Last week, a literary agent emailed to ask if we would be interested in a novel she was shopping. She said several other publishers had already made offers and she needed our response within 48 hours. I said no. Not because the book was bad. I had not read it yet. I said no because 48 hours is not enough time to decide whether to publish a book, and any process that requires that speed is, in my opinion, a process that is designed to produce bad decisions.

This is not a popular position. Speed is highly valued in modern publishing, as it is in most industries. Publishers compete to acquire books quickly. They compress editorial timelines to get titles to market faster. They rush through production to capitalize on trends before they fade. The assumption underlying all of this haste is that faster is better, that the publisher who moves quickest wins.

I think this assumption is wrong, and I want to make the case for slowness.

How Speed Warps Acquisitions

The acquisitions process is where speed does the most damage. When a publisher has 48 hours to decide on a manuscript, what actually happens?

Nobody reads the full manuscript in 48 hours. Not with the attention it deserves, not alongside their other responsibilities. What happens instead is that someone reads the first fifty pages and the proposal, skims the rest, and makes a decision based on a partial reading plus a market judgment: “Is this the kind of book that is selling right now? Does the author have a platform? Can we position this against comparable titles?” These are legitimate considerations, but they are not the same as “Is this a good book?”

The acquisitions decisions I regret most are the ones I made quickly. In one case, I acquired a novel based on a partial read and enthusiasm from a colleague, only to discover during editing that the second half had structural problems that would require months of revision. The book was eventually published and it was fine, but it would have been better if I had taken the time to read the full manuscript before committing. In another case, I passed on a book because I was not persuaded by the first three chapters, and the book went on to win a major prize. If I had read the entire manuscript, which gets dramatically better after those opening chapters, I would have made a different decision.

Speed favors certain kinds of books over others. Books with strong openings and clear commercial hooks are advantaged in a fast acquisitions process because they are easy to evaluate quickly. Books that are slower to reveal their qualities, that require patience and full engagement, are disadvantaged. This means that the acceleration of the acquisitions process systematically biases publishing toward the accessible and the immediately gratifying, and against the complex, the unusual, and the slow-burning.

I do not think this is a theoretical concern. I think it helps explain why so much of what major publishers release feels similar. When acquisitions decisions are made quickly, they are made based on pattern recognition: “This is like Book X, which sold well.” Pattern recognition favors the familiar. It penalizes the original. The result is a publishing list that is optimized for short-term sales but depleted of the kinds of surprising, challenging books that give a publisher its identity over time.

The Editorial Rush

Speed pressure does not end at acquisition. It continues through the editorial process, often with even more damaging results.

A book that needs two years of editing gets eighteen months. A book that needs eighteen months gets twelve. The author is pushed to revise faster because the publication date has been set based on a catalog deadline rather than on when the book will actually be ready. I have seen books published with revision notes still outstanding because the production schedule could not accommodate another round. I have seen authors sign off on galleys they were not satisfied with because the printer had already been booked.

At ScrollWorks, we try to set publication dates based on when the book will be finished, not when the catalog needs to be filled. This is easier for a small publisher than a large one, because we do not have a fixed number of catalog slots to fill each season. But it requires constant vigilance against the creeping pressure to move faster.

I worked on The Last Archive for an editorial period that would have been unthinkable at a major publisher. We went through multiple rounds of structural revision, followed by line editing, followed by two rounds of copyediting. Each round was followed by a pause, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, during which the author lived with the changes and came back with fresh eyes. That pause time is, I believe, one of the most valuable things a publisher can give an author. It is the time during which the author’s unconscious mind works on problems that the conscious mind has not yet identified. It cannot be compressed without cost.

The difference between a book that was rushed through editing and one that was given adequate time is not always apparent on first reading. But it accumulates. The rushed book has passages that almost work but do not quite land. It has character arcs that feel slightly forced. It has a climax that arrives too quickly or a resolution that feels unearned. The patient book has none of these problems, or rather, it had all of them at some point during the editing process, but the author had time to identify and fix them.

Production Quality and Time

The physical production of a book is another area where speed and quality are in direct tension.

Cover design is the most visible example. A good cover design typically requires the designer to read the manuscript (or at least a substantial portion of it), develop several concepts, present them for feedback, revise the chosen concept, and produce final artwork. This process takes six to twelve weeks if done properly. I have seen publishers compress it to two weeks, and the results are almost always generic. You get a cover that is competent but not distinctive, one that looks like fifty other covers in the same genre because the designer did not have time to find what makes this particular book unique.

Interior layout and typesetting also suffer under time pressure. A careful typesetter will adjust word spacing, fix awkward hyphenation breaks, ensure consistent treatment of special characters, and attend to the dozens of other small details that distinguish a well-made book from a merely adequate one. These details are invisible when done well, which is exactly why they are the first things to be cut when the schedule is tight. Nobody notices that the word spacing is slightly uneven on page 147. But the cumulative effect of hundreds of such small compromises is a book that feels cheap, even if you cannot articulate why.

Proofreading is another casualty of speed. A thorough proofread requires reading the entire typeset book at least twice, ideally by two different proofreaders. This catches not only typos but also formatting inconsistencies, orphaned lines, bad page breaks, and other layout errors that the typesetter might have introduced. A compressed schedule often reduces this to a single read by a single proofreader, and the error rate in the finished book increases accordingly.

The Marketing Paradox

Here is an irony that the speed advocates should consider: rushing a book to market often reduces its marketing effectiveness.

Effective book marketing requires lead time. Review copies need to go out four to six months before publication. Bookstore events need to be scheduled two to three months in advance. Media contacts need time to read the book, pitch it internally, and schedule coverage. Course adoptions, which can provide steady long-term sales, often operate on a semester-ahead timeline.

When a publisher compresses the production schedule, the marketing window shrinks correspondingly. There is less time to send advance copies, less time to cultivate media interest, less time to set up events. The book arrives in stores with less pre-publication buzz and fewer reviews than it would have had with a longer lead time. The publisher traded marketing effectiveness for production speed, and the book’s sales suffer as a result.

I have watched this dynamic play out repeatedly with books from other publishers. A novel that would have benefited from a long, slow marketing build is rushed to market to hit a seasonal deadline or capitalize on a trend, and it lands with a thud because nobody outside the publisher’s office has heard of it. Meanwhile, a competing title from a publisher that took its time, that sent advance copies six months out, that scheduled the author for a festival appearance, that cultivated a relationship with a key reviewer, sells steadily because the groundwork was laid properly.

The Cultural Cost

Beyond the practical arguments, I think there is a cultural cost to speed in publishing that is worth considering.

Books are supposed to be repositories of deep thought. They are the medium we turn to when we want someone to explain something complex, to tell a story with nuance, to make an argument with full supporting evidence. The book format exists precisely because some ideas cannot be compressed into a tweet or an article. They need the room that only a book provides.

When the production of books is rushed, we undermine this fundamental purpose. We are saying, in effect, that the medium dedicated to deep thought should be produced with shallow process. There is a contradiction there that I find deeply uncomfortable. If we believe that books matter because they contain ideas and stories that took time to develop, then we should also believe that the process of making those books available to readers should be given adequate time. Anything less is a betrayal of what books are for.

I am aware that this sounds idealistic. I am aware that market pressures are real and that publishers, especially small ones, need cash flow and cannot afford to sit on finished manuscripts indefinitely. I am not arguing for unlimited timelines. I am arguing for sufficient ones. And “sufficient” almost always means longer than the current industry standard.

At ScrollWorks, we have made slowness a deliberate part of our identity. We publish fewer titles than a publisher of our size could. We take longer between acquisition and publication. We give our authors more time for revision and ourselves more time for production. This costs us in market share and revenue. It earns us, I believe, in the quality of the books we produce and in the relationships we build with authors who value careful stewardship over rapid distribution.

What Slowness Looks Like in Practice

Let me be concrete about what our slower timeline actually involves, because “we take more time” is vague and could mean anything from slight delays to indefinite procrastination.

Our typical timeline from acquisition to publication is eighteen to twenty-four months. At a major publisher, the equivalent timeline is often twelve to fifteen months, sometimes less for time-sensitive titles. The extra months in our schedule are not padding. They are allocated to specific stages of the process. We give authors three to four months for a first structural revision where a faster publisher might allow six to eight weeks. We allow two months for cover design iteration where others might allow three weeks. We build in a one-month buffer between the final proofread and the print date, so that last-minute corrections can be incorporated without panic.

Each of these extra increments is modest on its own. But they add up to a fundamentally different experience for the author and a measurably different quality of finished product. Our authors do not feel rushed. They have time to sit with editorial feedback, to let it work on them before responding. They are not making revision decisions at midnight before a deadline. They are making them thoughtfully, over weeks, with the benefit of distance and reflection.

Every book in our catalog, from Still Waters to Echoes of Iron, has benefited from this philosophy. They are better books than they would have been under a faster timeline. That is not a claim I can prove with sales data. It is a judgment based on my experience of what these manuscripts looked like when they arrived and what they looked like when they were published. The difference, in every case, was time.

I went back to that agent and explained our process. She was understanding, if not enthusiastic. The book went to another publisher. I do not know if they made it better or worse than we would have. What I know is that we would have given it the time it needed, and in publishing, time is the one thing you can never get back once you have given it away.