**UPDATE: After 400 entries and more coming in, the survey deadline is extended to 30th April 2022**
At the start of February, following discussions with writer’s groups, we launched a survey into author safety and privacy issues, such as online harassment, threats and physical confrontations. This was simply to find out how common these issues are, and what type of problems writers face.
Initially this went out to our mailing list, where the results were troubling. We then took the decision to run it to the end of March. During February we would limit our wider distribution to writer’s groups to limit the possibility of spam. During March the survey would go wide to everyone, Twitter, Tumblr anywhere we could put it.
In February we got support from the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, Alli and the Crime Writer’s Association. We were not able to put the survey anywhere hobby or fanwriters could find it, as those groups we contacted either declined or did not respond. It was interesting to be told by some groups that this “was not the image of writing they wanted for their audience” which began to make us think that there is an awareness there is a problem, it simply isn’t spoken about.
The figures we have bear this out: a majority of authors are encountering problems while most believe these issues occur for either 1% or less than 25% of authors. Actually online harrassment occurs for the majority, and physical or serious stalking issues are into double digits. A summary of the first survey and the first 200 responses for the wider survey (a figure we are well passed), are available here.
The password is tset321? and used to prevent bots scraping the figures before we have completed the research.
If you haven’t taken the survey yet please do. Either don’t read the results yet, or relate to your own experiences and beliefs before you saw them. Then you can come back and compare your experiences to the percentages, and see the differences.
Take the Survey
The survey has now concluded. The final results are available here:Author Safety Survey Results.
