Rosemary Sekora is the Marketing and Sales Manager for UNP.
This year Nebraska was in the national news quite a bit – and maybe not for the reasons you’d expect; a world record for women’s sporting event attendance, a mini-series about a famous Black sheriff in the West, and a huge alien that crashed into the western half of the state that Ron Howard is interested in. Some of this is fiction, but most of it is not.
On August 30, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln cancelled class and declared “Nebraska Volleyball Day.” The Nebraska Cornhuskers were set to take on the Omaha Mavericks at Memorial Stadium, home of the Nebraska football team. The outcome was breaking the world record for attendance at a women’s sporting event with a whopping 92,003 fans. This wouldn’t be the only record the volleyball program would beat. The team went on to break its own Devaney Center attendance record at a home game. Then they became the first female sport in NCAA history to pass 250,000 in home attendance in a single season.
Serendipitously, we published Nebraska Volleyball: The Origin Story by John Mabry at the same time. UNP even had a small part in Nebraska Volleyball Day thanks to the Nebraska Alumni Association:
But our author John Mabry deserves credit for bringing the story of this historic team to light – no one else had written a book detailing where this volleyball program started. We, of course, were more than happy to publish it.
And yes, volume two is in the works.
This year UNP also published book three in the Bass Reeves Trilogy, just in time for the Paramount+ mini-series to debut in November. The trilogy is historical fiction and author Sidney Thompson is a creative consultant on the show. The result has renewed interest in the real Bass Reeves, which Art T. Burton skillfully writes about in his book Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (new edition, Bison Books 2022).
What about that alien crashing into Nebraska? While sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, Godfall by Nebraska native Van Jensen (published in UNP’s Flyover Fiction series) was picked up by Imagine TV with Ron Howard to direct. You can read more about it in the Omaha World-Herald.
Other highlights to celebrate from 2023:
-2023 One Book One Nebraska selection was The Mystery of Hunting’s End by Mignon G. Eberhardt
-UNP influencer program launches
-Publication of the first Zero Street Fiction series book, Forget I Told You This by Hilary Zaid
With well over 1,000 media mentions and reviews this past year, we’ve had our fair share of coverage for our books, running the gamut of topics and publication types. This is what I love most about publishing–volleyball, Bass Reeves, and a giant fictional alien: all a part of a day’s work.
Bring on 2024!
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