‘Murder, She Read!’ Deep Dive Into Mystery

Image - iStockphoto: KrivosheevV — Image – iStockphoto: KrivosheevV

Do We Have A Clue What’s Happening In Mystery/Crime Reading?

Their safe and secure lives rocked by a shocking revelation!
Their routines turned upside down!
Their world wracked by fear of the unknown now stalking them all!

No, not the characters in a Dorothy Sayers mystery.

I’m talking about the publishers.

As I wrote in my executive summary of Murder, She Read…Understanding The Mystery/Crime Buyer — a special “deep dive” study made by Nielsen Market Research of American Mystery/Crime readers — the publishing industry today can seem as terrorized by the twists and turns of the digital dynamic as the genre’s’ typical sweet, small town menaced by a dark threat. (On Nielsen’s UK site, the same report is here.)

I was as curious as the folks at Nielsen were about what would come up when the research team began its own special brand of sleuthing. Not only is Mystery/Crime one of the most visible fiction genres in the US, of course, but it’s thought by many to surpass even romance for popularity in the UK. And yet — as would be borne out by Nielsen’s findings — it’s not a genre that seems, so far, to be as attractive to younger readers as to older ones.

By the way, let’s be sure we’re on the same page of that page-turner: When we say “Mystery/Crime” for purposes of Nielsen’s study, this is the working definition we used:

Mystery fiction is a genre of fiction typically focused on the investigation of a crime. Mystery fiction is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction — in other words, a novel or short story in which a detective (either professional or amateur) investigates and solves a crime mystery.

Nielsen went to work. My good colleagues Jo Henry and Carl Kulo and I worked out an extensive line of questioning. Poirot would be proud of us. We used 75 questions to uncover a detective’s notebook of data in terms of who is buying and reading Mystery/Crime in the States today. Our goal was to be sure that the results would generate actionable insights for publishers, who face a mounting challenge from the electronic media, of course, not just from the allures of other genres in the books world.

We looked at the demographics of the genre: exactly who is reading this work?
We looked at the reading patterns of those consumers.
We studied how readers acquire their books — this proved to be one of the most fruitful parts of the inquiry.
We asked for readers’ preferred authors in the field, for their favorite types of mystery…what turns them on, basically, to a type of entertainment that almost routinely involves human death? (I mean, when you stop to think about it…you don’t want to stop to think about it, right?)
We also looked to update our understanding of the field: how is Mystery/Crime “going social”? — are its readers engaged with each other and with their authors as avidly as other genre readerships are? How is e-reading going down with Col. Mustard with a Twitter handle in the drawing room?
What’s more, we wanted to find out what was going on in Mystery/Crime in terms of serials, subscription services, and self-publishing.
And — here comes the “d” word: discoverability. We wanted to know how new authors and titles are discovered in the Mystery/Crime world. Howdunnit, if you will?

I know, if curiosity killed the cat, it’s a damned good thing we’re not feline. We had a lot of questions.