Our reader survey regarding preferred content drew relatively few responses, but those which we received had something to say. First, the basic genre question had some surprises. The folks that answered the survey had five choices in the basic Genre category. The genres and the number of votes each got are as follows:

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Essays: 6
Non-Fiction: 5
Visual Arts: 1
Fiction: 3
Poetry: 3

From this, it seems that we are after the facts, ma’am, as Sgt. Friday would have said. And although fiction and poetry lagged behind, half of our readership wants to see more of both. Only visual arts saw little support. It looks like we are doing fairly well at satisfying our readership at this basic level. We sure could use some more Essays and Non-Fiction submissions, though.

The next level of the survey got a bit deeper into the fine structure of content. Again, here are the categories we put forward and the number of votes they received:

Atheist / Agnostic Lives: 3
Believers vs. Non-believers: 4
Comparative Religion: 2
Current Events: 3
History of Unbelief: 4
Original Visual Art: 0
Original Unbeliever Fiction: 1
Personal Journeys: 3
Positive Atheism: 3
Philosophy- General: 3
Philosophy- Religious: 3
Politics of Atheism: 3
Rationalism: 1

These more specific subjects show a fairly wide range, though they do tend to concentrate on the more factual, which probably makes sense given our membership and the beliefs of people that are drawn to our site. We have some ideas for procuring more content that answers to the desires shown above.

Other remarks were surprising, as follows:

Please actively seek content from big-name freethinkers & professional writers such as Philip Appleman, Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, etc. Professional science and science fiction writers might especially enjoy a venue like this.

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If possible, if you could get the staff, would be great if The Eloquent Atheist could grow and over time be a major blog in the mode of The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, and Dan Savage’s Savage Love.

Yikes! Those are tall orders. We would very much like to be able to grow in order to reach more readers, and thus do even more to promote the causes of Humanism, Atheism, Agnosticism, etc. That sort of growth would present challenges, but we think we would be up to them.

As noted above, we have some ideas that will help us reach some of the near-term content goals that you have for us. And we will be adjusting our submissions page to try to get more of the content that you would like to see. We’ll check back later with another survey to see how we are doing.

Thanks for helping us with this!

[ Michael ]