The Middle Grade Landscape
A year-end wrap-up of Middle Grade books published in 2024
I’m a Data Analyst by day and a Middle Grade author, well, whenever else I can sneak in some writing time, so combining these two interests seemed like an obvious next step. Plus, I couldn’t find the answers to my questions anywhere else, leaving it to me to do it!
It’s fun for me to compile this data (weird, I know), and I share it freely because I think writers should be on the same playing field as publishers when it comes to industry information. But it does take many hours to create these reports, so if you’d consider saying thanks by buying one of my books for yourself or a Kidlit reader / librarian / teacher in your life, I’d be eternally grateful. Just click back to my homepage for purchase options, or support your local indie bookstore too by picking up a copy there.
1. Middle Grade Publisher Share of Bookshelf
We often hear about the “Big 5” publishers, but in the MG space it’s really the Big 6, with Scholastic holding a sizeable piece of the market and all other publishers beyond the top six placing as distant runners-up. Over the past decade+ since 2013, we’ve seen those top six steadily gain share while the market size of “Other” publishers in my pie charts below fell. Note: The graphics look at number of books released and not sales.
2. Top Middle Grade Genres 2013-2024
Now looking at MG genres, first, we see an upward trend in the Contemporary/Realistic category, which is the green bars at the bottom of the graphic below. Combined with Fantasy, these two genres made up over 70% of books released in 2024. Also Horror – that purple bar near the top – is seeing some impressive growth. Historical Fiction has been down the past couple of years after having a big moment in the early 2000s where it seemed like the Newberys were going to historical fiction almost every year. And then we have the smaller genres like sports, sci-fi, and nonfiction that are small but steady year to year.
3. Top Middle Grade Points of View (POVs)
When I look at these results, the good news to me as a MG writer is that there seems to room for lots of POVs in Middle Grade. When we look at 3rd past vs 1st person present or 1st past, they all have pretty similar shares across the board, with a slight bit of 3rd present. This is relatively steady to when I measured the same stat about two years ago, though we’re seeing a growth in 1st person past taking share from the other two. Which I think is interesting to compare to YA where really 1st person present is the dominant POV.
4. Middle Grade Word Counts
OK, on to a very practical measure for writers: How long should my book be? Here’s a look below at trends in word counts over the past decade. It’s a little bit hard to see the overall direction in the top chart, but if I add some linear trend lines below that, we can see pretty clearly that nearly all the major genres are trending longer over this time period. Fantasy as usual retains the top spot with the longest books, followed by mystery, but contemporary is seeing some big growth, on its way to those books being almost 10K words longer than they were 10 years ago. I keep seeing pleas from teachers, librarians, and parents for shorter MG books, but based on this data, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. (And yes, that yellow list of word averages by genre on the left there is supposed to look like an old library checkout card, with each genre adding its own signature. Thanks for noticing.)
5. Genders of Middle Grade Main Characters (and Authors)
I’ve talked before about the slow demise of boy MCs in middle grade books, and we saw that continue in 2024. It’s probably no surprise that this tracks directly with the gender of the person writing those characters, so when the percentage of male MG authors goes down, so too does the % of boy MCs, although interestingly in 2024 we saw male authors write female MCs about 1/3 of the time (and 2/3 male MCs), while female authors wrote male MCs only 1/4 of the time (and 3/4 female MCs). I have heard anecdotally calls for more male MCs to help get boys back into reading, so perhaps we’ll see this trend reverse in future years.
6. Middle Grade Books Releases in 2024
Of the approximately 500 books in my data set from 2024, here’s an idea of when they released over the course of the year. Typically the big release periods are in the spring in advance of summer reading and again in fall ahead of the holiday shopping season. As an author, looking at the 25 other books that released on the same day as my book Valor Wings on September 17 makes it clear how your book can so easily get lost in the noise. But on the other hand, I love seeing all these books coming out because it means there’s probably something out there for every kind of kid reader.
7. Ratings Review
As an author who tries (but mostly fails) to ignore ratings of my books, I’ve had the sense that Middle Grade readers are generally kinder in their critiques than Young Adult readers. Indeed, that played out in the data below where the ratings for nearly all genres were significantly higher in MG. Overall, Nonfiction and Sports books stayed near the top in terms of average rating in MG, with Horror (maybe fittingly?) again in the basement. As a little aside, I also created a visual on the right that illustrates the Rick Riordan factor, plotting count of reviews for his latest Wrath of the Triple Goddess at about 6x the runner up from the rest of the MG field. Uncle Rick, indeed.
8. Middle Grade Author Races
I’ve loved seeing the explosion of new voices from all different backgrounds and locations around the world telling Middle Grade stories. So I wanted to start tracking diversity beginning this year, using author race as a measurable (though of course not the only) proxy for that diversification trend. I present below my rough approximation of author races for MG books published in 2024 (top) and, for a point of comparison, the most recent US racial mix (bottom) as reported on Census.gov.
9. Middle Grade Subject Tags 2013 vs 2024
To get an idea of how the subject matter covered in Middle Grade books has changed over the past decade, I compiled lists of subject tags for Middle Grade books from 2013 and 2024. The tables below show the tags with the largest changes (up and down) between those two years, as well as new tags (middle) that didn’t appear in 2013. The most surprising change for me was how many fewer tags “humor” got, since a recent survey of kid readers showed that the number one thing they’re looking for in a book is that it “makes me laugh.”
And finally..
It’s fun for me to compile this data, and I share it freely because I think writers should be on the same playing field as publishers when it comes to industry information. But it does take many hours to create these reports, so if you’d consider saying thanks by buying one of my books for yourself or a Kidlit reader in your life, I’d be eternally grateful. Just click back to my homepage for purchase options, or support your local indie too by picking up a copy there.
I plan to send out my next Middle Grade update in mid-2025. Until then, happy writing and reading!
