Wednesday, 23 March 2016

The Importance of Research

To follow up with my idea of creating a book about loss, I decided to do some primary and secondary research. Primary research is where you gather information yourself, that is relevant to what you need, whether that be in articles or in questionnaire's, etc. Secondary research is different because other's have put it together, so, for instance, statistics and already made surveys, etc.

Research is really important because it helps you build and support ideas and/or projects. With research, you can tweak certain ideas so they become more successful, and it can help you relate your work to your audience, too. This includes market research, which usually means visiting a location or certain site that's relevant to what you're researching. This is important as you can see what other brands (etc) have used or applied, for instance, I visited a book store to help with research on book covers. This helped me to see whether the covers were important to what people were buying, etc.

For instance, if I wanted to write a romance novel I could create a survey asking what age groups read romance novels. I could use articles also to help me model my survey, and I could also search for other surveys that are similar. This would help me gain all the information I need for my book so I can write to a relevant audience.

I did create an online survey to help gather first hand research, and discovered a lot to help me with my project. For instance, I asked what genres were people's favourites. Over 50% said romance, action/adventure and fantasy. This helps me see what people like to read, and, possibly, what sections in bookstores they shop in. This helped towards my FMP as I can now consider adding some elements of romance into my chapter, to help draw in a larger audience.

I also asked about online reading on websites. The results weren't as I expected as I thought that not many people would use online websites for reading. However, as you can see, 50% don't use websites, however 50% do and over 45% of those use a website called Wattpad - one I have used before. This helps my FMP, as now I can think about publishing the chapter online to reach a wider audience.

As far as secondary research goes, I've done a lot of research in books and plays for my theme. This is to get a more grounded knowledge for my theme on loss, so my project is accurate and relevant. First, I found a quote from John Irving's book A Prayer to Owen Meany, 'When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time', which shows the time it takes to heal from loss, and this made me change my theme slightly to coping.

I've also done some research on author's websites to see what theme, colours, font, etc, they use. I looked at a couple on another blog here, but it really helped my project as it gave me an idea for my website. The sites are creative and have lots of links and interactive parts, so I have decided to try and include these in my own way.

Finally, I did some research on pricing and marketing. I need to see what my book would sell at and how much it would be to produce it. As I'm doing a chapter, I decided to price the whole 400 page novel as a pre-order, to make it easier. I looked online and many sites said to not go cheap as readers pay a good sum for their reading material, and cheap usually reflects on the book in a bad way. I found a great chart on this website which tells the average pricing of books. This really helped me decide on the pricing of my book and whether I wanted a huge profit or not, etc.

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