A few months ago, I was flipping through a new release from another publisher and noticed something that made me unreasonably happy. The acknowledgments page was four pages long. Four pages of the author thanking specific people, telling little stories about how they helped, and occasionally making jokes that clearly had meaning only to the people named. I read every word of it, which is something I almost always do, and which makes me unusual even within the publishing industry.

Most people skip the acknowledgments. I know this because I have asked. At dinner parties, at book festivals, in casual conversations with readers, I have asked probably a hundred people over the years whether they read the acknowledgments page. The vast majority say no. Some look at me like the question itself is strange. One person said, “Wait, books still have those?”

Yes, books still have those. At ScrollWorks Media, every single one of our titles includes an acknowledgments section, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I have any say in the matter. This is not a business decision. The acknowledgments page does not sell books. It does not generate reviews or social media buzz. It does not help with search engine optimization or retailer algorithms. From a purely commercial standpoint, the acknowledgments page is dead weight. It costs money to typeset, it takes up pages that could be used for an excerpt from the author’s next book or an ad for our other titles, and almost nobody reads it.

I do not care. We are keeping it.

Here is why. A book is never the product of a single person working alone in a room. I know that is how we like to imagine it. The solitary genius, the tortured artist, the writer alone with their thoughts and a blank page. It is a romantic image and it is almost entirely false. Every book I have ever worked on was shaped by dozens of people, most of whom the reader will never know about unless someone takes the time to write their names down.

The acknowledgments page is where that happens. It is the only place in the entire book where the collaborative nature of the work is made visible. And I think making it visible matters, even if most readers skip over it.

Let me tell you about some of the people who typically get thanked in an acknowledgments page, and what they actually did to earn that thanks.

Editors are the most commonly acknowledged, and deservedly so. But readers often do not understand what an editor actually does. The popular image is of someone fixing commas and catching typos. That is copyediting, which is important but is only one small part of the editorial process. The developmental editor, the person who works with the author on the structure, argument, pacing, and overall shape of the book, often has a profound influence on the final product. I have seen developmental editors suggest restructuring an entire book, cutting chapters that the author loved but that were not serving the narrative, or identifying a gap in the argument that the author had not noticed. These suggestions can transform a good manuscript into a great one.

When an author thanks their editor in the acknowledgments, they are usually thanking someone who spent months engaging deeply with their work, pushing them to make it better, and sometimes having difficult conversations about changes that needed to happen. That relationship is intimate in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not experienced it. Your editor sees your work at its worst, before it is ready, when the seams are still showing and the rough patches have not been smoothed out. Trusting someone with that is not easy, and a good editorial relationship requires real trust on both sides.

Then there are the agents. Literary agents do not just sell books to publishers. The good ones are advisors, career strategists, emotional support systems, and sometimes the only person in the author’s professional life who is unequivocally on their side. An agent’s job is to advocate for the author, and they do this for months or years before seeing any financial return. Many agents work with authors on revising their manuscripts before they even submit them to publishers. This pre-submission editorial work is essentially free labor, done on the hope that the book will eventually sell.

When I see an agent thanked in the acknowledgments, I often know more about what that thanks represents than the reader does. I know the agent fielded panicked phone calls at 10 PM. I know they talked the author off a ledge when the first round of rejections came in. I know they believed in the book when there was no evidence to justify that belief. Agents are the unsung heroes of publishing, and the acknowledgments page is often the only public recognition they receive.

But the acknowledgments are not just about publishing professionals. They are also about the personal network that made the book possible. Spouses who took over household duties so the author could write on weekends. Friends who read early drafts and provided honest feedback. Writing group members who met every Tuesday evening for two years. Parents who paid for a college education that eventually, indirectly, led to a career in writing. Children who tolerated a distracted, sometimes absent parent during the final push to deadline.

These people made real sacrifices so the book could exist, and naming them in the acknowledgments is the least an author can do. I find it genuinely moving when I read acknowledgments that are specific about these contributions. Not just “Thanks to my wife for her support,” but “Thanks to my wife, who read every chapter twice, told me when the dialogue sounded wooden, and kept the kids quiet on Saturday mornings so I could work.” That specificity turns the acknowledgment from a formality into something real.

I also love the acknowledgments that include people who contributed to the book’s subject matter rather than its production. Researchers, interview subjects, archivists, librarians, experts who took phone calls from a stranger and patiently explained their field. For non-fiction especially, these people are often the source of the book’s best material, and without them the author would have nothing to write about. When I edited the manuscript for The Last Archive, I counted over thirty individuals thanked in the acknowledgments for providing information, access, or expertise. Each of those thirty people gave their time because they believed the book mattered. Acknowledging them by name is a way of honoring that belief.

There is a practical argument for keeping acknowledgments, too. Publishing is a relationship business. Careers are built on networks of trust and mutual support. The acknowledgments page is a public record of those relationships, and people remember being named. I have had agents tell me that seeing their name in an author’s acknowledgments meant more to them than the commission they earned on the deal. I have had freelance editors tell me that acknowledgments mentions have led to referrals and new clients. In a business where so much of the work is invisible, being acknowledged matters in tangible ways.

Some publishers have started trimming or eliminating acknowledgments pages, especially in certain categories. I have heard the arguments. Digital-first publishers argue that in the ebook format, back matter that is not content feels like filler. Cost-conscious publishers argue that every page costs money and acknowledgments do not contribute to the reading experience. Marketing-focused publishers argue that the back matter should be used for calls to action, newsletter sign-ups, or previews of other titles.

All of these arguments have some validity, and I still disagree with all of them. A book is not just a product. It is an artifact of human effort, and the acknowledgments page is where that effort is made legible. Replacing it with a newsletter signup or an excerpt from another book feels, to me, like replacing a thank-you note with a coupon. It might be more commercially efficient, but something real is lost.

I want to share a story that solidified my feelings about this. A few years ago, we published a memoir by a first-time author. It was her first book and she was not sure what to do with the acknowledgments. She asked me if she really needed one. I told her it was her choice but that I hoped she would include one. She wrote a beautiful, two-page acknowledgment section that included, among others, her high school English teacher.

About a month after publication, the author forwarded me an email she had received from that teacher. The teacher was retired, living in a small apartment in Florida. She had not known the book existed until a former colleague sent her a copy. She had read the acknowledgments first, as retired English teachers apparently do, and found her name. The email was short. It said that in 35 years of teaching, she had never been mentioned in a published book before, and that seeing her name there, knowing she had played some small part in a student’s journey to becoming an author, was one of the proudest moments of her life.

I am not ashamed to say that email made me tear up. And it confirmed something I already believed: the acknowledgments page is not for most readers. It is for the people named in it. It is a public, permanent record that says “you mattered to this work.” In a world where so much labor is invisible and unrecognized, that matters. It matters a lot.

There is another dimension to acknowledgments that I find interesting, which is what they reveal about the book’s creation story. When I read a book’s acknowledgments, I am reading between the lines for clues about how the book was made. A long list of archivists and librarians tells me the author did extensive primary research. A mention of a residency or fellowship tells me the author had dedicated time and space to write. A thank-you to a therapist tells me the writing process was emotionally difficult. A mention of “everyone who read early drafts and told me to keep going” tells me there were moments when the author wanted to quit.

These details add depth to my experience of the book. Knowing something about how a book was made does not change the words on the page, but it changes how I receive them. It reminds me that the polished final product I am holding went through a messy, difficult, human process to get to my hands. I think that awareness enriches the reading experience, even if most readers do not consciously seek it out.

I should also mention the acknowledgments that make me laugh. The best ones have a sense of humor. I have read acknowledgments that thank a cat for “sleeping on the manuscript and thereby preventing me from making revisions I would have regretted.” I have read ones that thank a bartender at a specific establishment for “providing the venue where most of the good ideas in this book were conceived and most of the bad ones were discarded.” I have read one that simply said “No thanks to the squirrel that chewed through my internet cable in chapter seven. You know what you did.”

These moments of personality are delightful, and they only exist because the acknowledgments page gives authors a space to be themselves without the constraints of their genre or subject matter. It is the one part of the book where the author can step out from behind the narrative and speak directly as a person. For fiction authors especially, who spend the entire book inhabiting other voices, the acknowledgments can be the only place where their own voice appears unfiltered.

At ScrollWorks, we give authors complete freedom with their acknowledgments. We do not edit them for length, we do not suggest cuts, and we do not impose any template. If an author wants to write six pages of acknowledgments, we will typeset six pages. If they want to write three sentences, that is fine too. The only thing we insist on is that the section exists. Even a brief acknowledgment is better than none, because it signals that the author recognizes the collaborative nature of what they have done.

I realize I am making a sentimental argument here, and I am comfortable with that. Not everything in publishing needs to be justified by a business case. Some things are worth doing because they are right, because they honor the people who make our work possible, and because they remind us that books are made by communities of human beings, not by solitary geniuses or content algorithms. The acknowledgments page is one of those things.

If you pick up a copy of Echoes of Iron or Still Waters or any of our other titles, flip to the back before you start reading. Read the acknowledgments. You will meet the community of people who helped bring that book into the world. And the next time someone tells you that books still have acknowledgments pages, I hope you will say yes, and that you know why.