News
Rebound
Indie presses fought back after
a rough start to 2020I
n the first article of a monthlong series by PW
looking at how independent publishers fared
in 2020, five Midwest presses reported that
sales fell this past spring but then rebounded
to varying degrees in the remainder of the year.
They attributed the improved results to the relevance of
their lists and to some creative marketing pivots.
Sales tumbled in March and April, said Daniel Slager, pub-
lisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions, making him “really
nervous,” but they bounced back dramatically. The Minne-
apolis press ended the year with sales up 100% over 2019.
Slager attributed Milkweed’s showing to a strong backlist:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Late
Migrations by Margaret Renkl supplemented frontlist sell-
ers like World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, which
Barnes & Noble named its 2020 book of the year. “People
are inside reading, and there’s an appetite for the environ-
mental literature we’re publishing,” Slager noted. “We’re
trying to publish meaningful books that speak to the moment
and are beautiful as objects.”
Milkweed pivoted quickly to online events last year. To
launch World of Wonders, it teamed with the Asian American
Writers Workshop for a program that featured Nezhuku-
matathil and five other Asian American authors in conversa-
tion. “This was an event we could not have pulled off in one
location,” Slager said. “Some events are better on Zoom.”
Milkweed’s annual Booklover’s Ball, which usually attracts
300 supporters to a Minneapolis venue, drew 1,000 viewers
to a virtual fund-raiser in October. The press is also partner-
ing with indie booksellers on preorder campaigns.
At Graywolf Press, also in Minneapolis, publicity director
Caroline Nitz said sales were up “somewhat” over 2019, due
to the combination of a “strong early start for late 2019
frontlist,” such as Just Us: An American Conversation by Clau-
dia Rankine, which has sold 50,000 copies to date, and sales
of backlist by Rankine, Danez Smith, and other Black authors
in the wake of the increase in interest in the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement that began in spring. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s
The Discomfort of Evening, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize;
National Book Award–finalist Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love
Poem; and the release in paperback of Carmen Maria Mach-
ado’s In The Dream House also boosted sales.In terms of acquisitions, Graywolf “tries not
to respond to news cycles,” Nitz said, noting one
exception: it recently acquired Virus and Revo-
lution by Paul Preciado (slated for 2022), which
“tries to make sense of this transformational
moment from a philosophical perspective.” This
fall, Graywolf has high hopes for Maggie Nel-
son’s latest ruminations, On Freedom, and The
House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, the
first winner of the press’s Africa Prize.
The success of Temporary by Hilary Leichter,
a humorous take on millennial life that is selling well to mass
market retailers, helped Coffee House Press, which is also
based in Minneapolis, keep sales flat with 2019. “We didn’t
necessarily make the growth that we’d planned for pre-Covid,”
said marketing manager Marit Swanson. “But we didn’t lose
any of the ground we’ve gained the last few years either.”
CHP worked to beef up online sales—including selling
merchandise through Bonfire—while promoting sales at
indie bookstores. “One small thing we were proud of,” Swan-
son said, “was that, early in the pandemic, there was a push
on our blog and social media to promote the stores where
our authors had been scheduled for events before they got
canceled or moved online.”
Publicity manager Daley Farr noted that CHP’s fall 2021
list includes several books addressing state violence and
racial justice—areas that have drawn lots of interest in recent
months. Those titles include Written After a Massacre in the
Year 2018 by Daniel Borzutzky; Echo Tree, a collection of
short fiction by Henry Dumas, a leader of the Black Arts
Movement killed by police in 1968; and The Breaks by Julietta
Singh, an epistolary memoir about motherhood and race.
In Cleveland, though Belt Publishing’s 2020 sales through
retail channels were flat with 2019, sales overall spiked 25%.
“Direct sales were way up,” said senior editor Martha Bayne,
noting that the press ramped up online promotions through
email newsletters and Instagram. Belt intends to maintain
aggressive online efforts after the pandemic while keeping
up strong relationships with indie booksellers, such as White
Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh, which is hosting two Belt
book launches this spring.
Though sales were up across Belt’s list, a spring release
and a fall title especially resonated with readers: The Last
Children of Mill Creek, Vivian Gibson’s account of her child-
hood in segregated St. Louis, and Black in the Middle: An
Anthology of the Black Midwest, edited by Terrion L. Wil-
liamson. Bayne anticipates that the just-published Pure
America: Eugenics and the Making of Virginia by Elizabeth4 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 8, 2021