Author: kpdavis

Kimberly Parish Davis is the director and founder of Madville Publishing. She sometimes teaches writing, and worked on the editorial staff of Texas Review Press for five years.
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The state of the publishing industry–2021

The state of the publishing industry in 2021

Curious to hear a comprehensive analysis of the state of the publishing industry, I attended a ZOOM webinar this week put on by Ingram entitled: How has Covid-19 impacted the Book Industry? There was a lot of optimism. Here are the key points I took away from the meeting:

  • Book sales are up right across the spectrum by 6%, and a whopping 29% for Q1 2021 over Q1 2020 in the US. Global book sales reflect similar upticks. Basically, we’ve seen the market grow five years-worth in a year, with books finishing in the top five in retail sales.
  • The categories that saw the greatest increases are, 1) Juvenile fiction, 2) Fiction, and 3) Juvenile nonfiction.
  • Also of note, buys are interested in new formats, as well as titles that dealt with the state of the world today.
  • They report that the way orders come in changed dramatically due to the lack of face-to-face events. However Ingram’s ability to fill customer orders through drop shipping met a need, and eased issues with shipping in general. (On a global level, think Brexit. UK to EU shipping was particularly interesting, but thanks to Ingram’s multiple manufacturing plants throughout Europe, they were able to sidestep this border-crossing problem.)
  •  Digital sales rose 17%, and with the biggest rise in academic sales which were up 120%. There was also heavy interest form Libraries.
  • Audiobooks have taken off, not just through ACX (Audible), but across platforms. Here again there was spike in the demand for Children’s titles.
  • Don’t write off the print marked, however, because it also grew in 2020.
  • Microtrends spotlighted included African American titles and civil discourse, for example. So, as a publisher, we do need to have our finger on the pulse, and consider bring books to market faster.
  • Social Media usage is on the rise, with the average user spending 2 ½ hours per day online, and buying things they discover there, and there was a 50% increase in book-related searches on Google and Amazon. And of people surveyed 40-60% of consumers report they expect to continue this new shopping behavior post-COVID
  • Even brick-and-mortar sales are starting to return to pre-pandemic levels.
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Find us at #AWP21

#AWP21 Conference & Bookfair March 3-7, 2021
#AWP21 is virtual this year, and since we want to see you, we put together this guide to help you can find us.

How to find Madville Publishing if you are attending #AWP21:

Once you have logged into the #AWP21 Conference & Bookfair, you should see the Lobby: (This point is a little confusing because the conference is actually taking place on a website that is different from the usual AWP website. We expect they’ll sort that out and make it very clear for you when you log in, but if they don’t, https://awp21.pathable.co this is the URL for the Conference. You’re going to have to do some trial and error to figure out where to actually log in.)Bookfair, Bookshop, and EventsClick the Bookfair icon, then search for “Madville” in the search window at top right.
In combination with our good friends at Kestrel, we will be hosting a

RECEPTION & READING

Thursday, March 4, from 6:30-7:45
(central standard time)

Join Madville Publishing and Kestrel, a Journal of Literature and Art, in a virtual reception. Bring your favorite drink and share the screen with recent contributors and authors.

Readers will be: Rick Campbell, Jeff Gundy, Cynthia Hogue, Marlene Olin, Keith Stahl, Wondra Chang, Jessica Temple, Lee Zacharias, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Kim Addonizio.

To join the event: From the “Lobby,” click the EVENTS icon and search for Madville in the top right search window. The meeting will take place over Zoom.

To enter the Zoom meeting, click “Join Meeting” in this session page at the event’s start time. Should you need keyboard navigation of Zoom, please explore the keyboard shortcuts prior to the meeting. AWP’s Accessibility Guide for using Zoom can be found in the Files section of this event session. A URL to live-captions will be provided prior to the meeting start time.
Of course you’ll find us at the virtual bookfair

The Interactive Bookfair will be open throughout the conference. However, the schedule has been organized so that special hours have been set aside when nothing else is going on so attendees can focus on the bookfair. Those special times are: 

Thursday, March 4, 2:30-4 p.m. CST
Friday, March 5, 2:30-4 p.m. CST
Saturday, March 6, 2:30-5 p.m. CST 
 
Author Meet & GreetsThursday:
     Wondra Chang at 10-11 CST
     Jessica Temple at 1-2 CST
Friday:
     Lee Zacharias  at 12-1 CST
Saturday:
     Bonnie Jo Campbell at 12-1 CST.
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank

a "loading" graphic showing 2020 on the left and 2021 on the right

How did our books do in 2020? We looked at Amazon’s best seller’s rank for each of our titles.

We’ve been reviewing how our books fared in 2020, a different sort of difficult year. We were pleasantly surprised when we reviewed the different books’ Amazon rankings. We have some standouts:

Sisypha Larvata Prodeat by Jan Cole, translated by Angela Liu, and edited by Lorrie Lo

Read more about Sisypha Larvata Prodeat

A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being by Jeff Hardin

Screen capture of the Amazon.com bestsellers ranking for Jeff Hardin's A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being
read more about A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

Some Notes You Hold by Rita Sims Quillen

Amazon.com's best sellers rank for Rita Sims Quillen's Some Notes You Hold taken at the end of 2020
Read more about Some Notes You Hold

The Memoir of the Minotaur by Tom Shachtman

Amazon's best sellers rank for Tom Shachtmas's The Memoir of the Minotaur. Image captured end of 2020
Read more about The Memoir of the Minotaur

Congratulations to all our authors on this list. Keep up the good work!

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Pushcart Nominations 2020

The Pushcart Prize logo for 2020

We’ve made our nominations for the Pushcart Prize 2020. We wish we could nominate something from every single book we published this year, because we believe all of our authors are winners or we wouldn’t have published them in the first place, but the Pushcart committee limits us to six nominations per year. And every year that means we’ve had to leave six authors out. (We publish 12 titles per year on average)

We at Madville Publishing are pleased to nominate the following for your consideration for the 2020 Pushcart Prize:

Three poems:

  1. “Mysteries of the Corn” by Kyle Potvin from the poetry anthology, Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley. Madville Publishing, (November 2020).
  2. “I Know You’re in Detroit” by George Drew from his poetry collection, Drumming Armageddon. Madville Publishing, (June 2020).
  3. “Hive Mind” by Gerry LaFemina from his prose poetry collection, Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping. Madville Publishing, (February 2020).

Three short stories:

  1. “Ritual” by Aden Albert from the short story anthology, Runaway, edited by Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, & Lee Zacharias. Madville Publishing, (March 2020).
  2. “Lubbock, 1974” by Bobby Horecka from his short story collection, Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies. Madville Publishing, (March 2020).
  3. “The Last Ride, 1928” by Brian Petkash from his short story collection, Mistakes by the Lake. (May, 2020).

Congratulations everybody! Thank you for providing such high quality work for us, that we want to include it as one of our Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2020. And thank you for all you do to promote Madville Publishing.