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First of all, thank you to everyone for participating in the poll. It is not definitive: there is a huge section of the harem lit community missing (mainly the enormous Logan Jacobs, Eric Vall, MSE, DK communities, as well as other Amazon-only folks), but the fact that the results have not shifted in proportion from the first 30 votes to the 400th shows me that this is PROBABLY a fairly good representation of the community's opinions as a whole.
However, I also need to acknowledge some of my own errors. It's been a decade since I had to make a poll that would reach outside my family or friends, so this isn't very scientific. As some have stated, some of the questions are poorly worded (the self-insert question), have missing options (the monoromance question), or are dubiously necessary at best (the naked question). That being said, the data is still illuminating, if not perfect. I will do a much better, more complete, more precisely worded/crafted poll sometime late Spring or Early summer.
For now, let's see the results!
Right away we can see that romance is incredibly important to the majority of harem lit readers. 12% of readers even expressed the opinion that harem lit should revolve around romance, while 80% agreed that it was crucial but didn't NEED to be the entire plot.
In what is probably the most controversial question, we find that 94% of the community surveyed can at least tolerate lesbian scenes without issue, while 83% enjoy them. HOWEVER, 31% only enjoy them when the MC is present or being glorified by the scene.
When I wrote Solar Dragons Need Love Too, a couple people assumed I was going to have Pinky sell erotic videos, and since she romantically "belonged" to Brock, I received a couple of threats (one of them on my life, another a threat to one star every book I ever write) if other men ever saw her naked, which was part of the reason why I included this question. Obviously, I would never go that route with her character. Even if this wasn't something on everyone else's mind, the results of the poll are interesting. 50% of the community doesn't mind, and 50% dislikes it, with 9% even calling it a dealbreaker for the book (a not insignificant number on its own).
This was my worst question and I will need to reword it much more clearly in the next poll. I'll let the results speak for themselves. Frankly, because of the wording I used, I don't know if you can trust the results. Even so, they are interesting if taken at face value because most authors can tell you that a lot of readers over the years have expressed great distaste whenever the MC does something they wouldn't, which I think is where the immersion-breaking "self-insert disconnect" happens, at least from my perspective.
By and large, non-virgins aren't dealbreakers, it seems, but 35% of the the community would not like having sexual histories discussed at the very least. This limits story options, so authors should take it in stride and only use this information where it doesn't hamper their story, but it's good to be mindful of.
For me, the biggest takeaway was that, not only do most readers enjoy drama and harem politics, but a surprising proportion (36%) specifically enjoy yanderes. Interesting.
Slice of Life stories and Dungeon Dives seem to be the most popular, but there is a pretty even genre spread throughout the community! Even silly plots, near and dear to me, have their place.
No surprises here: most people prefer small harems but admit to enjoying harems of all sizes when written well. There you have it.
And it seems authors should vary their sex scenes between a few pages in length to a full chapter.
I got a LOT of people telling me this question didn't work but...clearly it did. As we can see, the blurb is the major selling point among the options provided. Cover art is devalued surprisingly, which I doubt, but that's due to my wording. I said what earns the purchase, not what earns the click, so fair enough. Worth noting that the second most important factor is the author him or herself. If people trust you, they'll by your books no matter what.
44% of respondents support their favorite authors on platforms like patreon (a small fraction of the community, though, so that just shows this poll has a small segment of the community that is very active).
And monster girl supremacy reigns supreme by a country mile!
The "What would you like to see more or less of" questions have hundreds of responses I can't share for now, but the responses were interesting and I may go through them in a future post.
Finally, I failed to include an "I like them both equally option" for the men's monoromance question, which we can detect in the number of dropped responses. Even so, the proportion of people willing to read monoromance is very high! This should give authors some sense of security in experimenting as that segment of men's fiction continues to grow.
Thank you everyone for participating. I'll leave the poll up an post an update again sometime if anything changes. Responses are still coming in, after all, but we certainly have enough now to get some initial impressions. I'm sorry about my errors in making the poll. I'll definitely do better next time. Leave comments below about anything you want to know, and maybe leave some questions you'd like to see on the spring/summer poll. Bye!
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