Indie Publishing
By Claire Kirch | PW - Nov 20, 2015
It has been a remarkable 12 months for South Dakota Historical Society Press. On Nov. 17, 2014, the 18-year-old publisher of regional titles about the Coyote State released Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. It immediately shot up bestseller charts and, within days, sold out of its initial 15,000-copy print run. One year later, it has sold 140,000 copies, gone through eight print runs, and has transformed a small press whose previous top-selling title, Tatanka and the Lakota People, had sold 15,000 copies.
“It’s an academic tome with the dimensions of a pizza box,” Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of SDHSP, said of Pioneer Girl, which clocks in at 472 pages in hardcover and retails for $39.95. “I didn’t think it would sail off into the stratosphere.”
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