The Black Library Reader Satisfaction Survey
Getting a look at how we're feeling
Every week, part of my beat covering the Black Library sees me having the privilege of connecting with the community. Whether it’s one of the prominent gathering places like the Black Library Nutters group on Facebook or the Black Library subreddit, the writer-heavy circles on BlueSky or elsewhere, there’s a lot of passionate readers and collectors and that means a lot of thoughts about how Games Workshop is doing.
I cover a lot of these trends each Monday for Black Library Weekly, but a lot of this is anecdotal in nature (for example, a rough preorder window, or a Limited Edition people are getting excited about).
Wouldn’t it be useful, I started thinking, if we had something a little more rigorous, some way to measure community sentiment? From there, the Black Library Reader Satisfaction Survey was born.
I’ve endeavored to make the questions as neutral as possible, to help ensure we get an accurate sense of community sentiment. Because the Black Library is ever-evolving, this will be a twice-yearly initiative, each July and January, so we can see how community feeling changes over time.
It’s my sincerest hope that this accomplishes two main objectives.
First, it will provide a vehicle for us Black Library consumers to be heard in a quantifiable way, and get a look at the general feeling of our fandom.
Second, it offers Games Workshop an opportunity to get some insight on how their customer base is feeling about their performance- the good and the bad. During my Magic heyday Wizards of the Coast was frequently checking the pulse of the playerbase with a stream of surveys; perhaps GW might see the value in taking a page from that playbook.
To be clear I offer no illusions about what they do with it- that is well out of our hands. But this initiative represents an organized and good-faith attempt to compile feedback, and that is something that has value.
I thank you all in advance for sharing your opinion through the survey. I’ve tried to keep the number of questions reasonable out of respect for everyone’s time, and would greatly appreciate if folks would share the link to the survey with others so we can get the widest possible pool of responses.