Canelo / Arts Council England

3. Survey
From the beginning of the research, we released a survey in the 
form of a web questionnaire to which anyone was invited to respond. 
Remaining open for over a month the survey elicited 249 responses 
– more than many equivalent surveys in the literary area, but still less 
than we would have liked. We promoted the survey through an article 
posted on The Bookseller website, posting regularly on our corporate 
and personal social networks, asking friends and colleagues around the 
book world to post as well as making the survey easily searchable and 
prominent on Canelo’s website. The survey was also sent to writers 
who successfully applied to the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts 
funding stream for ‘Time to Write’ grants.
The survey was not designed to elicit factual data. Rather it was 
designed as a sentiment analysis of interested opinion to contrast 

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Canelo / Arts Council England | 
8

Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction
with the data. We wanted to see to what extent the assumption that 
literary fiction was struggling was shared. We were also conscious of 
the likelihood of bias creeping in. Those with a particular perspective 
were more likely to reply. But by how much? The survey was not 
just multiple choice, but also asked for comments, both around each 
specific question and more generally to see if respondents thought 
there was anything else pertinent to the topic. 81 respondents left 
extensive comments, and collectively provided a wealth of insight 
into what people believe to be happening. Of those who filled out the 
survey 55% were writers, 13% publishers, 2% journalists or bloggers, 
1% literary agents, 1% from arts or writing organisations,
1% booksellers and 27% marked themselves as other.