All the Stats About Middle-Grade Books

Now that I've begun, in my kooky way, a novel for kids rather than yet another book for adults, I wanted to see what kind of word count I ought to be aiming for. After all, while I read huge numbers of children's books growing up and occasionally still read some, this is not an area of publishing that I've really followed.

Well, I found that middle-grade books tend to be somewhere in the 40,000 to 69,000 word range, which sounds just right for what I'm expecting to end up with. But I also found out a whole lot more.

Children's author Hannah Holt has compiled an amazing and incredibly useful set of statistics about middle-grade authors and their books. While for some things it would be nice to have a larger author sample size (76 authors participated), for the most part she was able to offer a fascinating view into this particular subset of publishing, with lots of handy graphs (and I'm not even big on graphs, but these really worked for me).

Not only did she find the usual word count range (in the middle of a surprisingly wide total range) for books for this age group, but she got data on advance sizes for large and small publishers, how advances correlated to agented vs unagented authors (guess what, having an agent makes a big difference in the size of your advance--not a surprise but good to have confirmed), how much this set of authors tend to make per year from their writing, how many hours a week they tend to write, and a whole host of other interesting data.

Major kudos to Hannah Holt for surveying authors and putting together such a detailed and well organized account of what she found! She also surveyed YA authors, chapter book authors (chapter books are for the age group between picture books and middle-grade), and picture book authors (in three parts, starting with this page). It looks like Hannah Holt has lots of other great stuff on her site too, so if children's books and how they are written and published is of interest to you, definitely check her out!

I Suddenly Begin a Middle-Grade Novel

School's out and I've been busy! There's promotion work to do both for Magnetic Woman and, in advance, for In Search of the Magic Theater. I also put together the spring newsletter for the Czechoslovak Studies Association. But mostly, I've been writing.

What am I writing, you may ask?

Well, I always have quite a few projects underway--some scholarly and some fiction. Some are books I've been working on for years, on and off. Others are fairly new or even simply in the planning stages. It's hard to finish writing any book during the school year because my time (and mental energy) is so fragmented. I can get a lot done all the same, but not wrap up a book. Summer break is when I try, these days, to get at least one book done per year, because in the summer I have days and months to focus and I can read an entire manuscript through easily and see what's missing or not working.

For three summers now, I've picked one nearly done project to finish up. And guess what? It's been the same one each year. Yet, oddly enough, in 2019 I finished two novels (one old, one new) and in 2020 I wrote a novella. (I would probably have finished a novel too in 2020, but I had to spend a lot of time prepping my fall remote classes, one of which was one I'd never taught before, let alone remotely.) In other words, I simply ended up working on books other than the one I thought I'd finish.

So, this year is looking true to form. I said yes, I want to finish that nearly done book that I began many years ago and still love. But what happened? In mid-May I had an idea for a whole new book that felt like it would be fun and easy to write, so I set to work. It's been purring right along and I've got about 13,000 words written, not counting masses of additional notes and partial scenes that might go in slightly later. The unexpected thing is that this is not a book for adults, which all of my other books are. This is what's known as a middle-grade book, which is to say that the anticipated audience is aged about eight to twelve.

It's a lot of fun, and I'm guessing that I'll finish it and still have time to see if I can wrap up one of those nearly done books that have been inching toward completion for years. Maybe even the one that has waited the longest to be finished! We shall see.

Of course, with two novels, one novella, and a story collection all seeking publishers, it'd be nice if I had an agent again to handle shopping them around while I promote the published book and the soon-to-be published book and write my new books. Unfortunately, looking for agents is yet another of those time-consuming tasks in a writer's life.

Museums as Agents of Change

I'm so pleased to see that my friend Mike Murawski's book Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker will be available Monday from Rowman & Littlefield / American Alliance Of Museums. In this book, Mike looks at how we, as individuals, can expand the work of museums to live up to their potential to serve as agents of change--how they can bring people together, contribute to local communities, and change people’s lives. He asks how can we better recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change and how can we work together to build a stronger culture of equity and care within museums. Such questions are increasingly vital for all museum professionals to consider, and are also important questions for all of us as community members.

Museums as Agents of Change is available in hardback and paperback, and soon also as an e-book.

How Do Libraries Get Books?

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at libraries--how purchasing choices are made and how books, especially e-books, come to be available? Author Maggie Lynch writes about The Importance of Library Distribution on her blog and notes that with the pandemic, libraries have adapted to changes in demand by providing stronger e-book offerings. As a reader who waited until the pandemic to get a Kindle, I can attest to my public library's growing interest in e-books!

Now, speaking of e-books, you may wonder whether Magnetic Woman is available as an e-book. The answer is, unfortunately, no. Rights for the art for e-book editions would have been even more expensive than what I had to pay (that's me, the author, not my publisher!) for print rights. Besides which, do you really want to read an art history book on a screen if you can read it on paper? Probably not, although I do think it would be nice to have a copy handy on an e-reader for travel.

Toward a Concrete Utopia

Not precisely a new book at this point, but Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, edited by Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić, was just awarded the Society of Architectural Historians 2021 Exhibition Catalogue Award. Kudos to the editors and authors!

I regret to say it looks like this is no longer available from MOMA's design shop, but you can still get it on Amazon (for a high price).

Baseball: An Astrological Sightline

For those of you who have seriously missed baseball during the pandemic, my friend César Love has an unusual and intriguing book--Baseball: An Astrological Sightline. Not your average account of the sport, this is an examination of baseball's magical quality, its spiritual aspect. Baseball: An Astrological Sightline uses astrology to demonstrate the transcendental nature of the game, showing how the stars and planets "affect the course of every baseball season and every baseball game." If you've wondered why the Cubs seem accursed or why the Mets were miraculous in 1969 Mets, César offers answers with astrology as a lens.

Love baseball but don't believe in astrology? You still might find this an interesting book. César, a poet and journalist as well as an astrologer, is a serious baseball fan, so there's lots of baseball lore here. As Kim Shuck, Poet Laureate of San Francisco and author of Deer Trails and Smuggling Cherokee, notes, "César Love takes a very fresh view of the histories of the various baseball teams. Poetic, beautifully written and researched, this book is a great read for baseball fans, historians and those interested in astrology. An absolutely unique piece of writing."

Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands

New books are coming out in profusion! Here's another title of interest: Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, edited by Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval. While you may need to wait to get the hardcover, it looks like the e-book is already available.

I'm being very quick-and-dirty about posting this as I'm in the middle of the annual Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, hosted by University of Pittsburgh this year. It's free to sign up and attend and continues through Sunday.