I have been having great fun this rainy afternoon, home alone and playing for the first time with SurveyMonkey. After pottering about and – after a few mistakes – creating a survey, I discovered that you cannot embed surveys in wordpress.com (although you can in wordpress.org. Which I don’t have). The best I can do is link to the survey.

I really hope that some of you will follow the link and answer the questions that I enjoyed thinking up – I’d love to read your answers. It is really quick (under two minutes according to SurveyMonkey) and it involves selecting answers to 7 questions by clicking on checkboxes etc (no typing required – unless you need to make use of the ‘Other’ category if I have only thought up really baad answers!)

So, here is the survey: All About You (and Mary Stewart)

I’d love to hear your comments on this survey – what works and what doesn’t, how I could improve future surveys, and what questions you’d like to see asked.

And here are the results: Survey Results

What do the results show us? At the moment (26 July 2017), over half of respondents have read most or all of Mary Stewart’s books, and over 75% have been reading them for  ‘too many years to count’. Everyone enjoys/loves the books (not exactly surprising on a Mary Stewart site but it is still nice to read this!), chooses complimentary descriptions for her novels, and for most of us the worst thing about Mary Stewart’s books is that she didn’t write enough of  ’em. A few respondents wrote lovely praise of Mary Stewart at the final, open-ended question.

One respondent asks how to get hold of the essay Mary Stewart wrote. I’m guessing this is a reference to ‘About Mary Stewart’, a booklet written by Mary Stewart in 1970 (and revised in 1973) that gives so much useful information about her? These were produced for her American publisher to coincide with the release of The Crystal Cave and then The Hollow Hills. I have no idea what the print run was but this short booklet is now very difficult to obtain. Occasionally a copy turns up on abe books, eBay etc. Perhaps if we all contacted the publisher to request a new print run…?