On the evening of June 13, we celebrated the gala for the 36th annual Midwest Book Awards. The evening was a lot of fun — feeling the energy among our more than 80 attendees as different titles were announced as winners really filled my heart with joy.
This year, our board of directors shared in the privilege of announcing the results. Our directors serve two-year terms; we’re currently half-way through the 2025-2027 term. They are:
- Ronald Peterson, VP/Secretary
- Joshua Weber of Calumet Editions, Treasurer
- Paul Nylander of Illustrada Design, Amy Rath of Unsung Voices, Nancy Roop of Developmental Texts, and Michael Braun of Orange Hat Publishing. (You’ll see Michael’s name again soon; he is scheduled for a retention election given that he was an appointed member of the board.)
I was also pleased to welcome our administrative coordinator, Allison Hawkins. Many of you who engaged with the submission and judging process worked with Allison. Our Midwest Book Awards chair, Jennifer Baum, could not attend — which is especially sad, given that her term of service leading the book awards for nearly a decade has come to a fruitful end with this very gala.
We gathered at St. Catherine’s University in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota, to celebrate the very best of Midwestern publishing. We welcomed roughly 200 submissions from more than 100 submitters — a number that is in line with recent years despite a shift, this season, in our submission window. It was a real joy to assess the “best of the best” that our region has to offer. To those of you who submitted — your confidence in your work was well-placed, regardless of who won individual categories. It was a privilege to peer into the landscape of the wonderful work all of you do, so consistently.
I want to take a moment with you to discuss last year at MiPA and what lies ahead in the year to come.
When our current board took office last July, we agreed to focus immediately on infrastructure needs. My immediate predecessor, Paul Nylander, had done yeoman’s work in the previous term keeping the organization on even keel despite a few resignations and a web-and-email setup that hadn’t seen material enhancement in quite a few years.
So a lot of our work has involved decidedly un-sexy remodeling efforts under the hood: We updated the website, transitioned our banking system to a modern platform, streamlined the Midwest Book Awards, put our email on a new hosting provider, built an internal social platform for communications and information sharing, and refreshed our newsletter service.
The Midwest Book Awards also saw some enhancements — for example, this was the first year that we’ve included special distinctions, and this year we significantly collapsed our genre categories to better reflect the cadence and volume of submissions over the last several seasons.
As we look forward as an organization, we cannot be just a friendly group of people who operate a regional trade association as if it’s still 1997. Our mission includes the promotion of excellent books, and there’s no better way to do that than to partner with other stakeholders in our industry to ensure that our books find diverse and eager audiences. To that end, we’re focusing on networking and convening, helping others to see the value of independent publishing, particularly indie booksellers. By being “independent, together” we hope to build a sustainable ecosystem of real literary excellence that avoids the economic challenges that come from an Amazon-distorted industry.
Thus, going forward, you’ll see us out in the wild more often. For example, Allison and I will be representing MiPA at the Writers’ Symposium at GenCon this summer, where we will meet as many of the 30,000 attendees of the Symposium as we can. You’ll see us at regional events across MiPA’s service area, including in places where you might not expect to bump into us. We will focus more on high-quality, in-person activities that bring real value — including potentially Mastermind circles, a carefully controlled social-networking community to share best practices, and more opportunities to share our catalog of award-winning titles with indie booksellers across the region.
And, of course, we’ve already developed a laundry list of enhancements for the next cycle of the Midwest Book Awards.
I am grateful to all of you for supporting the cause of independent publishing. I can tell you that each book that achieved finalist status is a great example of the work of Midwestern literary talent, author and publisher and designer alike. I’m grateful to Jennifer and Allison and our roster of judges for their hard work over the last few months. I’m grateful to St. Catherine’s University for being an excellent host, and for Illustrada Design and Kirk House Publishing, our sponsors for the gala.
The world is changing. Publishing is changing. But you know what? We’ll survive it — even thrive in it — by producing excellent books and by being independent, together.
Additional Book Awards Information
- Feedback from our judges will be individually emailed to every submitter, whether or not they were a winner/finalist, over the next week. Please look for an email from Allison. Thank you all for your patience!
- Seals can be purchased through the store link on the MiPA website. A selection for the rose gold special distinction seals will be available by tomorrow (Friday, 6/26) at noon.
- While we hope to have the full Gala recording available soon, a recording error has caused its posting to be delayed. We are working on it, and hope to have it available (even imperfectly) on our YouTube channel within the next week.
- A digital copy of the special distinction seal will also be made available on our website, for social media or other digital use.
- If you have any additional questions or concerns regarding the Midwest Book Awards, please email Allison directly at allison@mipa.org. As Jason mentioned above, we will be implementing quite a few enhancements to the process in the next cycle.
Thank you for supporting MiPA!