There’s a folder on my computer labeled “Almost.” It contains proposals, manuscripts, and correspondence for books that ScrollWorks considered publishing but ultimately didn’t. Some we turned down for business reasons. Some we loved but couldn’t afford. A few we let go because the timing was wrong, or because we couldn’t agree internally on whether they were brilliant or a mess. Every publisher has a folder like this, though most won’t talk about it. I think we should, because the books that got away tell you as much about a publishing house as the books it actually published.

I’m going to be somewhat vague about certain details to protect the authors involved, many of whom went on to publish their books elsewhere. But the stories are real, and the regrets are genuine.

The Memoir That Arrived Too Early

In early 2021, we received a memoir from a first-time author, a woman in her fifties who had spent twenty years working as a diplomatic interpreter. The manuscript was rough in places but contained some of the most vivid, funny, and insightful writing about cross-cultural communication I’d ever read. She had stories about mistranslations that nearly caused diplomatic incidents, about the strange intimacy of speaking someone else’s words in real time, about the loneliness of a job that required her to be invisible.

I loved it. My co-editor loved it. Our production team loved it. The problem was that in 2021, we were a much smaller operation than we are now. We had two books already in the pipeline and barely enough budget to produce them. Taking on a third, especially a memoir that would need significant developmental editing, was financially reckless. We agonized over it for weeks. I wrote a long, anguished email to the author explaining that we thought her book was exceptional but that we couldn’t offer her a deal that did justice to it.

She understood, or at least she said she did. Six months later, a mid-size press picked it up. They did a beautiful job with it. It got reviewed in several major publications and sold well. I was genuinely happy for her, and also genuinely sick about losing it. That book would have been a perfect fit for our catalog, and the only reason we don’t publish it is that we encountered it at the wrong moment in our own development as a company.

This is one of the hardest lessons in publishing: talent doesn’t wait for you to be ready. Books arrive when they arrive, and if you can’t say yes at that moment, someone else will.

The Novel We Argued About for Six Months

In 2022, an agent sent us a literary novel with a concept that I found either brilliant or insane, depending on the day. The book was structured around a single dinner party, told from the perspectives of eight different guests, each chapter revealing secrets and connections that recontextualized everything that came before. Think of it as a literary Rashomon set in a Brooklyn brownstone.

The writing was superb. The structure was ambitious. The problem was that I wasn’t sure it worked. Each individual chapter was compelling, but the cumulative effect was either dazzlingly complex or hopelessly confusing, and I changed my mind about which one almost every time I reread a section. Two members of our team thought it was the best thing we’d been offered in years. One thought it was a beautiful failure. I kept going back and forth, which is not a great position from which to make an acquisition decision.

We spent six months discussing it. We had multiple meetings. We brought in an outside reader for a second opinion (she loved it). We crunched the numbers on what it would cost to publish and what we could realistically expect to sell. In the end, we passed. Not because we thought it was bad, but because we couldn’t agree that it was good enough to take the financial risk on. Looking back, I think we were overthinking it. Sometimes you have to bet on talent even when the execution is imperfect, because the imperfections are often what make a book interesting.

The book was published by someone else in 2023. The reviews were polarized, exactly as I’d predicted: some loved it, some thought it was too clever by half. It didn’t sell particularly well. But it got noticed, and the author’s second book got a much bigger deal. I think about that trajectory sometimes. If we’d published the first book, we’d have been positioned to publish the second, which was more commercially viable. Instead, we played it safe and missed both.

The Nonfiction Book That Scared Us

We once considered a nonfiction book about the history of a particular industry that had recently been through a major scandal. The author was a journalist who had been covering the story for years and had access to sources that nobody else did. The proposal was extraordinary: deeply reported, sharply written, and full of revelations that would have made headlines.

We passed because we were afraid of getting sued. The industry in question was litigious, and several of the people named in the book had a history of threatening legal action against their critics. As a small publisher, we didn’t have the legal resources to defend ourselves if someone decided to come after us. A large publisher with a legal department could absorb that risk. We couldn’t.

I still think about this one more than any of the others, because the decision to pass wasn’t about the quality of the book. It was about the vulnerability of our business. The book was important and true and well-written. We didn’t publish it because we were scared, and I’m not entirely at peace with that. There’s a version of this story where I’m being prudent and responsible, protecting the company and its employees from a real threat. There’s another version where I’m being cowardly and letting a bully win. Both versions are true, which is not a comfortable thing to sit with.

The book was eventually published by a major house with a robust legal team. It did exactly what the author said it would: made headlines, generated controversy, and held powerful people accountable. The publisher fielded some legal threats but nothing came of them. I was glad the book existed and sorry we weren’t the ones who brought it into the world.

The Poetry Collection Nobody Wanted

I’m including this one because it illustrates something about the economics of publishing that non-industry people often don’t understand. In 2022, a poet whose work I deeply admire sent us a collection that was, I believe, one of the best things written in English that year. I read it three times in a week. I called my co-editor and said, “We need to publish this.”

The math didn’t work. Poetry collections sell, on average, somewhere between 300 and 1,000 copies. Even at the high end of that range, the revenue wouldn’t cover the cost of production, let alone editing, design, and marketing. We would have had to treat it as a loss leader, a book we published for prestige rather than profit, subsidized by the revenue from our other titles.

We considered it seriously. In the end, we decided we couldn’t justify the expense, not because the work wasn’t worth it but because every dollar we spent on the poetry collection was a dollar we couldn’t spend on our fiction and nonfiction titles, which needed the investment to find their audiences. It was a Sophie’s Choice situation, except less dramatic and more spreadsheet-based.

The poet found a university press to publish the collection, which is where most poetry ends up, and I’m told it did well by poetry standards. I still have the manuscript on my computer and I still reread it occasionally, with a mix of admiration and regret. The publishing industry’s inability to economically support poetry is one of its biggest failings, and I don’t have a solution. I just have the guilt of being part of the problem.

The Book That Was Too Similar to One We’d Already Published

This is an awkward one. A few years ago, we received a novel that dealt with some of the same themes and settings as a book we’d published the previous year. The new novel was different in tone, structure, and plot, but the surface-level similarities were strong enough that publishing both would have created a weird echo in our catalog. Reviewers would have noticed. Bookshop buyers would have been confused. Readers who liked the first might have felt cheated by the second, or vice versa.

We passed, and I still don’t know if it was the right decision. The new novel was arguably better than the one we’d already published. But loyalty to our existing author, and the practical concerns about catalog management, won out. Publishing is full of these kinds of decisions, where doing the right thing for one author means doing the wrong thing for another, and there’s no clean resolution.

The author whose book we turned down was understandably frustrated. From her perspective, we were punishing her for writing a book that happened to share some thematic territory with something in our backlist, which was not something she could have known about or controlled. She was right to be frustrated. I explained our reasoning as honestly as I could, and she published the book with a different small press. It did well. Our author’s book also continued to do well. Both books found their readers, which is how it should be.

The One That Got Away Because I Hesitated

I want to end with the one that bothers me the most, because it was entirely my fault. In late 2021, an author I’d been in contact with for months told me she was ready to submit her novel. She’d been working on it for years, and I’d read early drafts that were promising. She gave me first look, which meant I had a window of time, usually a few weeks, to make an offer before she submitted to other publishers.

I read the finished manuscript over a weekend. It was wonderful. Flawed in places, as most first drafts are, but the voice was distinctive and the story was emotionally powerful. I should have called her on Monday and made an offer. Instead, I hesitated. I wanted to reread a few chapters. I wanted to talk to my team. I wanted to think about the marketing plan. All reasonable steps, and all of them caused me to lose four days.

During those four days, she heard from a friend at a larger publisher who expressed interest. She submitted to them. They made an offer within 48 hours. By the time I called to say we wanted the book, she had already accepted. She was apologetic. I told her she’d made the right decision, because the larger publisher could offer things we couldn’t: a bigger advance, wider distribution, more marketing support. And I meant it. But I also knew that if I’d moved faster, if I’d trusted my gut instead of my process, the book would have been ours.

That experience changed how I handle acquisitions. I still do my due diligence, but I’ve gotten much better at recognizing when deliberation is productive and when it’s just fear wearing a responsible-looking costume. Sometimes you have to say yes before you’re completely sure, because by the time you’re completely sure, the opportunity is gone.

Living With the Almosts

Every publisher’s “Almost” folder is a record of roads not taken. Some of those roads would have led to great books and grateful readers. Some would have led to financial disasters. The frustrating truth is that you can’t always tell which is which at the time, and by the time you know, it’s too late to change the decision.

I’ve learned to live with these near-misses, not comfortably but productively. Each one taught me something about what ScrollWorks is, what we can do, and what we’re willing to risk. The memoir taught me about timing. The argued-about novel taught me about decisiveness. The scary nonfiction book taught me about the limits of courage when money is on the line. The poetry collection taught me about the cruelty of literary economics. And the one I hesitated on taught me to trust my instincts.

The books we did publish, the ones you can find on our books page, represent the decisions we got right, or at least the decisions we committed to. Books like The Last Archive and Echoes of Iron are here because, at some point, someone at ScrollWorks said yes and meant it. Behind each yes are the almosts, the books that didn’t quite make it, the ones that haunt us pleasantly on quiet afternoons.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We say yes to the books we believe in, and we remember the ones we let go.