And one could easily fault the methodology: it relied completely on self-reporting, with no particular incentive for readers to click the link to take the survey.
Yet the trends in the data are so clear that there’s not a lot of point keeping the survey running any longer. If you don’t believe me, maybe some charts will prove the point:
The vast majority of readers are men. That’s no surprise, but I wasn’t expecting almost 90%. I don’t know whether this reflects the reality of the male/female split among screenwriters or not. Regardless, I try to vary to my pronouns, so that I’m not always talking about “a screenwriter and his script.”
Readers are a little older than I thought. Had I known that the under-20 categories would be so sparsely populated, I would have broken up the age groups differently. Given the average age, I may feel a little more liberty to swear.
Based on my experience with questions from the IMDb, I assumed the readership was a little more international. I’ll continue to try to make my answers applicable overseas, at least in cases where I know the different terminology.
Again, this is different than the average readership of the IMDb page. At least a third of the questions I get from IMDb are written by non-native speakers.
Sometimes, I wish there were a little flag graphic readers could put on a post that signified English wasn’t their first language. A lot of the mocking and flame wars that happen in discussion forums might disappear if everyone took a step back and realized they didn’t have the same fluency in the language. We need to reward international readers for taking a chance by writing in. It takes guts. I speak Spanish, but I would never be brave enough to leave a comment on a Spanish-language site.
This goes hand-in-hand with the age question. The average reader is much further along in his education than I would have guessed. So along with more swearing, I’ll feel free to talk about keggers.
This is the best distribution among any of the survey questions. As expected, most readers are on the early side of their writing careers, but a sizable number has also written a lot more. (For the record, I’ve written 23 feature scripts and six television scripts.)
Very few readers are WGA members. That’s what I suspected, which is one reason that I avoid talking about WGA politics and issues. (The other reason: for most of the important questions, there’s no clear answer.)
Shortly after I posted the survey, a reader pointed out that the question as originally worded didn’t make any sense to people who were subscribing to the feed, since the feed pulls down new entries whenever they’re posted. So I added the parenthetical. Either way, the question doesn’t tell us a lot. I only update the site every few days, so visiting more often than that probably isn’t helpful.
From the web stats, I can tell how many times the RSS or Atom feeds are hit, but aggregators like Bloglines make it hard to gauge what percentage of readers are actually using the feeds. I suspect in a year or two, as syndication feeds get better integrated, these percentages will even out.
Question 10 was a free answer essay. Remarkably, almost half of you wrote something. In a subsequent post, I’ll list the most interesting and helpful suggestions, some of which I plan to implement right away.
Once again, thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. It really helped me get a better sense of who I’m writing for.
Articles
April 28th, 2005 at 9:43 am
Thanks, John.
You know, for someone who has written 23 scripts, I’m surprised you had time to build this page at all, much less update or improve it. It is greatly appreciated. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, wisdom and experience with us.
Swear away.
April 28th, 2005 at 11:15 am
I really do think that the male/female split for screenwriters is pretty much accurate. I’ve just noticed that there really aren’t many female screenwriters.
And John. Swear. Swear like you had money invested in each and every word. And talk about keggers, I believe it’s an area of discussion that has been too long left to the waysides.
April 28th, 2005 at 11:53 am
John:
As always, I tip my hat to you and your lovely survey skills. :)
When my site is a little more mature, I’ll be bugging you for tips on how to do this very same thing.
C.
April 28th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
I was wondering why you thoguht the average visitor was younger. I hope that it is not due to an impression given by our writing (i.e. spelling and grammatical mistakes).
April 28th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
I always assumed that the average reader was early-20s, maybe finishing up undergrad or just starting graduate work. I felt that because it seemed a lot of questions John receives are about simple things and a lot reflect the fact that a lot of people haven’t been out in Hollywood yet. I figured if the readership was older, there’d be fewer questions about screenwriting basics since, for the most part, I believed that most 30+ year old people on a screenwriting site would be screenwriters and be able to answer many of these questions without John’s assistance.
That being said, I’m 19 and I really appreciate the site even if I’m in the minority right now. It’s helped me out a lot–far more than any screenwriting book I’ve read so far.
April 29th, 2005 at 6:47 am
The problem with that assumption (from Drew above) is that most people visiting this web site are actively pursuing screenwriting careers. I would venture a guess that a lot of people love movies and hence love John’s perspective on part of the craft. Yes we’d love to some day be part of the industry but for the most part we’re happy as spectators to the process. Also, not everyone starts at the age of 19 and so not everone is a working screenwriter at 30 :)
April 29th, 2005 at 8:35 am
I think the “How often do you visit” results are probably heavily skewed towards people who visit the site frequently. Because the survey was only active for a short period of time, the segment of your user population that was most likely to fill it out are the people who check the website daily or several times a day. Most people who visit only once a week or every few days would have missed the survey entirely.
If that’s the case, then it might make sense to see if there are other demographic similarities for people the visit the site daily, or several times a day. You might find that your once a week audience (who didn’t get to fill out the survey) is older or has a higher female percentage.
April 30th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
Loved the survey idea, but was a bit discouraged by the results, as it looks like I have few sisters who site. I am now sending out a mass email to all of my creative women friends to check it out. I feel any artist who takes the time to share his knowledge should be rewarded by readership :) And yes, I feel it is a big problem there aren’t as many women screenwriters yet there are way too many female actresses (hmmm strange). I decided to start writing screenplays, because, as an actress I wasn’t able to find enough roles that explored the complexity of women, so I am writing my own. Still, I would have done anything to play a Charlie’s Angel–what true woman wouldn’t ;) at least they are writing fun kick-ass scripts for women sometimes!
April 30th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
oh wow, didn’t proof-read..oops!
May 2nd, 2005 at 10:43 am
I agree, I’m fascinated by the results of the survey. However there’s one question that I really would have liked to know the answer to: How many people who vist this site are seriously/actively pursuing a screenwriting career?
To clarify, there are many who study the craft, write a screenplay or two and might send it in to a few companies or actor’s agents now and then. That’s fine if that’s in line with your goals. But I’m curious about how many toil at their “pay-the-bills” job during the day, then really exploit every avenue to eventually win their dream prize of being, well, a John August. I’m referring to hitting contests (if so, how many/which ones?), actively querying, networking, persuing agents/managers (not in the stalking sense, of course), etc.
Basically just curious if most people here are, for lack of better terminology, active or passive screenwriters. Based on the survey results, I now wonder if most aren’t taking the passive approach (mostly due to the age brackets and being in school.) And don’t get me wrong, to each their own whatever you choose, just curious.
May 2nd, 2005 at 11:36 am
Great question, Derek. I wish I’d included it. Maybe in Survey 2.0 (whenever that comes).
May 2nd, 2005 at 2:48 pm
It is interesting to see that 40.5% of the respondents are somewhere in the US other than LA. It would have been interesting to see how that broke down for New York, California other, and other regions.
May 5th, 2005 at 10:17 am
Woman, actively pursuing screenwriting career, read your site regularly, except during the survey period. Go figure. Thanks for your insights, John.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:12 am
Would it be possible to have a full breakdown of all categories? I.e, American, British, et al. I found the data interesting and helpful.