Asking your readers things
You have a list of people who read your book and then handed over their address. That is a research panel drawn from exactly the population publishers pay agencies to assemble, sitting in your account, costing nothing, and most authors never ask it anything.
Partly that is politeness. Mostly it is that the first question everybody thinks of is the one question that produces nothing.
The question not to ask
"What should I write next?"
It looks like the obvious use of a list of readers. It is close to useless. Readers answer with what they already know — more of the last one, the sequel to the book they just finished, the safe adjacent version. Nobody replies with the book you have not written yet, because they cannot picture it, and imagining it is not their job.
You also acquire a mandate you did not ask for. Forty people say sequel, you write the sequel out of obligation, and the book you actually wanted moves back two years. Choosing what to write is yours. A survey is a bad instrument for it.
The near relation of that mistake is asking readers to design things — pick a cover, pick a title, pick one of these three openings. That is a different exercise with different rules, and it has its own page: Testing a cover with readers.
What is worth asking
Four questions earn their place, because each one asks about something the reader has already done rather than something they would have to predict.
What did you like about it? Past tense, about a book they finished. The answers are specific and they are usable, because what a reader singles out is usually what your next description should lead with.
Where did you first hear about this book? The one piece of attribution nobody else will ever give you. Store reporting arrives stripped of origin, so a reader telling you it was a friend, a library shelf, a podcast or a search is information you cannot buy — see Tracking what actually works for why that gap exists and what else survives it.
What else have you read lately that you loved? This tells you who you are actually sitting beside, which is frequently not who you aimed at. It feeds comparison titles, categories and keywords directly.
What nearly stopped you buying it? The most uncomfortable and the most valuable. Answers cluster: the cover looked like a different genre, the description gave away too much, the sample opened slowly, the price seemed high for the length. Every one of those is fixable and free to fix.
How to build the thing
Few questions. Five or six. Every additional question costs you completions, and the ones abandoned halfway are lost entirely.
Mostly closed. Multiple choice and short scales, because they take a reader five seconds and they add up into something you can count. Twenty open questions produce twenty essays you will not read.
One open box, at the end. "Anything else you want to tell me?" This is where the real material is. It is also the slowest thing to read — a few hundred replies is an afternoon — which is exactly why there should be one of them and not four.
Say how long it takes, and be right. Two minutes means two minutes. A reader who finds out otherwise abandons it and remembers.
Any survey tool does this. None is meaningfully better than another for something this simple, so use whichever you already have an account with.
Where to ask
The newsletter. Your highest-quality audience, and the one place where asking is clearly not an intrusion. Once a year is plenty.
The back of the book. A short line after the last page, in the back matter, where a reader who just finished is at their most willing. It reaches people who are not on your list yet, which no other method does. The back of the book is where your next sale is covers what else belongs there.
A reply-to-this-email question. One question, in the body of a normal newsletter issue, answered by hitting reply. No form, no link, no tool. This gets the highest response rate of anything on this page, takes ten minutes to write, produces answers in the reader's own voice, and almost nobody does it. It also builds the thing a list is for: readers who have written to you once write again.
In the Interior Formatter. Back matter is built from fields rather than pasted in at the end, so the page that asks the question is part of the book's structure — and rewording it later is a re-export, not a retypeset. Start your book → · about the Interior Formatter
Reading the answers
Look for the repeated phrase, not the individual opinion.
One reader calling your book cozy is one reader. Nine readers using the word cozy when nobody offered it to them is a finding, and it belongs in your description, your categories and your keywords, because those are the words real readers reach for when they describe your book to someone else. See Categories and keywords, without the folklore for where they go.
The reverse is worth as much. If nobody uses the word you have built the listing around, the listing is describing a book your readers did not think they read.
The bias to keep in front of you
The people who answer are your most engaged readers. They are on your list, they opened the email, and they cared enough to spend two minutes. That is not your typical buyer, and it is nowhere near a stranger scrolling past your thumbnail.
So a survey of your biggest fans tells you a great deal about what your book does for people who already love it, and nothing at all about why strangers do not buy it. The fans are why your next book has a first week; the strangers are why it has a second year. For the stranger's view you need people who have not read you — Beta readers: what to ask, and when is the earlier version of that problem.
One last rule: never trade a prize for a response. A gift card attracts people who want a gift card, they answer at speed to reach the end, and you have paid to poison your own data. The readers who answer honestly do it because you asked.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Writing things that keep bringing readers · More: Writing a newsletter people actually open · Tracking what actually works · How to write a blurb that sells the book