On March 16, 2020, we sent our entire staff home. At the time, I thought we would be back in two weeks, maybe three. I remember packing my laptop and a single notebook, leaving everything else on my desk. The stack of manuscripts I was reading. My coffee mug. A proof copy of a cover I was reviewing. I figured I would be back for all of it before the month was out.

It was fourteen months before I sat at that desk again. In the interim, ScrollWorks Media published eight books, adapted every one of our processes, learned things about our business that we did not know we needed to learn, and came out the other side changed in ways that I am still processing. Here is what we learned from publishing during a pandemic, told as honestly as I can manage.

The first thing we learned was how dependent we were on physical infrastructure we had taken for granted. Our editorial process, for example, relied heavily on in-person conversations. An editor and an author would sit in a room together, sometimes for hours, talking through the structure of a manuscript. These conversations had a quality that is hard to replicate over video call. There are nonverbal cues, moments of silence that are productive rather than awkward, the ability to spread printed pages across a table and point at things. When we moved these conversations to Zoom, something was lost. Not everything. The conversations still happened and the editorial work still got done. But the texture was different, and several of our editors reported that the process took longer and felt more exhausting.

We also discovered that our production pipeline had a single point of failure we had never identified. Our primary printer, the company that handled most of our print runs, experienced severe disruptions in April and May of 2020. They had staff shortages, supply chain issues with paper and ink, and were dealing with their own pandemic protocols. We had two books scheduled for June publication, and suddenly we were not sure we could get them printed on time.

We scrambled and found a backup printer who could handle the job, but the experience exposed a vulnerability in our operations. We had been relying on a single printer for years because they gave us good rates and consistent quality. It had never occurred to us to develop a relationship with a backup. After the pandemic, we now maintain active relationships with three printers and can shift production between them if needed. This costs us some efficiency in normal times, but the insurance against disruption is worth it.

The second big lesson was about reader behavior. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people in publishing assumed that book sales would collapse. The logic seemed sound: bookstores were closing, people were scared and distracted, discretionary spending was expected to drop. And in the very short term, March and April of 2020, sales did dip. But then something happened that surprised almost everyone in the industry. Book sales not only recovered; for certain categories, they surged.

People stuck at home, stripped of their usual entertainment options, turned to reading. Some were reading to escape. Some were reading to understand what was happening. Some were reading because they finally had time for the stack of books they had been meaning to get to for years. Whatever the reason, the demand was real, and it reshaped our understanding of when and why people buy books.

At ScrollWorks, we saw a particularly strong surge in two categories: literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. Our fiction titles, including Still Waters and early copies of Echoes of Iron, saw sales increases that we had not projected. My theory, and it is only a theory, is that readers in crisis gravitate toward stories that offer emotional depth and complexity. When the real world feels chaotic and frightening, a well-crafted novel provides a space for the kind of sustained, focused attention that is hard to find elsewhere. Television and social media offer distraction. Books offer immersion. During the pandemic, a lot of people discovered they needed immersion more than distraction.

The third lesson was about the economics of events. Before the pandemic, author events were a significant part of our marketing strategy. Book launches, readings, signings, festival appearances. These events were expensive to organize (travel, venue rental, refreshments, staffing) but they generated sales, media coverage, and the kind of personal connections between authors and readers that build long-term loyalty.

When in-person events became impossible, we pivoted to virtual events. And here is the thing: virtual events were, in some ways, better. Not in all ways. I will never pretend that a Zoom reading has the same energy as a packed bookstore. But virtual events had advantages that surprised us. They had dramatically lower costs. No travel, no venue, no catering. They had wider geographic reach. A reader in rural Montana could attend a virtual book launch that they never would have traveled to New York for. And they generated data. We could see exactly how many people attended, how long they stayed, and what they clicked on afterward.

Our most successful virtual event during the pandemic was an author Q&A that drew 340 attendees. For comparison, our best-attended in-person event pre-pandemic had maybe 75 people. The virtual event cost us essentially nothing to produce. The in-person event had cost several thousand dollars. On pure ROI, the virtual event won by a massive margin.

But I do not think ROI tells the whole story. The in-person events created something that virtual events cannot, which is a sense of shared physical presence. When you are in a room with an author and fifty other readers, there is an energy that emerges from that gathering. Laughter is different in a room than it is on a screen. The moment when an author reads a passage and you can feel the audience holding its breath, that does not happen on Zoom. Or if it does, nobody knows it is happening because everyone is muted.

Our post-pandemic approach is a hybrid. We do in-person events for major launches and local audiences. We do virtual events for wider reach and lower cost. And we have found that the two formats serve different purposes. In-person events build deep connections with a small number of people. Virtual events build shallow connections with a large number of people. You need both.

The fourth lesson was about the supply chain, and this one still affects us today. The pandemic exposed fragilities in the global paper supply chain that the publishing industry is still dealing with. Paper prices spiked, delivery times stretched, and for a period in late 2020 and early 2021, getting certain types of paper for book printing was genuinely difficult. We had to change the paper stock for two of our titles because our preferred stock was unavailable. Readers probably did not notice, but we did. The feel of a book in your hands, the weight of the pages, the way they turn, all of this is affected by the paper, and settling for a substitute felt like a compromise.

The supply chain disruptions also affected shipping. Getting books from the printer to the warehouse and from the warehouse to bookstores and online retailers became less reliable. We had shipments delayed by weeks, which caused stock-outs at some retailers. One of our titles was effectively unavailable on a major online retailer for nine days because a shipment was stuck somewhere in the logistics chain. Nine days does not sound like much, but when a book is new and you are trying to build momentum, nine days of unavailability is devastating.

The fifth lesson was personal, and it is the one I think about most often. The pandemic reminded me why I got into publishing in the first place. When the world was falling apart, or felt like it was, the work of making books felt meaningful in a way that was hard to articulate. People needed stories. They needed well-researched information. They needed the experience of encountering another human consciousness through the medium of printed words. And we were helping to provide that.

I remember a phone call with one of our authors in April 2020. She was struggling with her manuscript, as many authors were. The world felt too chaotic for fiction to matter. She asked me, half-jokingly, whether anyone would still care about novels after the pandemic. I told her that I thought people would care about novels more after the pandemic, because the experience of living through a global crisis would make people hungry for the kind of deep human understanding that only literature can provide. I believed that when I said it, and I believe it now. Books are not luxuries. They are necessities. The pandemic proved this in a way that no marketing campaign ever could.

The sixth lesson was about remote work and its impact on publishing culture. Before the pandemic, the publishing industry was one of the most office-centric industries in America. People commuted to midtown Manhattan or other publishing hubs and worked in offices because that was how it had always been done. The pandemic forced everyone to work remotely, and it turned out that most of the work could be done from anywhere. Manuscript editing, cover design, marketing campaigns, sales calls, all of it worked fine remotely. Not identically. But fine.

At ScrollWorks, this realization has permanently changed how we operate. We now have team members in three states, which would have been unthinkable before the pandemic. This has expanded our talent pool and, I think, diversified our perspectives. An editor living in Boise sees the market differently than an editor living in Brooklyn, and those different perspectives make our acquisitions better.

The seventh and final lesson is about resilience, both institutional and personal. The pandemic tested every part of our operation, from our finances to our relationships to our emotional capacity for uncertainty. There were moments when I was not sure ScrollWorks would survive. Our cash flow was tight in the best of times, and a prolonged disruption could have killed us. We survived because we had just enough financial cushion, because our team was adaptable and committed, and, frankly, because we got lucky. The surge in book sales that started in the summer of 2020 saved us. If sales had stayed depressed for another quarter, the story might have ended differently.

I do not want to be glib about this. Many small publishers did not survive the pandemic, and it was not because they were less talented or less committed than we were. Business survival during a crisis involves a large element of luck, and I think it is important to acknowledge that rather than pretending that our survival was entirely a result of smart decisions. We made some smart decisions. We also caught some breaks. Both were necessary.

Looking back now, more than a year after the worst of the pandemic, I think ScrollWorks is a better publisher than it was in February 2020. We are more adaptable, more thoughtful about risk, and more appreciative of the work we do. We have a deeper understanding of our supply chain, better relationships with backup vendors, a hybrid events strategy that reaches more readers, and a distributed team that brings more perspectives to our work. These are all good things, and none of them would have happened without the pressure of the crisis.

But I would not choose to go through it again. The stress was real, the uncertainty was exhausting, and the human cost of the pandemic extends far beyond the publishing industry. What I can say is that we came through it with a clearer sense of what matters, both in our business and in our lives. Books matter. The people who make them matter. The readers who need them matter. Everything else, the office politics, the industry drama, the arguments about format and platform and algorithm, is just noise. The pandemic made the signal louder, and I intend to keep listening. If you are interested in the books that came out of this period, our catalog tells the story better than I can.