The Middle Grade Landscape
A survey of Middle Grade books published in 2022
As a Middle Grade author, I was intensely curious about what the overall market landscape looks like, such as: How many middle grade books are published every year? Who’s publishing those books and in what genres? What are the mechanics of those books like POV, length, and voice? So I started digging through available data from libraries, publishers, Goodreads, and Amazon, and this is what I found. I figured maybe a few other people might be interested in the results too.
1. How many MG books were published in 2022?
To answer this question, I started out by mashing together every “best of,” “top reads,” and general 2022 middle grade book list I could find. I came up with 514 Middle Grade books published in 2022. Is that every book? Probably not, but I think it’s still a pretty representative set for the types of answers I wanted. The 514 includes 74 debuts (though the authors on the list had an average of 26 books to their name), 16 novels in verse, and 43 graphic novels. If you’re interested in seeing what books I included, click to see a list of the full set here.
2. Who’s publishing all these MG books?
I included books from all sorts of publishers, big and small, as well as self-published titles. As you can imagine, the biggest publishers took up the lion’s share of the total number of books, followed by a long tail that I grouped as “all other publishers” which includes self-pubbed books and indie presses.
3. What are the most popular MG genres?
Next I was curious to see which genres were the most popular for the MG books published in 2022. Many books could fit into multiple categories, so for the sake of simplicity I took each book’s primary genre as designated by the publisher.
As a sub-question, I wondered whether certain publishers focus on some genres more than others, so I created a similar view by publisher next for the six largest publishers. Indeed, you can see from these views, for example, that half of Simon & Schuster’s 2022 MG books were in the Fantasy genre, while Scholastic publishes a more significant portion of the “Animals” genre (featuring animal protagonists) than other publishers.
4. What’s your Point of View?
As an author, I’m frequently torn about what POV is the best fit for my story. I’ve been hearing anecdotally that first person POV has been rapidly gaining popularity in MG, and the data here bore that out, with first person accounting for 60% of overall books, followed by third person at 39% and a very small number of books using mixed tenses.
5. How long should my book be?
If you’ve ever written a book, then you’ve very likely asked this question! I don’t know if the data below answers the should, but it does tell us what they were in 2022. For authors, the total word count by genre is usually the more relevant figure. I included page count along with it just to see how those words translate into a book’s pages. As expected, MG fantasy runs the longest, with an average of just over 72K words, albeit with a broad range from 17,303 words all the way up to 158,047 (ahem, Shannon Messenger). I broke out Novels in Verse (NIV) and Graphic Novels separately since they tend to have shorter word counts.
6. What are the genders of MG main characters?
We’ve had a tidal wave of fierce females taking over MG literature, with girls accounting for nearly 2/3 of the leading roles in 2022 when you include the “Mixed” category where multiple POVs tell the story from characters of different genders.
Which, just out of curiosity, I compared to the genders of the authors of these 500+ Middle Grade books.
7. When is the best time to publish my book?
When your publisher gives you the release date of your shiny new middle grade novel, you might be curious to see how many other new books may be vying for that limited shelf space. In 2022, there were peaks in early Spring and again in early Fall.
Or zooming in a little closer by week, the largest peaks were at the beginning of March, April, and May, as well as later in the year at the start of September and October.
8. What are the most popular genres for readers?
Now we’re admittedly entering into a murkier area because it requires more speculation. I wanted to understand both what people chose to read and what they actually liked after they’d read it. To gauge the “Did they like it?” question, I averaged the Goodreads ratings by genre, which gave me the result below where I found that overall the Poetry category (or Novels in Verse) garnered the best average ratings, while categories like Horror and Humor were generally not as highly rated. In case you’re curious, the overall average rating for all 514 books was 4.15.
As an author, you of course want people to like your book, but, well, you kind of want lots of readers too! So I flipped the view in the next chart by taking the average number of Goodreads ratings as a measure of overall popularity of each genre. From this view, we can surmise that while readers typically don’t rate Horror very highly, it’s actually the fourth most popular genre and therefore gets lots of readers. (You might even say that readers love to hate it?) Another takeaway, and this is a bummer for me to see since I love Nonfiction, is that while readers rate Nonfiction highly, it has the fewest number of readers of any genre.
9. Focus on the top books and authors.
On the topic of popularity, I wanted to double click on the top books and authors to see if the stats for those were any different from the rest of the pack. So I took the 20 most highly rated books from 2022 and pulled some statistics on those. Overall, this was a much more seasoned group including plenty of well-known names like Kwame Alexander, Kelly Yang, and Katherine Applegate.
From the charts below, we can see that Fantasy took up a much larger percentage of the pie than for the overall set of 500+ books, which speaks to the popularity of Fantasy among readers. Also, the 3P Past POV dominated among this group, while 1P Present remained the same. The bigger slice attributed to the “Mixed” POV suggests a bit more unconventional storytelling techniques, which you might expect from authors who have been around the block a few times.
Wrap Up
These data points gave me a lot to think about as I work on my next story. For example, I’ve already been trying out the First Person Present POV and finding it more fun than I’d expected. It’s funny how changing your POV can open up new avenues into your story that you didn’t even see before. And, as always, I’m trying to reduce my overall word count to fit within the appropriate bounds for my genre (I always say it’s easier to add than cut!). Also, seeing the apparent popularity of the Sports genre has my brain spinning with ideas for a story there. However: MUST. FINISH. CURRENT. STORY. (haha)
One takeaway from the larger picture has to do with the analysis of the top 20 books. I didn’t mention this above, but the authors in that group have published an average of 51 books each, vs. 26 for the entire 514 (which is still a lot!). To me, this speaks to the adage that publishing is a marathon, not a 100-meter dash. Success takes time. Which I hope should encourage all those authors who, like me, are just getting started on their publishing journey and aren’t seeing the results of your hard work pay off yet, or maybe aren’t published or even agented yet. Keep working. Keep writing. Keep climbing that mountain.
What did you take away from this data? Want to see something else I didn’t include? I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to drop me a line via my Contact form. In the meantime, happy writing and reading.
