Yesterday I closed the survey I was running to gather feedback on my newsletter content. Overnight I selected the two winners of the Amazon Gift Cards I had promised as a giveaway prize for completing the survey. I've made contact with the winners, confirmed their details, and sent out the USD$20 eGift Cards. Congratulations Diane and Mahmoud (and thank you for your feedback).

If you'd like to know more about the survey, I have updated the original post with the results.

Over the last year I've grown the number of subscribers to my author newsletter significantly and I think it's time to test it's content. What do you want to see in my newsletter? Answer the survey below to go in the draw to win one of two Amazon.com Gift Cards (USD$20).  Details of rules and information on the prizes are at the end of this post.

Results

The survey has now closed — thank you everyone for your feedback. I've selected the two winners — congratulations Mahmoud and Diane! They have been sent their Amazon vouchers.

I've included some of the results of the survey below.

Information on my writing

Other information to include

Suggestion box

I also included an option to provide more freeform suggestions. Below I've summarized the key suggestions that cropped up:

• Other writers would love to hear about your road to publication. The hard times, the good times. What worked for you. An advice column might be nice.
• Try including freebies from other authors.
• I suggest making a youtube channel.
• Book summaries.

People also left some lovely feedback in this section, which I haven't included here as it feels a little self-congratulatory to post it, but rest assured if you left on of those comments it made me feel great. Thank you

Next steps

Based on this, I'll be focussing on publishing announcements, editing updates, and some background lore and science for my own writing. I'll include snippets and concept art as well, but this will be less frequent. For other information to include, I'll:

• Keep up the book recommendations and experiment with presentation, etc. 
• Include more regular giveaways. I have some plans for this, from larger newsletter builder giveaways to smaller giveaways focussed on specific books from my recommendations.
• Sci-fi and fantasy news from around the web. I'll start to include more of this, but will work on doing so in a brief format with links to more detailed information so I avoid sending out war and peace.

Rules

For reference, I have left the rules here for the giveaway I ran as part of the survey.

1. The draw is open to any individual person.
2. The winner must provide their name and email address as part of the survey. These contact details will only be used to contact you if you win. You are not signing up to my newsletter by filling out this survey (but if you are not subscribed, you can do so here).
3. The survey will be open until Friday, 14 December 2018. I may extend this by several days at my discretion (read, if I'm too busy on Friday to close out the form).
4. Once the survey is closed, I will use a random number generator to select two entries from the survey responses that include a name and email. I will contact those people by email to confirm delivery arrangements for the gift cards. If they do not respond within three days, I will select a new winner.  This process will continue until two chosen winners respond and confirm delivery instructions.

Prizes

There are two prizes which will each be awarded to a different winner. They are both Amazon.com eGift Cards to the value of USD$20. The winner must be able to claim eGift Cards from the Amazon.com (US) marketplace. The winner must be able to provide a valid email address where the gift card code can be sent.

Privacy

The contact details section of this survey is optional. You may complete the survey without providing your name or email address and I will receive your feedback. However, if you do not provide your email address, you will not be eligible for the prize. Any names or email addresses submitted via this survey will ONLY be used to contact the winners. By filling out this survey, you are not subscribing to my email newsletter (but you can do so here).

I have a detailed Privacy Policy available here if you would like more information about how I handle personal information.

Note: the survey has been designed using Google Forms. When you fill out the survey, you are submitting the data to the Google Forms site, not my own. The data is captured in my personal Google Forms account and should not be available to any other user. Once the prizes have been awarded, I will delete all contact information submitted from the survey data and only keep the anonymous feedback results.