Underestimating Laura Ingalls Wilder

In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa heads to town promising to return by nightfall, but a terrible storm blows through, and hefinds himself trapped in a snow bank for three days. To survive, he eats the candy he brought for the girls’ Christmas stockings. 

It’s a tale of pluck and miscalculation not lost on the publishers of Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s new annotated autobiography. Last November, they found themselves trapped in a snowbank of preorders for the book, which they won’t dig their way out of until March. They didn’t have to eat the Christmas peppermints, but they did leave Wilder fans crying in their homespun handkerchiefs when the book didn’t arrive in time for the holidays.

The size of the initial print run might seem ridiculously small, considering that Wilder’s Little House books have sold more than 60 million copies. “But you have to understand—this is an academic book,” says Koupal. Pre-Pioneer Girl, the press’s best-seller was the children’s book Tatanka and the Lakota People: A Creation Story, which sold around 15,000 copies.*

 “We felt we were taking a huge risk even to do [15,000].”

 http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015…