In the fall of 2010, when I was director of the South Dakota Historical Society (SDHS) Press and negotiating for the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography under the title Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, I optimistically told our marketing director that I hoped it might eventually sell 30,000 copies. He scoffed at the idea, considering it absurd. I cited the Mark Twain autobiography from the University of California Press that was doing so well—about 45,000 copies at that point and counting. Yeah, he retorted, but Twain was an American classic; Wilder was a regional children’s author. Maybe we could sell 10,000, he conceded. As it turns out, we were both wrong! Ten years later, SDHS Press has published three additional Pioneer Girl-related books and sold 200,000 copies of the original title. The Press has, in short, exceeded its wildest expectations.

Let me give you a little context. As a not-for-profit, scholarly publisher, SDHS Press typically printed about 1,000 copies of any book, with the exception of its children’s titles (2,000 copies) and its newsstand biography series (2,500 copies). It was a small press with big aspirations. Publishing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography represented its most ambitious project yet. Further, the book was big, oversize in both physical dimensions (10 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches) and number of pages (469). The Press took no shortcuts in production, lavishly illustrating and annotating it, and it was expensive to print. Donors generously helped with the printing costs, but even so, the first printing alone used up that money and then some.

Estimating how many copies to print was not an exact science. The forthcoming book had gotten good publicity during the final months of preparation in the summer and fall of 2014, with the Associated Press interviewing editor Pamela Smith Hill, who described the book as a grittier view of frontier life than could be found in Wilder’s novels. That description fired peoples’ imaginations, and with the Pioneer Girl Project researchers blogging regularly on this website about Wilder discoveries (see, for example, “Mary Ingalls Goes to School” or “A Day Trip to De Smet”), the Press had a serious number of followers poised to buy the book. By the time the volume was at the printer, there were approximately 7,000 preorders from individuals and book distributors. After much debate, the Press roughly doubled that number and printed 15,000 copies. It was a big investment for what national media would dub “The Little Press on the Prairie” or “The Little Press that Could.” The staff collectively chewed their fingernails and waited for the book to show up in the warehouse.

It arrived on November 14, 2014, and we spent the next few days frantically redirecting pallets of books to distributors for release on November 17, 2014. Our inexperience with national distribution was on display, as we should have had the books out much earlier for the given release date. Nonetheless, at least one seller took the matter into its own hands. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society of De Smet showed up with a pickup, and its staff and board members provided their own labor, loading their 1,000 copies for resale. The Press soon discovered that the volume of books being shipped was overwhelming the state’s central mail services, and it would have to find independent shipping companies. The staff was learning on the job and by the minute.

Within three weeks, all 15,000 copies were gone, with an order for a second 15,000-copy printing submitted before Thanksgiving. Customers were literally begging for more by Christmas, but given the size and production values of the book, it would take six weeks to two months for the next batch to reach the warehouse, arriving just after Christmas. Even so, things seemed to be more or less under control until the end of December, when the entire staff gathered around the fulfillment person’s desk as she read out the unbelievable number of copies that Amazon had just ordered—34,000! At that moment, everyone knew the Press had a bestseller on its hands, but there were only about seven thousand copies in the warehouse. Panic time.

The Press sent Amazon what it had on hand and promised the balance out of the third printing, which it soon ordered—45,000 copies. One of the hardships of the book publishing business is that booksellers and distributors have 120 days to pay their bills or return the books—and one never knows which will happen until it does. Printers’ bills come due in thirty days. The math just does not work in a publisher’s favor, especially for a small publisher like SDHS Press. Its fundraising arm, the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation, talked to its bank about a line of credit should it be needed. Fortunately, however, some distributors paid within thirty days, and with the direct buyers, the Press never had to rely on credit. But the third printing would not arrive until mid-March. Customers were not happy. There was a lot of criticism—why had “they” allowed such a small press to take on this big, important book if it couldn’t handle it, they queried. Never mind that HarperCollins, for example, had been in the same pickle with a book just a few months earlier.

And still the orders kept coming. The book was now on the New York Times bestseller list, and everyone, it seemed, just had to have a copy. A fourth and fifth printing were ordered for an additional 50,000 copies for delivery in April and May, which finally put the Press ahead of the curve. By the anniversary date of the book’s release, November 17, 2015, there were 145,000 copies in print. It had been a rollercoaster ride that left the staff exhausted, but the reviews had been fabulous. “Wilder pulls off the difficult trick of telling a rich, satisfying story about good people being good,” one reviewer wrote. Another enthused, “Wilder’s memoir is a fascinating piece of American history, but it’s the annotations that set Pioneer Girl apart as the most important work of its kind.” On the other hand, a Scottish reviewer huffed that the cover was “appallingly quaint” for an “academic tome” with “the dimensions of a pizza box.” I shared that cranky assessment with the book’s designer, who said, “I’ll put that on my resumé!” He was right, for readers overwhelmingly loved the cover, and the second book in the series, Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts, using the same designer and the same artist, won an award for best design in 2021 from the Association of University Presses.

Earlier this month, ten years and 200,000 copies later, the South Dakota Historical Society Press took possession of its seventeenth printing of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Of course, each printing is much smaller now, closer to the Press’s standard printing size, but the book continues to find new readers as Wilder’ popularity as an important American author continues to expand beyond all expectations.

―Nancy Tystad Koupal