In 2002, I worked for a publisher that occupied the second floor of a converted warehouse in a part of town that nobody would call fashionable. The elevator was broken more often than it wasn’t. Our “conference room” was a folding table in the corner of the main office. Our catalog was printed on a photocopier because we couldn’t afford a commercial printer. We had nine employees, a list of about twenty titles per year, and a distribution arrangement with a regional wholesaler that paid us sixty days late, if we were lucky, and ninety days late, if we weren’t.

That was independent publishing twenty years ago. I want to describe it in some detail, because the independent publishing of today is so different that people who entered the industry in the last decade might not recognize what it used to be. And I think understanding where we came from helps explain both what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost.

The biggest difference was distribution. Today, an independent publisher can get their books into virtually any bookstore in the country through relationships with national distributors like Ingram or through direct-to-consumer sales via their own website. Twenty years ago, distribution was the wall that separated “real” publishers from everybody else. The major distributors, the companies that could place your books in Barnes and Noble, Borders (when it existed), and the independent bookstores that relied on their catalogs, were selective. They had limited capacity, and they prioritized publishers with track records. A new independent publisher could spend years trying to get a distribution deal, and in the meantime, their books were effectively invisible to most retail channels.

Without distribution, you were stuck with a handful of options, none of them great. You could sell directly to bookstores, which meant calling or visiting individual stores, one at a time, and convincing each one to carry your titles. This was exhausting, time-consuming, and geographically limited. You could sell through your own website, but e-commerce in 2002 was primitive compared to today, and nobody had figured out how to market online effectively. You could sell at events, readings, and book fairs, which was actually our most effective channel but which scaled about as well as you’d expect. Or you could try to get into Amazon, which in 2002 was still primarily a book retailer and was more open to working with small publishers than it would later become.

The practical result was that most independent publishers had tiny sales volumes. A successful title for us sold 2,000 to 3,000 copies in its first year. A hit, the kind of book we’d celebrate, might sell 5,000. These numbers made it essentially impossible to pay authors significant advances, invest in marketing, or build the kind of institutional infrastructure that larger publishers took for granted. We operated on margins so thin that a single underperforming title could threaten the company’s solvency. I remember calculating, more than once, whether we could make payroll the following month.

Print-on-demand technology barely existed. Short-run digital printing was available, but the quality was noticeably inferior to offset printing. The covers looked flat. The text was slightly fuzzy. The paper options were limited. If you wanted a professional-looking book, you needed to print at least 1,000 copies via offset, which meant a significant upfront investment and a warehouse full of inventory that might or might not sell. Every print run was a gamble. Print too many, and you’d be sitting on boxes of unsold books for years. Print too few, and you’d miss sales while waiting for a reprint. We got it wrong constantly. I can still picture the storage unit we rented that was, at one point, filled floor to ceiling with copies of a poetry collection that we’d optimistically printed 2,000 copies of and sold 400.

The editorial side was different too, though in some ways better than what many independent publishers manage today. Because we published so few titles, each one got intense attention. Our editorial process was slow and thorough, partly by design and partly because we didn’t have enough staff to rush. I edited three or four books per year, which gave me time to read each manuscript multiple times, to have long conversations with authors, to agonize over individual sentences. The editorial quality of our books was, I think, genuinely high. We couldn’t compete with the big publishers on distribution or marketing, but we could compete on how much care we put into each title.

Cover design was a constant struggle. Good book designers were expensive, and we couldn’t afford them consistently. Some of our early covers were designed by friends, relatives, or the authors themselves, with predictably uneven results. I remember one cover that the author designed using Microsoft Publisher. It looked like a church bulletin. We published it anyway because we’d run out of time and money. The book was actually quite good, and I’ve always felt guilty that its cover didn’t give it a fair chance. Today, independent publishers have access to a global market of freelance designers through platforms like Dribbble and Behance, and tools like Canva have raised the floor for basic design. Twenty years ago, if you couldn’t afford a professional designer, you got an amateur cover, and amateur covers killed books.

Marketing was the area where independent publishers were most disadvantaged, and where the gap with larger publishers was widest. The major publishers had publicity departments that could get books reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major literary magazines. They had advertising budgets for print campaigns in those same publications. They had sales teams that could get books placed prominently in bookstores. They had relationships with radio and television producers who booked author interviews. Independent publishers had none of this. Our marketing consisted of sending review copies to publications that might or might not cover them (usually not), organizing readings at local bookstores, and hoping for word of mouth.

The review ecosystem was particularly hostile to independent publishers. Major review outlets had limited space and prioritized books from major publishers. The New York Times Book Review might review 2,000 books in a year, out of the 50,000 or more published annually. The odds of an independently published book getting a Times review were vanishingly small. Without reviews, it was almost impossible to generate the kind of critical attention that drove bookstore placement and consumer awareness. We were caught in a chicken-and-egg problem: we needed reviews to sell books, but we couldn’t get reviews because we didn’t sell enough books.

The internet changed everything, but it changed everything slowly. By 2005 or 2006, book blogs were becoming a legitimate alternative to traditional review outlets. Bloggers were reviewing books that the mainstream media ignored, including books from small and independent publishers. They were building audiences of dedicated readers who trusted their recommendations. For the first time, an independently published book could get critical attention without going through the traditional gatekeepers. I remember the first time one of our books was reviewed on a popular book blog. The review was thoughtful and positive, and we saw a measurable spike in sales that week. It was a tiny spike by any objective standard, maybe twenty or thirty additional copies, but it felt like a revelation. There was a way to reach readers that didn’t depend on the New York Times.

Social media amplified this effect enormously. By 2010, Twitter had become a significant platform for book discovery. By 2015, Instagram (BookStagram) and YouTube (BookTube) were driving substantial sales for books that the traditional media hadn’t covered. Today, TikTok (BookTok) can make a book a bestseller overnight, regardless of who published it. The democratization of attention has been the single most transformative change in independent publishing over the past two decades. It hasn’t eliminated the advantages that major publishers have (they still dominate in terms of advance money, distribution infrastructure, and institutional relationships), but it has made it possible for a small publisher to reach a large audience if they produce a book that resonates with the right community of readers.

Print-on-demand has been equally transformative. Modern POD technology produces books that are virtually indistinguishable from offset-printed books. The paper quality is good. The cover printing is crisp. The binding is durable. And because POD allows you to print one copy at a time, the inventory risk that used to plague independent publishers has been largely eliminated. We no longer need to guess how many copies to print. We can start with a modest offset run for bookstore distribution and use POD to fulfill individual orders and handle demand spikes. The storage unit full of unsold poetry collections is a thing of the past.

E-commerce has solved the direct-to-consumer problem. Platforms like Shopify make it easy for a small publisher to run a professional online bookstore. Payment processing, fulfillment, customer service. All of it is accessible at a fraction of what it would have cost twenty years ago. Our website now accounts for about 15% of our total sales, and that percentage is growing. Direct sales are also our most profitable channel because we don’t share revenue with a distributor or retailer. Every dollar a customer spends on our website is a dollar that stays in the ecosystem of author, publisher, and reader.

What have we lost? Some things, I think. The independent publishing of twenty years ago was, by necessity, a local phenomenon. Your publisher was down the street. Your bookstore was around the corner. Your author readings were in your neighborhood. There was an intimacy to the relationship between publisher, bookseller, and reader that’s harder to maintain when your books are sold globally through Amazon and your authors live in different time zones. I miss the feeling of walking into a local bookstore and seeing our books on the shelf, knowing that the bookseller had ordered them because they believed in them, not because an algorithm suggested them.

I also think the barrier to entry being lower has created a noise problem. Twenty years ago, the difficulty of independent publishing meant that the publishers who survived were generally the ones with genuine editorial taste and business acumen. Today, anyone with a laptop and an account on IngramSpark can publish a book. That’s democratizing, and I support it in principle. But it also means that bookstores, reviewers, and readers are overwhelmed with choices. The signal-to-noise ratio has worsened. Good books from small publishers can still get lost in the flood, just as they could twenty years ago, but now they’re competing with a much larger number of titles for the same limited attention.

The economics have shifted in complicated ways. On one hand, it’s cheaper to start a publishing company today than it was twenty years ago. POD eliminates inventory risk. Digital distribution eliminates the need for a physical warehouse. E-commerce eliminates the dependence on traditional retail. On the other hand, the profitability ceiling for independent publishers hasn’t risen proportionally. Amazon’s dominance of book retail has compressed margins across the industry. The wholesale discount that publishers give to distributors and retailers, typically 55% of the retail price, hasn’t changed in decades, even as other costs have risen. An independent publisher today might have lower fixed costs than its 2002 equivalent, but the per-unit economics are just as tight.

At ScrollWorks, we benefit from every technological advance I’ve described. Our production process uses POD for backlist titles and short offset runs for new releases. Our marketing relies heavily on social media, email newsletters, and direct relationships with book influencers. Our distribution reaches every major retail channel. We’re incomparably better-equipped than the publisher I worked for in 2002. But the fundamental challenge is the same: finding great books, producing them with care, and getting them into the hands of readers who will value them. The tools have changed. The mission hasn’t.

I keep a photograph from that warehouse office on my desk. Nine people, a folding table, a stack of books. We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we knew why we were doing it. I look at that photograph when the industry feels overwhelming, when the algorithms and the data and the market dynamics threaten to crowd out the simple, stubborn belief that good books matter and that someone needs to publish them. Twenty years ago, we did it with a photocopier and a broken elevator. Today, we have better tools. The work is the same.

Every publisher says they know their readers. I’m skeptical of most of those claims, including, on bad days, my own. The truth is that publishers know their market. They know the demographics, the buying patterns, the genre preferences, the price sensitivities. What they often don’t know, and what matters far more, is who their readers actually are as people. What keeps them up at night. What kind of conversations they have about books. Why they picked up this particular title and not the one next to it on the shelf. The difference between knowing your market and knowing your readers is the difference between looking at a map and walking the territory.

At ScrollWorks, I’ve tried to walk the territory. Not perfectly. Not consistently enough. But enough that I can describe the people we publish for with more specificity than a demographic profile would allow. I want to describe them here, because I think the exercise is valuable, and because I think other publishers might benefit from being more honest about who they’re trying to reach and why.

Our readers tend to be in their thirties and forties, though we have a meaningful contingent in their fifties and sixties. They read between two and four books per month, which puts them in the top 10% of American readers by volume. They buy a mix of fiction and nonfiction, with a slight lean toward nonfiction. They own more books than they’ve read, and they’re not embarrassed about it. They see an unread book as a promise, not a failure. They have at least one shelf in their home that they think of as “the shelf,” the one with the books that mean the most to them, the ones they’d save in a fire.

They’re educated, usually with at least a bachelor’s degree. But they’re not academic readers. They left literary theory behind when they left school. They read for understanding, for emotional engagement, for the pleasure of well-constructed sentences. They can appreciate experimental work, but they don’t seek it out. What they seek out is intelligence. They want to feel that the author is smarter than average about whatever subject the book addresses, whether that’s the dynamics of a family in crisis or the history of a particular industry or the experience of living in a particular place.

They’re suspicious of hype. A book that’s been on every bestseller list and recommended by every celebrity makes them wary rather than curious. They’ve been burned before. They’ve bought the book everyone was talking about and found it shallow or overwritten or both. Their trust goes to specific, personal sources: a friend whose taste they respect, a reviewer they’ve followed for years, a bookseller at a store they visit regularly. They pay attention to publishers, too, though they might not think of it that way. When they find a book they love, they look at the spine to see who published it. If they recognize the publisher from a previous good experience, they’ll give the next book from that publisher a slightly longer look.

This is something I’ve verified through direct conversation and through our own sales data. Readers who buy one ScrollWorks title are significantly more likely to buy a second one within the next year than readers who buy a title from a larger publisher are to buy another title from the same publisher. Part of this is our list size. We publish twelve to fifteen titles per year, and they share a sensibility. A reader who loves Still Waters will probably find something to appreciate in The Cartographer’s Dilemma, even though the two books are nothing alike in genre or subject matter. What they share is an editorial sensibility: both are books by smart, careful writers who take their subjects seriously and trust their readers to keep up.

That last part, trusting the reader, is something our readers notice and value. They don’t want to be condescended to. They don’t want exposition they didn’t ask for. They don’t want the author to explain the significance of something that a thoughtful reader can figure out on their own. They appreciate a book that makes them work a little, that assumes they’ll bring their own intelligence and experience to the reading. This doesn’t mean they want obscurity. They’re not looking for puzzles. They want clarity and depth simultaneously, which is harder to achieve than either one alone.

I can describe their reading habits in more detail because we’ve asked. Several years ago, we started including a brief survey card in our physical books, a postcard-sized insert with a few questions and a URL for an online version. The response rate has been about 3%, which is low in absolute terms but has given us a few thousand responses to analyze. The results have been consistently illuminating.

Our readers buy books from a wider variety of sources than the general population. Amazon accounts for about 40% of their purchases, which is lower than the national average of about 50%. Independent bookstores account for about 25%, which is significantly higher than the national average. They buy from our website directly (about 10%), from Barnes and Noble (about 10%), and from various other sources including library sales, used bookstores, and book fairs (the remaining 15%). They’re intentional about where they spend their money. Many of them have told us explicitly that they prefer to buy from independent bookstores when possible, even if it’s less convenient, because they want those stores to survive.

They read in multiple formats, but they have preferences. About 60% read primarily in print, with hardcover preferred over paperback. About 25% split evenly between print and ebook. About 15% read primarily in ebook format. Audiobooks are a supplement for most of them, something they listen to during commutes or workouts rather than as a primary reading format. They care about the physical quality of the books they buy. They notice the paper stock, the typography, the binding quality. Several respondents mentioned that they can feel the difference between a cheaply produced book and a well-produced one, and that the feeling affects their reading experience. One person wrote, and I’m paraphrasing heavily, that a well-made book tells you the publisher respected the author’s work enough to give it a proper home. I think about that phrase a lot.

Discovery is the question that keeps me up at night. How do our readers find us? The survey data says the most common discovery path is personal recommendation. A friend or family member told them about the book. The second most common is browsing in a bookstore. The third is online reviews, either on Goodreads, book blogs, or social media. Traditional media coverage (newspaper reviews, magazine features, radio interviews) accounts for a small but measurable percentage. Advertising, both digital and print, accounts for almost nothing. This matches the broader industry data, but it’s still striking. We spend money on advertising. Our readers don’t find us through advertising. They find us through people they trust.

This has implications for how we think about marketing. If personal recommendation is the primary discovery path, then our marketing strategy should focus on creating experiences worth recommending. That means the book itself has to be extraordinary. No amount of marketing can make a mediocre book go viral through personal recommendation. It also means we need to make it easy for enthusiastic readers to share their enthusiasm: social media-friendly cover designs, quotable passages, discussion guides that give book clubs a reason to choose our titles. We can’t manufacture word of mouth, but we can create the conditions in which it’s more likely to happen.

I also think about who our readers are not. They’re not impulse buyers. They don’t grab a book off a display because the cover caught their eye and they need something to read on the plane. They’re not genre loyalists who read exclusively within a single category (mystery, romance, sci-fi) and judge every book by that category’s conventions. They’re not academic readers who approach books as objects of analysis rather than vehicles for experience. And they’re not prestige readers who buy books to signal their cultural sophistication without actually reading them. (These people exist. I’ve met them. They have beautiful bookshelves and strong opinions about writers they’ve never finished.)

Our readers are, if I had to choose a single word, serious. Not in the sense of humorless. Many of them have a sharp, dry sense of humor, and they appreciate it in the books they read. Serious in the sense that they take reading seriously. They set aside time for it. They think about what they’ve read. They form opinions and defend them. They’re the kind of people who will re-read a paragraph that struck them, not because they didn’t understand it, but because they want to understand why it affected them. They notice craft. They appreciate when a writer has done something technically interesting, even if they couldn’t name the technique. They feel the difference between a sentence that’s working and one that’s not.

I find these readers through the same channels they use to find us. I attend book events, not as a publisher making a pitch, but as a reader having conversations. I read the same book blogs they read. I follow the same bookstagrammers. I shop at the same independent bookstores. This isn’t a marketing strategy, though it has marketing benefits. It’s a way of staying connected to the people I’m trying to serve. If I don’t understand what they want, I can’t publish books that give it to them. And the only way to understand what they want is to spend time in their world.

One thing I’ve noticed is that our readers are remarkably loyal, but their loyalty is conditional. They’ll stay with us as long as we maintain the editorial standard they’ve come to expect. If we publish a book that feels like a step down, they notice. I’ve received emails from readers after a title that didn’t meet their expectations, and the tone is consistent: disappointment more than anger. “I was surprised to see this one on your list.” “Not up to your usual standard.” These messages are painful to receive and valuable beyond measure. They tell me that our readers are paying attention, that they care about our list as a whole, not just individual titles. They’ve invested their trust in us, and they expect us to honor it.

This loyalty extends to our authors. When a reader connects with one of our writers, they often follow that writer across multiple books. They show up at readings. They post about the books on social media. They recommend the books to friends. They become, in effect, advocates. Not because we asked them to, but because the books genuinely mattered to them. The relationship between reader and author is the most powerful force in publishing. Everything we do as publishers is in service of creating and sustaining that relationship.

I want to end with a specific reader, though I’ll change the details to protect her privacy. She came to one of our author events about two years ago. She’d read three of our titles and wanted to meet the author of the fourth. After the event, she told me that she’d found our books during a difficult period in her life. She’d been going through a divorce and had stopped reading for months, something that hadn’t happened since she was a teenager. A friend gave her one of our books. She read it in two days. Then she read everything else on our list. She said the books didn’t fix anything about her life, but they reminded her that she was a person who read, who thought, who cared about ideas and stories. They gave her back a part of herself that she’d temporarily lost.

That’s who we publish for. Not a demographic. Not a market segment. Not a data point. A person sitting in a chair with a book, looking for something she can’t quite name, trusting that we’ve put something in her hands that’s worth her time and attention. Every editorial decision, every design choice, every marketing plan we create is ultimately in service of that person in that chair. I don’t always succeed in serving her well. But I never stop thinking about her. She’s the reason ScrollWorks exists. She’s the reader we write for.

A few months ago, I was in a used bookstore in Vermont, the kind of place where the shelves go floor to ceiling and the owner’s cat sleeps on the counter. I was there for an hour, maybe longer. I walked out with four books, three of which I’d never heard of before walking in. One was a memoir by a woman who’d worked as a lighthouse keeper in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. Another was a slim novel by a Uruguayan writer who, according to the back cover, had published three books and then disappeared from public life. The third was a collection of essays about beekeeping that was written so beautifully it made me angry, angry because I’d never heard of the author and angry because the book was out of print and clearly deserved not to be.

These are the kinds of books I’m talking about when I say “books nobody else is reading.” Not obscure for the sake of obscure. Not difficult or niche or avant-garde. Just books that fell through the cracks of the publishing industry’s attention economy and ended up forgotten by everyone except the used bookstores and libraries that keep them alive on their shelves. Finding these books is one of the great pleasures of being a reader, and I want to share some strategies for doing it consistently.

The first and most obvious strategy is to spend time in used bookstores. Real time. Not a quick browse on your lunch break, but a dedicated hour or two where you commit to looking at every shelf, including the ones in genres you don’t normally read. Used bookstores are time capsules. They contain books from every era of publishing, organized (usually loosely) by genre or subject, and priced low enough that you can take a chance on something you know nothing about. The financial risk of buying a $4 used book is essentially zero, which frees you to follow your curiosity without the calculation that accompanies buying a $28 new release.

When I browse used bookstores, I follow a few informal rules. I look for books that are in good condition, which suggests they were valued by their previous owner. I read the first paragraph of anything that catches my eye, right there in the store. If the first paragraph makes me want to read the second, I buy it. I pay attention to publishers. If I see an imprint I respect on the spine of an unfamiliar book, that’s a signal worth following. I look for books from specific time periods that I know were productive for particular genres. American fiction from the 1970s, for instance, is full of extraordinary mid-list novels that were well reviewed at the time, sold modestly, and vanished. British nonfiction from the 1990s has a similar wealth of overlooked titles.

Libraries are equally valuable, and I think readers underuse them for discovery. Most people go to the library with a specific book in mind. They search the catalog, find the book, check it out, and leave. But libraries are browsing environments, just like bookstores, and browsing the physical shelves is one of the best ways to find books you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. The library’s classification system puts books in proximity to related books, which means that if you’re looking for a specific title on, say, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the books on either side of it might be equally interesting titles you’ve never heard of. Serendipity is built into the system.

I also pay close attention to librarians’ recommendation shelves. Many libraries have a “staff picks” display, and the books on it tend to be different from what you’d find on a bestseller table in a bookstore. Librarians read widely and eclectically, and their recommendations often surface books from small publishers, translated literature, and backlist titles that deserve a second life. I’ve found some of my favorite books this way, titles that no algorithm would ever have recommended to me because they were too far outside my usual reading patterns.

Speaking of algorithms, let me address the elephant in the room. Amazon’s recommendation engine and similar systems are designed to show you books that are like the books you’ve already bought. This is useful for readers who know what they like and want more of it. It’s terrible for discovery. The algorithm optimizes for probability of purchase, not breadth of experience. It will never recommend a forty-year-old out-of-print memoir by a lighthouse keeper, because the data doesn’t support that recommendation for any significant number of users. The algorithm is a funnel. It narrows your options. If you want to find books nobody else is reading, you need to escape the funnel.

Goodreads is better than Amazon for discovery, but it has its own limitations. The most visible books on Goodreads are the ones with the most ratings and reviews, which skews heavily toward new releases from major publishers. To find the hidden gems, you need to go deeper. I follow specific Goodreads users whose taste I trust, people who read widely and review honestly, and I look at what they’re rating highly, especially titles with fewer than 500 total ratings. A book with 200 ratings and a 4.3 average is, in my experience, more likely to be genuinely special than a book with 50,000 ratings and the same average. The smaller number means the book hasn’t been discovered by the mass market, and the high rating means the people who did find it were impressed.

Curated lists are another strategy that works. Not bestseller lists, which are popularity contests, but editorial lists compiled by people with broad reading knowledge. The New York Review of Books Classics series is the gold standard for this. Their editors have spent decades identifying overlooked books from the past century and bringing them back into print with new introductions. If you haven’t explored the NYRB Classics catalog, you have hundreds of hours of extraordinary reading waiting for you. Pushkin Press does similar work for international fiction. Daunt Books in the UK has a publishing arm that specializes in rediscovering forgotten travel writing and memoirs.

Literary magazines and small journals are an underused discovery tool. Publications like The Believer, Granta, The Paris Review, and Tin House (when it was still publishing the magazine) regularly featured excerpts from forthcoming books by writers who weren’t yet well known. If you read these publications, you encounter writers at the beginning of their careers, before the bestseller lists and the major reviews and the cultural consensus that can make reading feel like homework. You also encounter international writing, experimental work, and nonfiction on unusual topics that mainstream publications wouldn’t cover.

I want to share a specific discovery method that I’ve used for years with consistent results. I call it “following the footnotes.” It works best with nonfiction but applies to fiction too. When you read a book you love, look at its bibliography, its acknowledgments, its footnotes, and its “further reading” section if it has one. These are the books that the author read while writing the book you loved. They’re the intellectual background, the sources and influences that shaped the work. And because they were chosen by a writer whose taste you already trust, they’re pre-filtered for quality.

I discovered the beekeeping essay collection I mentioned at the beginning through exactly this method. A nonfiction book I’d read about rural American economies mentioned it in a footnote. The footnote reference was brief, just a citation, but the way the author had used the source suggested it was more than dry agricultural writing. I tracked down a copy (it took some searching, since it was out of print), and it turned out to be one of the best books I’d read that year. That’s the power of following the footnotes. You’re tracing the intellectual genealogy of a book you love, and in the process, you find books that share its DNA.

Award longlists, as distinct from shortlists and winners, are another productive hunting ground. Every major literary award publishes a longlist before it narrows to a shortlist and eventually a winner. The longlist is typically ten to fifteen titles, and the ones that don’t make the shortlist often vanish from public conversation almost immediately. But they made the longlist for a reason. Someone on the judging panel thought they were among the best books of the year. These longlist-but-not-shortlist titles are where I find some of my most interesting reading. They’re good enough to be recognized by a serious award but obscure enough that most readers have never heard of them.

The international angle is worth emphasizing. If you read only English-language writers, you’re missing most of the world’s literature. Translated fiction and nonfiction, especially from languages other than the usual suspects (French, German, Spanish), contains an almost inexhaustible supply of books that nobody in the English-speaking world is reading. Literature from Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Hindi, Portuguese, and dozens of other languages is being translated into English at an increasing rate, often by small presses that don’t have the marketing budget to make their books visible. Seeking out these books requires some effort, using resources like the Best Translated Book Award longlist, the websites of publishers like Archipelago Books, Open Letter, and New Directions, and the translation-focused sections of literary magazines. But the effort pays off. Some of the most original and powerful books I’ve ever read came to me through this channel.

Independent bookstores with strong curation are another resource. Not every indie bookstore is well-curated, but the ones that are can introduce you to books you’d never find on your own. Look for stores where the staff writes hand-written recommendation cards, where the “staff picks” shelf changes regularly, and where the selection feels personal rather than algorithmic. These stores function as filters. Their buyers have read widely, and their shelf space is limited enough that everything on display represents a deliberate choice. When a bookseller at a curated shop says “you should read this,” the recommendation carries weight because it’s informed by years of reading and by an understanding of their community’s tastes. I make a point of visiting at least one unfamiliar independent bookstore whenever I travel, and I always ask the staff what they’ve been excited about lately. Their answers are rarely the same books I’d find on a bestseller list.

At ScrollWorks, we try to be part of this discovery ecosystem. When we publish a book like The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron, we know we’re competing for attention against thousands of other titles. We can’t outspend the major publishers on marketing. What we can do is produce books of such quality that readers who find them become advocates. Our best marketing is a reader who loves one of our books so much that they buy a second copy for a friend. That kind of discovery, personal and passionate and free, is how books nobody else is reading become books that everyone should be reading.

I want to mention one more strategy, and it’s the simplest. Talk to people. Talk to booksellers. Talk to librarians. Talk to the person reading on the bus. Talk to the friend who always has a book recommendation you haven’t heard before. The best book recommendations I’ve ever received came from conversations, not algorithms. A human being who knows your taste and has read something that surprised them can make a connection that no technology can replicate. They can say, “I know this sounds like it’s not your thing, but trust me.” And because you trust them, you read it. And sometimes it changes everything.

The books nobody else is reading are out there. They’re in used bookstores with cat hair on the counter. They’re in library stacks, spine-out on the bottom shelf. They’re in the footnotes of books you already love. They’re on the longlists of awards you haven’t been following. They’re being published right now, today, by small presses that can’t afford to advertise, in languages that most English-speaking readers can’t read but that translators are bringing across the border, one sentence at a time. All you have to do is look. And the looking, honestly, is half the fun. The best reading experiences of my life haven’t been the books that came to me through the usual channels, pre-chewed by the hype machine and delivered to my doorstep by an algorithm. They’ve been the books I had to work to find, the ones that felt like secrets, the ones that made me feel like the luckiest reader in the world because I’d stumbled onto something magnificent that almost nobody knew about. That feeling is available to anyone willing to put down their phone, walk into a store full of books, and start pulling things off the shelf.

I don’t usually talk about this book. The title has been out of print for eight years. Most of our current authors and readers have never heard of it. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, because the lessons we learned from it shaped almost every decision we’ve made since, and because I think there’s value in being honest about the times when things go wrong.

The book was a work of narrative nonfiction. I’ll call it “Project Atlas,” though that wasn’t its real title. The author was talented, the subject was timely, and the advance reviews from people who read early copies were enthusiastic. We gave it the biggest launch we’d ever attempted. We printed more copies than we’d printed of any previous title. We spent more on marketing. We booked more events. We committed, financially and emotionally, at a level that was unprecedented for ScrollWorks.

It flopped. Not gently. Not in the way that most books underperform, which is quietly and gradually. Project Atlas flopped loudly and immediately. First-month sales were less than half of what we’d projected. Returns started coming back from bookstores within weeks. By the end of the second month, it was clear that the book was going to lose us a significant amount of money. By the end of the first year, it had lost us more money than any other title in our history, and the financial impact took nearly two years to fully recover from.

What went wrong? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve identified at least five distinct failures, each of which taught us something. Some of the failures were ours. Some were the book’s. Some were the market’s. All of them were instructive.

The first failure was timing. Project Atlas dealt with a subject that was in the news when we acquired the manuscript, roughly eighteen months before publication. By the time the book came out, the news cycle had moved on. The subject hadn’t become less important, but it had become less urgent. The sense of “everyone is talking about this” that had made the book feel timely during acquisition had evaporated. This is a risk with any topical nonfiction, and we should have been more aware of it. A book that’s tied to a specific news moment needs to be published quickly, ideally within six months of acquisition. Our eighteen-month timeline was standard for us, but it was too slow for this particular book. By the time we delivered, the window of cultural attention had closed.

The second failure was positioning. We marketed Project Atlas as a book for general readers. The jacket copy, the press materials, the review pitch, all of it was aimed at a broad audience of people who cared about the subject. The problem is that the book itself was more specialized than its marketing suggested. The author had done deep, original research, which was one of the book’s genuine strengths, but the depth of the research also made the book dense and demanding in ways that general readers weren’t expecting. Readers who picked it up based on our marketing found it heavier going than they’d anticipated. Many of them put it down. The people who would have loved the book, specialists and deeply informed general readers with a pre-existing interest in the subject, weren’t reached by our marketing because we’d aimed above them, trying to build a broader audience that the book’s content couldn’t support.

This mismatch between the book and its positioning was our fault, not the author’s. The author wrote the book they wanted to write, and it was a good book. We were the ones who decided it could be marketed to a mass audience. We were wrong. The book needed to be positioned as a serious, in-depth work for informed readers, with marketing that emphasized the quality and originality of the research rather than the timeliness of the subject. If we’d done that, we would have sold fewer copies, but we would have sold them to the right people, and the book’s reputation would have built from there.

The third failure was the cover. I still wince when I think about it. The cover was beautiful. I loved it. The designer loved it. The sales team loved it. The author loved it. Everyone agreed it was one of the best covers we’d ever produced. It was also, in retrospect, completely wrong for the book. The cover suggested a certain kind of reading experience: accessible, contemporary, perhaps slightly journalistic. The actual reading experience was more scholarly, more meditative, more demanding. Readers who were attracted by the cover and the positioning arrived at a book that didn’t match their expectations. The cover was a promise we couldn’t keep.

This taught me something about book covers that I’ve never forgotten. A great cover isn’t just one that looks beautiful or catches the eye. A great cover is one that accurately communicates what the book is. It sets correct expectations. It attracts the readers who will appreciate the book and, just as importantly, it doesn’t attract readers who won’t. A cover that over-promises is worse than a cover that under-promises, because over-promising leads to disappointed readers, negative reviews, and returns. The cover of Project Atlas got people to pick up the book. It didn’t prepare them for what they’d find inside.

The fourth failure was our print run. We printed 8,000 copies, which was more than double our usual first print run. The decision was based on optimistic sales projections that were themselves based on the advance enthusiasm and the (supposed) timeliness of the subject. When the book didn’t sell as expected, we were stuck with thousands of unsold copies. The financial impact was brutal. Each unsold copy represented not just lost revenue but sunk cost: printing, shipping, and warehousing that we’d already paid for. The returns from bookstores compounded the problem, because returns cost money to process and the returned books had to be pulped or remaindered at a fraction of their cost.

We now have a strict rule about first print runs: never print more than 150% of our conservative sales projection, regardless of how optimistic we feel. If a book takes off and we need to reprint, the cost of a rush reprint is less than the cost of warehousing thousands of unsold copies. This rule has saved us from repeating the Project Atlas mistake multiple times. It’s also cost us some sales when books sold faster than expected and we ran out of stock while waiting for a reprint. But the missed-sales cost is always smaller than the overstock cost. Always.

The fifth failure, and this is the one I’m least comfortable admitting, was my own enthusiasm. I loved this book. I thought it was important. I thought the writing was strong, the research was original, and the subject mattered. All of those things were true. But my love for the book clouded my judgment about its commercial potential. I conflated “this book deserves a large audience” with “this book will find a large audience.” Those are very different things. Lots of books deserve large audiences and don’t get them. The market doesn’t reward books based on their merit. It rewards books based on their ability to find and satisfy readers. Project Atlas was a meritorious book that wasn’t accessible enough to satisfy the audience we tried to build for it.

This is the hardest lesson I’ve learned in publishing, and I keep having to relearn it. My personal taste is not a reliable predictor of commercial performance. I can love a book and be right about its quality while being completely wrong about its sales potential. The two judgments require different faculties. Quality assessment is about craft, intelligence, originality, and emotional resonance. Sales prediction is about market conditions, audience size, competition, timing, positioning, and a dozen other variables that have nothing to do with the book’s inherent merit. I’m good at the first. I’m less good at the second. Knowing that about myself has made me a better publisher, because it means I seek out opinions and data that can correct for my biases.

What happened to the author? She was disappointed. Of course she was. She’d worked on the book for four years, and its commercial failure felt personal even though it wasn’t. We had a long, honest conversation about what went wrong. I told her that the positioning and marketing failures were ours, not hers. I told her the book was good, that I still believed in it, and that its commercial performance didn’t define its value. I’m not sure she believed me. Authors hear publishers’ excuses and consolations all the time, and after a while, the words start to sound hollow.

She published her next book with a different publisher. I understood. A publisher that’s lost money on your last book, however good their intentions, carries an association that’s hard to shake. She deserved a fresh start. Her second book did better, though not dramatically so. Publishing is a business where early career stumbles can be overcome. One underperforming book doesn’t define an author, and the readers who did find Project Atlas were passionate about it. The book has a small, dedicated following that occasionally surfaces on Twitter and Goodreads, recommending it to anyone who will listen. In a different timeline, with better positioning and a more accurate cover and a publication date six months earlier, those passionate readers might have been joined by tens of thousands of others.

The experience changed how we make decisions at ScrollWorks. Some of the changes were procedural. The print run caps. The architecture review for positioning. The practice of testing cover designs with readers outside our immediate circle to check whether the expectations set by the cover match the book’s actual content. Other changes were more philosophical. We became more cautious about topical nonfiction, not avoiding it but insisting on a shorter timeline from acquisition to publication. We became more disciplined about separating our enthusiasm for a book’s quality from our assessment of its commercial potential. We started building what I call a “disagreement step” into our acquisitions process, where someone on the team is specifically tasked with arguing against acquiring a book that everyone else loves. The disagreement isn’t meant to kill the acquisition. It’s meant to surface risks that enthusiasm might have hidden.

I’ve also become more comfortable with the idea that not every book needs to reach a large audience. Some books are for 2,000 readers, and that’s fine. Those 2,000 readers might be deeply affected. They might carry the book with them for years. They might recommend it to people who recommend it to other people, building an audience slowly over decades rather than weeks. Literary history is full of books that failed commercially on publication and found their audience much later. Moby-Dick was a commercial disaster. The Great Gatsby sold poorly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. These are extreme examples, and I’m not comparing Project Atlas to either of them. But the principle applies: a book’s commercial reception at the moment of publication is not the final word on its value.

I still think about Project Atlas regularly. Not with regret, exactly. More with the rueful awareness that we could have done better, and that doing better would have meant being more honest with ourselves about what the book was and who it was for. The best service we could have given that book was accuracy: accurate positioning, an accurate cover, an accurate assessment of its audience size, and an accurate timeline that matched its subject’s position in the cultural conversation. Instead, we gave it ambition. Ambition is a good quality in a publisher, but not when it substitutes for clear thinking.

If you’re a publisher reading this, or a writer, or anyone involved in bringing books into the world, I hope the story is useful. Failures in publishing are common but rarely discussed in public. Success stories are everywhere. Conference talks are full of them. Industry memoirs are built around them. But the failures are where the real learning happens, because failures force you to examine your assumptions and admit that your judgment was wrong. I was wrong about Project Atlas. I was wrong in five specific, identifiable ways. And because I was willing to name those ways and build systems to prevent them, ScrollWorks is a better publisher than it was before. The worst book on our list turned out to be the most valuable one, not because of what it was, but because of what it taught us about who we are and how we work.

I didn’t always care about book indexes. For years, I treated them the way most readers do: as that dense block of tiny text at the back, something to flip past on the way to confirming I’d actually finished the book. Then I started working in publishing, and my opinion changed fast. A good index is one of the most useful tools a reader can have, and a bad one (or worse, a missing one) can turn an otherwise solid book into a frustrating experience.

Let me be clear about what I mean. I’m not talking about fiction. Nobody needs an alphabetical listing of every character appearance in a novel. I’m talking about nonfiction: history, science, biography, reference works, how-to guides, academic texts. These are the books where you’re likely to return to a specific passage, look up a specific claim, or try to find that one paragraph you half-remember from three chapters ago. Without a proper index, you’re stuck thumbing through pages or, if you’re reading digitally, relying on a search function that returns every instance of a common word with zero context.

The difference between a search function and a good index is the difference between a phone book and a knowledgeable friend. A search function tells you where a word appears. An index tells you where an idea lives. That distinction matters more than people realize.

What an Index Actually Does

At its most basic, an index is an alphabetically organized guide to the contents of a book, listed by subject, name, and concept with corresponding page numbers. But that description makes it sound mechanical, like something a computer could spit out in seconds. In reality, professional indexing is interpretive work. The indexer has to read the entire book, understand its arguments, and then decide how a future reader might try to find information within it.

Think about that for a moment. The indexer isn’t just listing words. They’re anticipating questions. If I write a book about the history of bread, and I mention sourdough starters on page 47 in the context of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, the indexer needs to decide: does this entry go under “sourdough,” under “San Francisco,” under “Gold Rush,” or under all three? And should there be a cross-reference from “starters, sourdough” to “sourdough starters”? What about “fermentation”? The bread itself might be the topic of the sentence, but the underlying point might be about westward migration and food culture.

A good indexer captures all of those threads. A mediocre one just lists the obvious nouns. And an automated one, generated by software that scans for proper nouns and high-frequency terms, misses the nuance entirely.

The History of Indexing Is Stranger Than You’d Expect

People have been making indexes for a surprisingly long time, though not always in the form we recognize today. The concept of organizing information alphabetically took centuries to become standard. In the ancient world, scrolls didn’t lend themselves to random access the way codices (bound books) did. You couldn’t easily flip to page 200 of a scroll. So early reference systems relied on memory, marginal notes, and tables of contents rather than back-of-book indexes.

The shift to the codex format in the early centuries of the Common Era made indexing possible, but it took a while for anyone to bother. Monastic scholars in the medieval period started compiling concordances, particularly for the Bible, which were essentially exhaustive indexes of every word and where it appeared. These were enormous projects, sometimes filling multiple volumes on their own. The idea was that a preacher preparing a sermon on, say, mercy could quickly find every biblical passage that mentioned mercy without reading the entire text from Genesis to Revelation.

By the 13th century, scholars at the University of Paris had produced some of the first true concordances of the Bible. These were collaborative efforts involving dozens of monks, and they required a standardized system of chapter and verse divisions, which hadn’t existed before. So in a real sense, the desire for better indexes helped create the chapter-and-verse system we still use today. The index didn’t just organize information. It reshaped how we structured books.

The printing press accelerated everything. Once you could produce hundreds of identical copies of a book, page numbers became consistent across copies, and a proper index became feasible. Before printing, every manuscript was unique, with different page layouts, and an index keyed to one copy would be useless for another. After Gutenberg, an index in one copy worked for every copy. That’s when the back-of-book index as we know it became standard practice for scholarly and reference works.

Why Publishers Sometimes Skip the Index

Given how useful indexes are, you might wonder why some nonfiction books don’t have them. The answer is almost always money and time. Professional indexing costs between $3 and $8 per page, sometimes more for technical or specialized content. For a 400-page book, that’s $1,200 to $3,200, and it has to happen at the very end of the production process, after the final page proofs are set, because page numbers can shift during typesetting. That means the indexer is working under a tight deadline, often just a couple of weeks, right when everyone involved in the book is exhausted and eager to be done.

Some publishers push the cost onto the author. I’ve seen contracts that specify the author is responsible for providing or paying for the index. For a first-time author who just spent two years writing a book and might be earning an advance of $10,000 or less, an extra $2,000 for indexing feels like a lot. Some authors try to do it themselves to save money, and the results are usually disappointing. Indexing your own book is like editing your own book: you’re too close to the material to see it the way a reader would.

At ScrollWorks, we consider the index part of our production budget, not the author’s problem. I feel strongly about this. If we’re publishing a nonfiction book, we’re committing to making it useful, and that means including a professional index. It’s not optional. It’s not a luxury. It’s a basic component of a finished nonfiction book, like a table of contents or page numbers.

The Qualities of a Great Index

Not all indexes are created equal, and once you start paying attention, you’ll notice the difference between a thoughtful one and a lazy one. Here’s what separates the good from the great.

First, a great index uses language the reader would actually use. If the book discusses “quantitative easing” but a general reader might look for “money printing” or “Federal Reserve policy,” the index should include cross-references from those terms. The indexer has to think like the reader, not like the author. This is why automated indexes fail so badly: they only capture the author’s vocabulary, not the reader’s.

Second, a great index breaks down broad topics into useful sub-entries. An entry that says “World War II, 23, 45, 67, 89, 102, 115, 134, 156, 178, 201, 223” is worse than useless. It tells you the topic appears frequently but gives you no way to find the specific aspect you’re interested in. A better entry would be “World War II: causes of, 23-28; Pacific theater, 67-89; home front economics, 102-115; Allied strategy in Europe, 134-156.” Now you can actually find what you need.

Third, the index should include concepts, not just proper nouns. A biography of Thomas Edison should index “filament experiments” and “patent disputes” and “laboratory culture,” not just the names of people and places. The conceptual entries are often the most valuable ones, because they help you find the analytical meat of the book rather than just the narrative surface.

Fourth, and this is subtle, a great index reflects the book’s argument. If a history book is making the case that economic factors drove a particular political change, the index should make it easy to trace that argument across chapters. The index becomes a kind of map of the book’s intellectual structure, and a skilled reader can sometimes evaluate a book’s argument just by studying its index.

The People Who Make Indexes

Professional indexers are a fascinating group. Most of them are freelancers. Many have advanced degrees in the subjects they index. They tend to be voracious readers with a particular talent for categorization and an almost obsessive attention to detail. The American Society for Indexing (ASI) has been their professional organization since 1968, and they hold annual conferences where people discuss things like the proper handling of “see also” references and whether to use letter-by-letter or word-by-word alphabetization. I went to one of these conferences a few years ago and found it genuinely interesting, which probably says something about me.

The pay isn’t great for the amount of skill involved. Most indexers charge by the page or by the entry, and even experienced ones typically earn between $25 and $40 per hour when you account for all the reading and analysis time. It’s the kind of work that attracts people who love books and language and don’t mind working alone. I’ve met indexers who specialize in medical texts, legal texts, cookbooks, children’s encyclopedias, and everything in between. Each specialization requires different knowledge and different conventions.

There’s a persistent myth that indexing will be fully automated soon, and it keeps getting repeated by people who’ve never actually compared an automated index to a human one. Yes, software can generate a concordance. It can identify every instance of a proper noun and list its page numbers. What it can’t do, at least not yet, is understand that a paragraph about “the president’s economic advisor” on page 156 should be indexed under the advisor’s name even though the name doesn’t appear on that page, because the advisor was introduced by name on page 154 and referred to by title for the next three pages. A human indexer catches that. Software doesn’t.

Digital Books and the Index Problem

E-books have complicated the index question in ways that publishers are still figuring out. On one hand, digital books have built-in search functions, which makes some people argue that indexes are unnecessary in digital formats. On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, searching and indexing are fundamentally different activities. A search for “Jefferson” in a digital book about American history will return dozens or hundreds of hits with no indication of which ones are substantive discussions and which are passing mentions. An index entry for “Jefferson, Thomas” with sub-entries telling you where to find his views on agriculture versus his diplomatic career versus his relationship with Sally Hemings is infinitely more useful.

The technical challenge with e-book indexes is that page numbers aren’t fixed. Depending on your device, your font size settings, and your display preferences, the “pages” in an e-book are fluid. So a traditional index keyed to page numbers doesn’t translate directly. The solution most publishers have adopted is to hyperlink index entries directly to the relevant passages, which actually works better than page numbers in many ways, because you can tap an entry and jump straight to the text. But creating a hyperlinked index is more work than creating a traditional one, because every entry needs to be linked to a specific anchor point in the text, not just a page number.

Some publishers have decided it’s not worth the effort and simply omit the index from the e-book edition. I think this is a mistake. If anything, e-book readers need indexes more than print readers, because they can’t easily flip through physical pages to find something they vaguely remember. The search function is a poor substitute, and without an index, readers are left with a worse experience than they’d have with the print edition.

Famous Indexes and Infamous Ones

There’s a small but entertaining tradition of authors using the index to settle scores or make jokes. The poet Alexander Pope reportedly included mocking index entries in his satirical work “The Dunciad,” pointing readers to passages that ridiculed his literary enemies. More recently, some authors have used index entries as a form of dry commentary. I once encountered an index entry that read “meetings, pointless: see also bureaucracy” in a book about organizational management, which told me everything I needed to know about the author’s perspective.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are infamously bad indexes. The most common failure mode is the “concordance masquerading as an index,” where every significant noun gets listed with a string of undifferentiated page numbers and no sub-entries. This is technically an index in the same way that a phone book is technically a social network: it contains the right information but in a form that’s nearly impossible to use efficiently.

Another common failure is the vanity index, where the author indexes themselves on practically every page. “Smith, John: 1-350” is not helpful. It’s just the author confirming that they wrote the book, which the reader presumably already knew.

What Readers Can Learn from Indexes

Here’s something I recommend to anyone who reads a lot of nonfiction: before you start a book, read the index. Not word by word, but scan it. Look at what topics get the most space. Look at which names appear most frequently. Look at the sub-entries under major topics. You’ll get a surprisingly accurate sense of the book’s priorities and approach before you read a single chapter.

I also use indexes to evaluate books I’m considering acquiring for our list. If I’m looking at a manuscript about, say, the history of jazz, and the index (or proposed index structure) doesn’t include entries for specific recordings, specific venues, or specific musical techniques, that tells me the book might be too general, too focused on biography at the expense of the music itself. The index reveals what the book actually covers versus what the title promises.

Academics have known this trick for decades. When a scholar is researching a topic and evaluating whether a particular book is worth reading in full, they often start with the index. If their specific area of interest appears in the index with substantial sub-entries, the book is worth their time. If it appears only in passing or not at all, they can move on. The index functions as a contract between the book and the reader: these are the subjects I address, and here’s where to find them.

The Future of Indexing

I think about the future of indexing more than most people, probably because I see the consequences of both good and bad indexes on a regular basis. AI tools are getting better at natural language processing, and there are products on the market that claim to generate usable indexes automatically. I’ve tested several of them, and my honest assessment is that they’re useful as a starting point but nowhere near ready to replace human judgment. They can identify the obvious entries, the proper nouns, the chapter headings rephrased as index terms. But they miss the subtle connections, the implied references, the conceptual threads that make a great index great.

My prediction is that we’ll see a hybrid approach become standard over the next decade. Software will generate a draft index, and a human indexer will refine it, adding the conceptual entries, fixing the cross-references, and ensuring the sub-entries actually help the reader rather than just listing page numbers. This could bring down costs and speed up the process, which would be good for everyone. But it won’t eliminate the need for human indexers, because the core skill, understanding what a reader might look for and how they might look for it, is fundamentally a human one.

In the meantime, I’d encourage you to pay attention to the indexes in the books you read. Notice when they’re helpful and when they’re not. Notice when a book doesn’t have one and how that affects your ability to use it as a reference. And if you’re an author working on a nonfiction book, please, for the love of your readers, budget for a professional index. Your book deserves it, and so do the people who read it.

At ScrollWorks Media, every nonfiction title we publish, from Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners to our forthcoming releases, gets a professionally crafted index. We think of it as part of the reader’s experience, not an afterthought. If you’re curious about our catalog and how we approach book production, take a look at our full list of titles.

I own too many books. This is not a confession so much as a statement of fact, like saying I have brown hair or that I live in a house with insufficient shelf space. The books have taken over the spare bedroom, colonized the hallway, and formed precarious stacks on the dining room table that my family has learned to navigate around at mealtimes. I know I should probably get rid of some of them. I also know I won’t.

The thing is, I’ve thought a lot about why I keep them, and the reasons are more complicated than simple hoarding or an inability to let go. There’s a philosophy to the personal library, a set of ideas about what books mean when they’re gathered together in a private space, that goes beyond reading. Your library is a portrait of your mind. It’s a record of who you’ve been and a projection of who you want to become. And it works differently from almost any other collection a person might assemble.

The Library You’ve Read vs. The Library You Haven’t

The Italian writer Umberto Eco kept a personal library of around 30,000 volumes. When visitors came to his home, they would invariably ask, “Have you read all of these?” Eco found the question missing the point entirely. The books he hadn’t read were more important than the ones he had, because they represented everything he still wanted to learn. The unread books were a reminder of his own ignorance, and he considered that reminder valuable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb picked up on this idea and gave it a name: the “antilibrary.” Your antilibrary is the collection of books you own but haven’t read, and Taleb argued that its size should grow as you get older, because the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. A person with a small library of well-worn favorites might feel comfortable, but a person with shelves full of unread books is, in some sense, more honest about the scope of human knowledge.

I find this idea genuinely liberating. For years I felt a low-grade guilt about the books on my shelves that I hadn’t finished or hadn’t started. Now I think of them differently. They’re not failures. They’re possibilities. The biography of Catherine the Great that I bought in 2019 and still haven’t opened isn’t a reproach. It’s an invitation that I haven’t accepted yet. Maybe I will next month. Maybe I will in five years. Maybe I never will, and that’s fine too, because its presence on my shelf means that when I suddenly develop an interest in 18th-century Russian politics, the book is right there waiting.

Why Physical Books Still Matter

I read e-books. I’m not a purist about this. E-books are convenient, especially for travel, and certain kinds of reading (genre fiction, light nonfiction, anything I’m unlikely to revisit) work perfectly well in digital format. But for the books that matter to me, the ones I want to keep and return to, I need the physical object.

Part of this is about memory. Research in cognitive psychology has consistently shown that people remember the content of physical books better than the content of digital ones. There are several theories about why. One is that physical books provide more spatial cues: you remember that a particular passage was near the top of a left-hand page, about two-thirds of the way through the book. Your brain maps the information to a physical location in a way that doesn’t happen with a scrolling digital text. Another theory is that the tactile experience of turning pages creates additional memory hooks. Whatever the mechanism, the effect is real, and for books I want to remember and reference, physical copies work better for me.

But there’s something else going on too, something less rational and more emotional. A physical book carries its history with it. The coffee stain on page 42 of my copy of “The Great Gatsby” is from a cafe in Portland in 2008. The margin notes in my copy of a behavioral economics textbook are from a period when I was trying to understand pricing strategy for our first print run. The dog-eared pages in a collection of short stories mark the ones I wanted to reread, and seeing those folded corners takes me back to the state of mind I was in when I first marked them. A Kindle book doesn’t do any of this. It’s clean and efficient and completely without history.

The Personal Library as Autobiography

Walk into someone’s home and look at their bookshelves, and you’ll learn more about them in five minutes than you would in an hour of conversation. I believe this completely. The books people keep tell you what they care about, what they aspire to, what they’ve struggled with, and what gives them pleasure. A shelf full of travel guides and memoirs suggests a different person than a shelf full of philosophy and political theory. Neither is better. Both are revealing.

I’ve noticed that people arrange their books in ways that reflect their personalities too. Some people organize by color, which drives me slightly crazy but which I recognize as a valid aesthetic choice. Some organize by genre, some by author, some by size. I organize roughly by subject, with a separate shelf for books I intend to read soon (this shelf is optimistically large). My partner organizes by a system I can only describe as “vibes,” which somehow makes it possible for her to find anything she wants while I stand there baffled.

The way you arrange your books also reveals what you want visitors to see. Most people, whether they admit it or not, put certain books in prominent positions. The impressive-looking hardcover of a difficult novel goes at eye level in the living room. The guilty-pleasure romance novels go in the bedroom or the closet. This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s curation. We all present slightly edited versions of ourselves to the world, and our bookshelves are one of the stages where that performance happens.

I try to resist this impulse, but I’m not immune to it. I notice that my most intellectually ambitious books tend to end up in the rooms where guests are most likely to see them, while the stack of thrillers I devoured last summer lives quietly in the bedroom. I’m working on being more honest about this, because I think a library that only shows your serious side is as misleading as a social media profile that only shows your best angles.

The Accumulation Problem

Let’s talk about the practical side of maintaining a personal library, because it’s not all philosophy and aesthetics. Books take up space. They’re heavy. They collect dust. They attract silverfish. And if you live in a humid climate, they can develop mold. I’ve lost a few beloved paperbacks to a leaky pipe, and the experience was genuinely upsetting in a way that losing a digital file wouldn’t have been.

Space is the big constraint for most people. Unless you’re wealthy enough to dedicate an entire room (or wing) to your books, you eventually have to make choices about what to keep. This is where the philosophy of the personal library gets tested by reality. In theory, every book on your shelf has value. In practice, you probably don’t need that copy of “Who Moved My Cheese?” that someone gave you in 2004.

My approach to culling is ruthless in theory and weak in practice. Every year or so, I go through my shelves and pull out books I know I’ll never read again, books I’ve outgrown, and books I acquired for reasons I can no longer remember. I put them in boxes and take them to the local used bookstore or donate them to the library. The process is satisfying for about thirty minutes, at which point I start second-guessing my choices and pulling books back out of the boxes. Last time, I removed about fifty books and then rescued twelve of them before I made it out the door.

The real problem is that books come in faster than they go out. I acquire new books at a rate of maybe three or four per month, and I cull maybe twenty per year. The math doesn’t work. At some point I will either need a bigger house or a fundamental change in my relationship with physical objects. I suspect I’ll get the bigger house.

What a Library Says About a Culture

The idea of a personal library is culturally specific in ways that are worth thinking about. In parts of Europe, particularly in countries with strong literary traditions like France and Italy, a well-stocked personal library is considered normal, even expected, for educated adults. In the United States, the personal library has had a more complicated status. It can signal intellectualism, which is sometimes admired and sometimes viewed with suspicion, depending on the social context.

There’s also a class dimension that I don’t think gets discussed enough. Building a personal library requires money, space, and leisure time, all of which are unevenly distributed. A hardcover book costs $25 to $35 these days. If you buy two a month, that’s $600 to $840 per year, which is a significant expense for many households. Public libraries exist partly to address this inequality, and they do an incredible job of it, but a public library book goes back after three weeks. It doesn’t become part of your personal collection, part of your intellectual history.

I think about this when I hear people romanticize personal libraries. The image we conjure is usually of a wealthy person’s study: leather chairs, mahogany shelves, first editions behind glass. But the personal libraries I find most interesting are the modest ones, the apartment dweller who has books stacked on every flat surface, the college student whose milk-crate bookshelves contain a mix of assigned readings and flea-market finds, the retiree whose paperback collection fills an entire wall of a small living room. These are libraries built with intention and sacrifice, not decorating budgets.

The Library as Workshop

For people who write, or who work with ideas professionally, the personal library functions less as a collection and more as a workshop. My books aren’t there to be admired. They’re there to be used. I pull them off the shelf, flip through them, cross-reference one against another, and put them back slightly worse for wear. This is how a working library operates, and it’s fundamentally different from a display library.

When I’m editing a manuscript and I need to check whether a particular historical claim holds up, I want to be able to reach over and grab a relevant reference book. When I’m writing marketing copy for a new title and I want to see how a comparable book was positioned, I want to pull it off the shelf and study its jacket, its blurbs, its table of contents. Digital resources can do some of this, but the physical proximity of the books matters. Having them within arm’s reach changes the way I work, because the friction of looking something up is almost zero.

The historian Robert Caro has talked about his own working library, which is organized not by author or subject but by the project he’s currently working on. When he was writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, the books closest to his desk were the ones most relevant to the section he was currently drafting. As he moved through different periods of Johnson’s life, the books on his desk shifted accordingly. This is the library as a living tool, constantly reconfigured to serve the work at hand.

Lending, Borrowing, and the Social Life of Books

Every personal library is shaped by its owner’s lending policy, and this is a subject on which people have strong opinions. I have friends who never lend books, reasoning that lent books are lost books. I have other friends who lend freely and consider the loss of a book to be the natural cost of sharing ideas. I fall somewhere in the middle: I’ll lend a book I can easily replace, but I won’t lend one that’s out of print or that I’ve annotated heavily.

The anxiety around lending isn’t really about the monetary value of the book. It’s about the relationship between the owner and the object. A book that’s been with you for twenty years, that you’ve read three times, that has your notes in the margins and your ex’s inscription on the flyleaf, is irreplaceable in a way that has nothing to do with its cover price. Lending that book to someone who might leave it on a bus feels reckless.

On the other hand, some of the best reading experiences I’ve had came from borrowed books, books I never would have picked up on my own but that a friend insisted I read. The social circulation of books is one of the ways that personal libraries expand and diversify. Left to my own devices, I tend to read within my comfort zone. My friends push me out of it by pressing books into my hands and saying, “You need to read this.” Sometimes they’re right.

The Digital Threat (Real and Imagined)

Every few years, someone declares that physical books are dying and that personal libraries will soon be as quaint as vinyl record collections. This hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it will, at least not in my lifetime. Print book sales have been remarkably stable over the past decade, and in some categories they’ve actually grown. People like physical books. They like owning them, displaying them, and giving them as gifts. The predicted collapse of print has not materialized, and I’ve stopped worrying about it.

What has changed is the role of the personal library in daily life. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to look up a fact, you went to your bookshelf. Now you go to your phone. The reference function of the personal library has been largely taken over by the internet, and honestly, the internet does it better for most purposes. I no longer need a set of encyclopedias, a world atlas, or a dictionary on my shelf, because all of that information is available instantly and in more up-to-date form online.

But the contemplative function of the personal library, the slow, immersive reading experience that a physical book provides, hasn’t been replaced. If anything, the constant noise of digital media has made the quiet of a book more appealing. I find that my ability to concentrate on a long text is better with a physical book than with a screen, partly because the book doesn’t ping me with notifications or tempt me with hyperlinks. The personal library, in this sense, has become a kind of sanctuary, a deliberate space for a kind of attention that the digital world constantly fragments.

Building a Library That Matters

If I were advising someone starting to build a personal library from scratch (a young person moving into their first apartment, say, or someone who’s decided to start collecting physical books after years of digital reading), I’d suggest a few principles.

Buy books you intend to keep. If you want to read a book once and never think about it again, get it from the library or buy the e-book. Reserve your shelf space for books you expect to return to, books that you want as permanent companions.

Don’t buy books to impress people. A shelf full of books you haven’t read and don’t intend to read is just furniture. There’s nothing wrong with furniture, but don’t mistake it for a library. Buy what genuinely interests you, even if it’s not what you think a serious person should read.

Annotate your books. Write in the margins. Underline passages. Dog-ear pages. A library of pristine, unread-looking books is less useful than a library of battered, marked-up ones. Your annotations are a conversation with the author, and when you return to the book years later, they’re a conversation with your past self.

Let your library reflect your evolution. Don’t be embarrassed by the books you read ten years ago, even if your tastes have changed. They’re part of your story. My shelves still contain a few books from my early twenties that I now find simplistic or even misguided, but I keep them because they remind me of who I was and how my thinking has changed.

At ScrollWorks Media, we think a lot about the books we want to add to people’s shelves. Every title we publish, whether it’s fiction like The Last Archive or practical guides like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, is designed to be the kind of book you keep, the kind that earns its place in a personal library. You can browse our full catalog on our Books page.

One of the questions I get asked most often, usually by authors who are new to publishing, is how many copies of their book we plan to print. It sounds like a simple question with a numerical answer. It is neither. The decision about print run size involves economics, logistics, educated guesswork, and occasionally a leap of faith that keeps me up at night. I want to walk through how we actually make this decision at ScrollWorks Media, because I think it reveals something about the inner workings of publishing that most people never see.

The Basic Economics of Printing

Let me start with the fundamental fact that drives every print run decision: the more copies you print, the less each copy costs. This is because a significant portion of the expense in printing a book is in the setup, not the per-unit production. A printer has to create plates, calibrate the press, run test sheets, set up the binding equipment, and adjust for paper weight and trim size. Whether you’re printing 500 copies or 50,000, those setup costs are roughly the same. The difference is that with 50,000 copies, you spread those fixed costs across a much larger number of units.

To give you a concrete example: for a standard trade paperback (roughly 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 300 pages, black and white interior), a print run of 1,000 copies might cost around $4.50 per unit. Bump that up to 5,000 copies, and the per-unit cost might drop to $2.50. At 10,000 copies, you might be down to $1.80. And at 50,000 copies, you could be paying $1.20 or less per book. Those numbers are approximate and vary by printer, paper stock, and other factors, but the pattern holds. Volume discounts in printing are steep.

This creates an obvious temptation: print as many copies as possible to minimize the per-unit cost. And if you could guarantee that every copy would sell, that would be the right strategy. But you can’t guarantee that, and unsold copies are not free. They cost money to warehouse. They cost money to ship back from bookstores that didn’t sell them. And eventually, if they sit unsold long enough, they cost money to pulp, which is the publishing industry’s euphemism for destroying them. I’ve watched pallets of books get loaded onto trucks headed for recycling, and it’s not a pleasant experience.

The Variables We Consider

When we’re deciding on a print run at ScrollWorks, we look at a bunch of factors. None of them gives us a definitive answer, but together they help us triangulate a reasonable number.

The first factor is pre-orders and advance interest. If we’ve been marketing a book and taking pre-orders through our distribution channels, those numbers give us the closest thing to hard data that we’ll get before publication. A book with 2,000 pre-orders needs a first print run of at least 4,000 to 5,000, because pre-orders typically represent a fraction of total initial demand. But the ratio of pre-orders to first-month sales varies wildly by genre, by author platform, and by how much marketing we’ve done. For an author with a large social media following, pre-orders might represent 30 to 40 percent of first-month sales. For a debut author with no platform, pre-orders might represent 10 percent or less.

The second factor is comparable titles. We look at books that are similar in subject, audience, and positioning and see how they performed. This is more art than science, because no two books are truly comparable, but it gives us a range. If the three most similar books we can find all had first print runs between 3,000 and 7,000 copies, that tells us something about the likely demand for our title. We won’t print 50,000 copies of a book in a category where the ceiling appears to be 10,000.

The third factor is the author’s platform and marketing plan. An author with 100,000 engaged followers on social media, a popular newsletter, or regular speaking engagements can move books in ways that an unknown debut author cannot. We factor this in, though we try to be realistic. Having followers doesn’t automatically translate into book sales. I’ve seen authors with huge online audiences sell surprisingly few copies, because their audience follows them for content that’s different from what the book offers.

The fourth factor is the publication schedule and season. Books published in the fall, particularly in October and November, benefit from holiday gift-buying. Books published in January often face slower initial sales because the retail market is sluggish after the holidays. We might print slightly more copies of a fall title and slightly fewer of a winter one, all else being equal.

The fifth factor, and this is the one that’s hardest to quantify, is our own editorial judgment about the book’s potential. Sometimes you read a manuscript and you just feel it. The writing is electric, the subject is timely, the voice is distinctive. That feeling doesn’t always translate into sales, but it’s not nothing. We’ve been wrong about books we were enthusiastic about, and we’ve been wrong about books we were cautious about. But over time, editorial instinct has proven to be a useful data point, especially when the other signals are ambiguous.

The Risk Calculation

Every print run is a bet. You’re putting money on the table before you know the outcome. The question is how to size that bet so that the downside is manageable and the upside is captured.

Here’s the scenario we want to avoid most: printing too few copies and running out of stock in the first few weeks. This is worse than it sounds. When a book gets attention, whether from a review, a podcast appearance, a social media moment, or just strong word of mouth, there’s a window of maybe two to four weeks when demand peaks. If you don’t have books available during that window, you miss sales that you will never recover. The reader who can’t find your book today will find a different book tomorrow. Bookstores that can’t restock will give the shelf space to something else. The momentum dies.

Reprinting takes time. Even with a cooperative printer, a reprint run typically takes three to four weeks from the decision to order to the arrival of finished books in the warehouse. If you’re using an overseas printer (many publishers use printers in China or India for color-intensive books), the turnaround can be eight to twelve weeks. During that entire period, your book is out of stock, and every day out of stock is lost revenue and lost momentum.

On the other side, printing too many copies isn’t immediately catastrophic, but it hurts your cash flow and your storage costs. A small publisher like us doesn’t have unlimited warehouse space. Every pallet of unsold books in our warehouse is capital that’s tied up and unavailable for other projects. If we print 10,000 copies of a book that only sells 3,000, we’ve got 7,000 copies occupying space and slowly depreciating. After a year or two, we’ll have to decide whether to continue warehousing them (at a cost) or remainder them (sell them at a steep discount) or pulp them (a total loss).

Print on Demand: The Safety Net

The rise of print-on-demand (POD) technology has fundamentally changed the risk calculation for small publishers. With POD, you can print individual copies of a book as orders come in. There’s no minimum order quantity, no setup fees, and no warehousing. The trade-off is that the per-unit cost is much higher, typically $5 to $8 for a standard trade paperback, which is two to four times what you’d pay for an offset run of a few thousand copies.

We use POD strategically at ScrollWorks. For titles where we’re uncertain about demand, we might do a small offset run (1,500 to 2,000 copies) to fill initial orders and bookstore placement, with POD as a backup to prevent stockouts while we evaluate whether to do a larger reprint. This hybrid approach lets us capture the cost advantages of offset printing for the copies we’re confident we’ll sell while using POD as insurance against the copies we’re not sure about.

POD has also made it possible to keep books in print indefinitely, which was genuinely difficult for small publishers in the pre-digital era. Before POD, once a book’s initial print run was exhausted, the publisher had to decide whether the remaining demand justified a reprint. If the book was selling 50 copies a year, a reprint of 1,000 copies would take twenty years to sell through, which didn’t make financial sense. So the book would go out of print. Now, with POD, those 50 copies a year can be printed on demand at a reasonable cost, and the book stays available. This is genuinely good for authors, readers, and the cultural ecosystem.

What Happens When You Get It Wrong

I’ll tell you about a mistake we made early on, because I think it’s instructive. We published a book that we were extremely excited about. The writing was strong, the subject was timely, and the author had a modest but engaged platform. We decided on a first print run of 5,000 copies, which for us at the time was ambitious. We planned a robust marketing campaign and secured some good advance reviews.

Then the book came out, and the response was… fine. Not bad, but not the breakout we’d hoped for. First-month sales were around 1,200 copies. Six-month sales were around 2,000. A year later, we’d sold about 2,800 copies and had 2,200 sitting in our warehouse. The book wasn’t a failure by any reasonable measure, but we’d overprinted by about 40 percent, and those extra copies represented thousands of dollars in tied-up capital and warehousing costs.

What went wrong? In retrospect, we overweighted our own enthusiasm and underweighted the comparable titles data, which suggested a more modest first-year sales trajectory. We also assumed that the marketing campaign would generate more organic word-of-mouth than it did. The campaign was fine; it just didn’t create the multiplier effect we’d counted on. Lesson learned: be honest about what you know and what you’re hoping for, and don’t let hope drive your print run number.

On the flip side, I’ve also experienced the pain of under-printing. We published a title that we expected to be a modest performer, printed 2,000 copies, and then watched in disbelief as a prominent podcast featured the author and the book went from selling 20 copies a day to 200 copies a day overnight. We sold out within a week. The reprint took three weeks. During those three weeks, the book was unavailable on Amazon, unavailable in most bookstores, and we missed what was probably $15,000 to $20,000 in sales. Some of those readers came back when we restocked; many didn’t.

The Data We Wish We Had

The publishing industry is, frankly, not great at data. Compared to other industries, we make major financial decisions with remarkably little information. A tech company launching a new product has user testing, beta feedback, analytics, and market research to guide its decisions. A publisher launching a new book has… pre-orders, comparable titles, and gut feeling.

There’s a service called BookScan, run by NPD Group, that tracks point-of-sale data from most major book retailers in the United States. It’s useful, but it only captures an estimated 75 to 80 percent of print sales and doesn’t cover e-book sales, library sales, or many independent bookstores. So when we look at BookScan data for a comparable title and see that it sold 5,000 copies in its first year, the actual number might be 6,000 to 7,000, but we don’t know for sure.

Other data points we’d love to have but don’t include: how many people saw our marketing and were interested but didn’t pre-order; how many bookstore browsers picked up the book, read the jacket, and put it back; how many people added the book to a wish list and plan to buy it later. This kind of intent data exists in the digital advertising world but barely exists in publishing. We’re essentially flying by instruments that were designed for a simpler era.

How Small Publishers Differ from Big Ones

The Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan) have advantages in the print run game that small publishers like us don’t. They have dedicated sales teams that visit bookstores and present upcoming titles months in advance, gathering orders that give them a solid baseline for print run decisions. They have long-standing relationships with printers that give them better per-unit pricing and faster turnaround on reprints. And they have deeper financial cushions that let them absorb the occasional overprint without it threatening their solvency.

A small publisher printing 3,000 copies of a book has a lot more riding on that decision than a large publisher printing 30,000. Our margins are thinner, our cash reserves are smaller, and a single significant overprint can affect our ability to fund the next season’s titles. This makes us more cautious by necessity, which sometimes means we miss upside potential. It’s a constant balancing act between prudence and ambition.

On the positive side, small publishers can make decisions faster. When we see strong early signals, we can authorize a reprint within hours. A large publisher might need to route that decision through multiple layers of approval. Speed matters when you’re trying to keep a hot book in stock, and this is one area where being small works to our advantage.

The Emotional Side

I want to acknowledge something that publishers don’t talk about much: the emotional weight of print run decisions. When an author has spent years writing a book and has trusted us to publish it, the print run number carries a symbolic significance that goes beyond economics. A large print run signals confidence. A small one can feel like a vote of no confidence, even when it’s the smart financial decision.

I’ve had uncomfortable conversations with authors who felt that our print run was too small, who interpreted our caution as a lack of faith in their work. These conversations are hard, because the author isn’t wrong to care, and our caution isn’t wrong either. The best I can do is be transparent about how we made the decision, what data we used, and how we plan to manage inventory going forward. Most authors, once they understand the economics, appreciate the honesty.

The truth is that a successful book often goes through multiple printings, and there’s something exciting about that. When we call an author to say “We’re going back to press,” it’s a celebration. It means the book is connecting with readers, and we need more copies to meet demand. Some of the best moments I’ve had in publishing have been making those calls. The first print run is a guess. The second print run is evidence.

For anyone curious about how these decisions play out across different types of books, take a look at our catalog. Each title, from Echoes of Iron to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, has its own story of how we landed on the right number, and sometimes how we had to adjust along the way.

Books have been banned, burned, confiscated, hidden, smuggled, and suppressed for as long as books have existed. The specific reasons change with the times, but the impulse doesn’t. Somewhere, right now, someone in a position of authority is deciding that a particular book is too dangerous for other people to read. I find the history of book banning fascinating, not because I sympathize with the banners, but because the reasons they give reveal so much about what each era fears most.

Before the Printing Press

You might think book banning started with the printing press, since mass production is what makes a book genuinely hard to suppress. But people were banning texts long before Gutenberg. In 221 BCE, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of books that didn’t align with his political philosophy. The target was primarily Confucian texts and historical records from rival states. According to historical accounts, scholars who resisted were buried alive alongside their libraries. The emperor wanted a clean slate, a unified state with a single approved narrative of history, and books from the old order were obstacles to that vision.

In ancient Rome, authorities occasionally ordered the burning of books they considered subversive. The poet Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria” (The Art of Love) was reportedly banned from public libraries by Emperor Augustus, possibly because its frank treatment of romantic pursuit embarrassed the emperor’s campaign for moral reform. Ovid himself was eventually exiled, though the exact reasons remain debated. The pattern, though, is clear: a text that challenges the prevailing moral or political order attracts the attention of people who enforce that order.

In the medieval period, the Catholic Church became the most systematic book-banning institution in Western history. Long before the formal creation of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (which I’ll get to shortly), local bishops and church councils condemned individual texts. The targets were usually heretical religious works, but the net was cast wider than that. Translations of the Bible into vernacular languages were suppressed, because the Church wanted to control interpretation through the clergy rather than letting ordinary people read scripture for themselves. John Wycliffe’s English translation of the Bible in the 14th century was condemned, and copies were burned. The message was clear: some knowledge is reserved for those in authority.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum

The most famous formal book-banning system in history is the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Forbidden Books maintained by the Catholic Church from 1559 to 1966. Yes, 1966. This wasn’t a medieval relic. It was actively maintained and updated into the age of television, rock and roll, and the space program.

The Index was created by Pope Paul IV in 1559, partly as a response to the explosion of printed material that followed the invention of the printing press. Before printing, heretical texts could be suppressed relatively easily because they existed in small numbers of handwritten copies. After printing, a single press run could produce hundreds or thousands of copies that spread across borders faster than any authority could track them. The Index was an attempt to impose order on this flood of uncontrolled information, which, when you think about it, sounds remarkably like contemporary debates about regulating the internet.

The list of books on the Index reads like a syllabus for the best education you could possibly get. Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was on it, because his heliocentric model contradicted Church teaching. Descartes’ philosophical works were on it. Voltaire made the list. Rousseau was there. David Hume. Immanuel Kant. John Locke. Victor Hugo. Gustave Flaubert. Jean-Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir. At one point, the Index included virtually every significant work of Enlightenment philosophy, modern science, and literary realism produced in Europe.

I sometimes think the Index inadvertently functioned as the world’s best reading list. If you wanted to know which books contained the most challenging, thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting ideas in Western civilization, the Catholic Church had helpfully compiled them all in one place. All you had to do was read the books they told you not to read.

Book Banning in England and Colonial America

In England, the history of book banning is intertwined with the history of censorship and licensing. From the 16th century through the late 17th century, the English government maintained a licensing system that required all printed material to be approved before publication. The Stationers’ Company, a guild of printers and booksellers, enforced this system, which meant that the people who profited from controlling the book trade were also the people tasked with preventing unauthorized publications. It was a cozy arrangement for everyone except authors and readers.

John Milton’s “Areopagitica,” published in 1644, is one of the earliest and most famous arguments against pre-publication censorship. Milton, who was himself no stranger to controversy (his defense of divorce on grounds of incompatibility had scandalized Puritan England), argued that the free exchange of ideas was necessary for the discovery of truth. He didn’t go so far as to argue for complete freedom of the press; he specifically excluded Catholic works from his defense of free expression, which is a reminder that even the greatest champions of liberty often have blind spots.

In colonial America, book banning was sporadic but real. Massachusetts banned Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” in 1637, partly because it criticized the Puritans. Various colonies banned or restricted works that were considered blasphemous, seditious, or morally corrupting. After independence, the First Amendment prohibited Congress from making laws that abridged freedom of the press, but this didn’t stop state and local governments from restricting books, particularly on grounds of obscenity.

The Comstock Era

The most aggressive period of book banning in American history came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, driven largely by one man: Anthony Comstock. Comstock was a special agent of the United States Postal Service who made it his personal mission to rid the country of what he considered obscene material. In 1873, he successfully lobbied Congress to pass what became known as the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material through the mail. Since the mail was the primary distribution channel for books and periodicals, this gave Comstock enormous power over what Americans could read.

Over the course of his career, Comstock claimed to have destroyed 15 tons of books and nearly 4 million pictures. He prosecuted publishers, booksellers, and authors with a zeal that bordered on obsession. Among the works he targeted were medical texts about human anatomy, early family planning literature by Margaret Sanger, and novels that contained descriptions of sex or adultery. He was particularly offended by any material that discussed contraception, which he considered equivalent to pornography.

Comstock’s influence extended well beyond his own actions. His success emboldened local censorship groups across the country. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Boston Watch and Ward Society, and similar organizations actively patrolled bookstores and libraries, threatening legal action against anyone who sold or lent books they deemed inappropriate. The phrase “banned in Boston” became a badge of honor for publishers and a marketing advantage, since readers assumed that any book Boston tried to suppress must be worth reading.

The Twentieth Century’s Greatest Hits

The 20th century produced a remarkable number of banned books that are now considered masterpieces. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was banned in the United States from 1921 to 1933 on grounds of obscenity. The ban was overturned in a landmark decision by Judge John M. Woolsey, who wrote that while the book was frank in its treatment of sexuality, it was not pornographic because it did not aim to arouse the reader. This decision established an important precedent: literary merit could be a defense against obscenity charges.

D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was banned in both the United States and the United Kingdom for decades. The UK trial in 1960 is particularly memorable because the prosecution asked the jury whether they would be comfortable with their wives and servants reading the book, a question that revealed more about the prosecutor’s class assumptions than about the book’s content. The jury acquitted, and the resulting publicity made the novel a bestseller.

In the United States, the list of books challenged or banned in schools and public libraries during the 20th century includes some of the most widely read and widely taught novels in the American canon. “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger was removed from schools for profanity and depictions of teenage alienation. “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee was challenged for its depictions of racism, which is ironic given that the novel is one of the most widely used texts for teaching about racism and injustice. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley was banned for sexual content and anti-religious themes. “1984” by George Orwell was challenged for, depending on who was doing the challenging, being pro-communist or anti-communist.

The fact that “1984” has been challenged by people on opposite ends of the political spectrum tells you something interesting about book banning: the same book can offend different people for completely different reasons. This makes the banning impulse harder to understand as a coherent ideology and easier to understand as a general anxiety about ideas that make people uncomfortable.

Book Banning Today

Book banning has not gone away. In the United States, challenges to books in schools and public libraries have actually increased dramatically in recent years. The American Library Association reported over 1,200 demands to censor library materials in 2022, the highest number since they began tracking in the early 2000s. Many of these challenges target books that deal with race, gender identity, and sexuality. Others target books with graphic content, profanity, or depictions of violence.

The current wave of book challenges differs from earlier ones in some important ways. Historically, book banning was often the project of a single individual or a small local group. Today, it’s frequently coordinated by national organizations that provide model legislation, talking points, and lists of books to challenge. This has made the process more efficient and more widespread. A book that gets challenged in one school district can quickly face challenges in dozens of others, because the same organizations are operating in all of them.

I have opinions about this, and I’ll share them. I think adults should have the right to decide what they read, full stop. I think parents have a reasonable interest in knowing what their children are reading, but I don’t think any parent should have the power to determine what other people’s children can read. When a parent demands that a book be removed from a school library, they’re not just making a decision for their own child. They’re making a decision for every child in the school. That’s an exercise of power over other families, and I think it’s wrong.

I also think that discomfort is not a sufficient reason to ban a book. Literature is supposed to be uncomfortable sometimes. It’s supposed to challenge your assumptions, expose you to perspectives different from your own, and make you think about things you’d rather not think about. A library that only contains books that nobody objects to is a library that has failed its mission.

The International Picture

Book banning is a global phenomenon, and the reasons vary dramatically by country and culture. In China, the government maintains extensive control over publishing and regularly bans books that criticize the Communist Party, discuss Taiwanese independence, or provide unauthorized accounts of recent Chinese history. Foreign books are routinely censored or blocked from importation. The entire publishing ecosystem operates under a system of pre-publication review that would be familiar to the 16th-century English licensors I mentioned earlier.

In Russia, books have been banned or restricted on grounds of “extremism,” a category so broad that it has been used against everything from religious texts to children’s literature. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publications were banned in 2017 under the country’s anti-extremism laws, and various works of historical scholarship have been restricted for presenting views of World War II that differ from the official Russian narrative.

In several Middle Eastern countries, books that discuss homosexuality, criticize Islam, or challenge traditional gender roles are routinely banned. Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was banned in multiple countries after its publication in 1988 and resulted in a fatwa calling for the author’s death, one of the most extreme responses to a book in modern history.

Even in countries with strong free-speech traditions, book banning persists in various forms. In Australia, a customs system has historically restricted the importation of books deemed offensive. In Canada, certain books have been challenged in schools for content related to race and sexuality. The specifics differ, but the underlying pattern is the same: people in authority trying to control which ideas are available to the public.

What Banning Accomplishes (and What It Doesn’t)

Here’s the thing about banning books: it doesn’t work. Or rather, it doesn’t accomplish what the banners intend. It often accomplishes the opposite. When a book is banned or challenged, sales typically increase. Media coverage follows. People who might never have heard of the book become curious about why someone wants it suppressed. The Streisand Effect, the phenomenon where trying to suppress information makes it more widely known, applies with particular force to books.

But there’s a more insidious way that book banning does work, and it’s worth acknowledging. When a book is removed from a school library, the students who would have discovered it there may never encounter it. They won’t seek it out at a bookstore or public library because they don’t know it exists. The ban doesn’t prevent people who are already interested in the book from finding it. It prevents people who haven’t yet discovered it from having the opportunity. This is the real damage: not the suppression of known information, but the prevention of accidental discovery.

Some of the most important reading experiences of my life happened because I stumbled across a book I wasn’t looking for. I pulled it off a library shelf because the title caught my eye, or a teacher assigned it, or it was sitting on a table in a bookstore. If someone had decided that book was too dangerous for me to encounter, I would have missed something that shaped how I think. That’s what book banning takes away: the serendipity of unexpected encounter.

At ScrollWorks Media, we believe that publishing exists to put ideas into the world, not to protect people from them. Every book on our list, from literary fiction like Still Waters to practical nonfiction like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, represents our commitment to the idea that readers are smart enough to decide for themselves what to read and what to think about it.

I get asked this question a lot, usually at industry events or in emails from aspiring authors. “What’s the difference between a publishing house and a printing press?” Sometimes the question comes with a slightly embarrassed tone, as if the person suspects they should already know the answer. They shouldn’t feel bad about asking. The distinction isn’t obvious from the outside, and the publishing industry hasn’t done a great job of explaining what it actually does, as opposed to what most people assume it does.

The short answer is this: a printing press puts ink on paper. A publishing house decides what to put ink on paper for, and then handles everything that comes before and after the printing. The printing is actually one of the simplest parts of the entire process. The complicated, time-consuming, expensive parts are the ones that most people never think about.

What a Printing Press Does

Let me start with the printing press, because it’s the more straightforward of the two. A printing press (or more accurately in 2022, a printing company) is a manufacturing operation. It takes a digital file, usually a PDF formatted to precise specifications, and produces physical copies of a book. The printer doesn’t care about the content of the file. It could be a novel, a cookbook, a phone directory, or 300 pages of the letter “Q” repeated. The printer’s job is to reproduce the file accurately on paper, bind the pages together, and deliver the finished product.

Modern book printers use two main technologies: offset lithography and digital printing. Offset printing uses metal plates that transfer ink to rubber rollers, which then press the ink onto paper. It’s fast and efficient for large runs but requires significant setup time and cost. Digital printing skips the plates entirely and prints directly from a digital file, similar in concept to a desktop printer but on an industrial scale. Digital is slower per page but has virtually no setup cost, which makes it economical for short runs and print-on-demand.

The printer also handles binding. For paperbacks, this typically means perfect binding, where the pages are gathered into a block, the spine edge is roughened and glued, and a cover is wrapped around the block. For hardcovers, the process is more complex: the pages are sewn together in sections called signatures, the spine is reinforced, and the whole assembly is attached to rigid board covers. Some books use other binding methods, like saddle stitching (stapling, essentially) for thin booklets or spiral binding for cookbooks and manuals.

Good printers also provide pre-press services: checking the digital file for errors, making sure the colors will reproduce correctly, and producing proofs for the publisher to review before the full run starts. Some printers offer basic design services, but this is a sideline for them, not their core business.

That’s it. The printer makes the physical object. They don’t find the author, develop the manuscript, design the book, market it, distribute it, or sell it. Those are the publisher’s jobs.

What a Publishing House Does

A publishing house does everything else. And “everything else” is a lot more than people realize. Let me walk through the process from beginning to end, because I think the scope of what publishers do is genuinely underappreciated.

It starts with acquisition. A publisher finds books to publish. This means reading manuscripts and proposals, evaluating their commercial and artistic potential, negotiating contracts with authors or their agents, and deciding which projects to invest in. At a large publishing house, the editorial team might review hundreds of submissions per month and acquire a handful. At a small house like ScrollWorks, I personally read every submission that makes it past our initial screening, and we acquire maybe ten to fifteen titles per year.

Acquisition is a judgment call with real financial consequences. Every book we acquire represents a commitment of money (the advance paid to the author, the production costs, the marketing budget) and time (typically twelve to eighteen months from acquisition to publication). If we acquire the wrong books, we lose money and miss the opportunity to publish better ones. If we acquire the right books, we build our reputation and our revenue. This is the single most important thing a publisher does, and it’s entirely a matter of editorial and commercial judgment.

The Editorial Process

Once a book is acquired, the editorial process begins. This is where the manuscript is developed from its submitted form into its published form, and the difference between the two can be significant. I’ve worked on books where the final published version bore only a passing resemblance to the original submission. The ideas were the same, but the structure, the pacing, the voice, and the argument had all been reworked through multiple rounds of revision.

The editorial process typically involves several stages. Developmental editing comes first. This is the big-picture work: looking at structure, argument, pacing, character development (for fiction), and overall coherence. The developmental editor might suggest rearranging chapters, cutting sections that don’t work, expanding sections that need more development, or rethinking the book’s central argument. This is collaborative work. The editor makes suggestions; the author decides which ones to accept. Good editors have a light touch and a clear vision of what the book is trying to be.

After developmental editing, the manuscript goes through line editing, which focuses on sentence-level writing quality. The line editor works through the text paragraph by paragraph, looking for awkward phrasing, unclear logic, repetition, inconsistency, and opportunities to strengthen the prose. This is painstaking work that requires a strong ear for language and an ability to improve someone else’s writing without overwriting it.

Then comes copyediting, which is the most technical stage. The copyeditor checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style consistency. They verify facts, dates, and proper nouns. They ensure that the book follows a consistent style guide (most publishers use the Chicago Manual of Style). They flag potential legal issues, like unsourced claims or passages that might be libelous. A good copyeditor catches hundreds of small errors that would otherwise end up in the finished book.

Finally, there’s proofreading, which is a final check of the typeset pages for any remaining errors. By this point, the text should be nearly perfect, but typos have a way of surviving every previous round of review. The proofreader is the last line of defense before the book goes to the printer.

All of this editorial work is done or managed by the publisher, not the printer. The printer never sees the manuscript in its rough form. The printer gets the finished, polished, typeset file.

Design and Production

While the editorial work is happening, the publisher is also handling design. This includes the interior design (typeface, margins, chapter headings, spacing, treatment of illustrations and sidebars) and the cover design (which is a whole separate discipline). The cover is arguably the single most important marketing asset a book has. It’s the first thing a potential reader sees, whether in a bookstore, on a website, or on social media. A bad cover can sink a good book, and a great cover can give a mediocre book a fighting chance.

Cover design involves a complicated negotiation between art, commerce, and genre convention. A literary novel needs a different kind of cover than a thriller, which needs a different kind of cover than a self-help book. Readers have learned to decode cover design conventions, often unconsciously: they can tell from the cover what kind of book they’re looking at and whether it’s aimed at them. The designer’s job is to create something that signals the right genre, communicates the book’s tone, and stands out among the dozens of other books competing for attention.

Production management is another publisher function. Someone has to coordinate the timing so that the editorial, design, and printing processes all come together on schedule. Someone has to choose the right paper stock, the right trim size, the right binding method. Someone has to negotiate with the printer on price, quality, and delivery dates. Someone has to manage the ISBN, the Library of Congress cataloging data, the copyright registration, and the metadata that ensures the book shows up correctly in bookstore and library databases. This is unglamorous work, and it’s invisible when it’s done well, but when it’s done poorly, the consequences are real: delayed publication, misprinted pages, incorrect pricing in online stores.

Marketing and Publicity

The publisher is responsible for marketing the book. This is one of the areas where the publishing house’s role is most different from the printer’s, and where the most misunderstanding exists. Marketing a book involves advance reader copies sent to reviewers, press releases, media pitches, social media campaigns, author events, bookstore partnerships, advertising (increasingly digital), and trade marketing aimed at booksellers and librarians.

Publicity, which is a subset of marketing, involves getting the book and the author in front of media. This means pitching book reviewers at newspapers, magazines, and websites. It means booking author appearances on podcasts, radio shows, and television. It means arranging book tours, signing events, and festival appearances. None of this happens by itself. It requires a publicist (or a team of publicists) who has relationships with media contacts, understands the media cycle, and knows how to frame a book in a way that makes it newsworthy.

Small publishers like us have smaller marketing budgets than the Big Five, which means we have to be more creative and more targeted. We can’t afford full-page ads in the New York Times Book Review (few publishers can, honestly), so we focus on channels that reach our specific audience: targeted social media advertising, partnerships with relevant influencers and bloggers, email marketing to our subscriber list, and direct outreach to bookstores that serve our readers. For a title like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, our marketing looks very different than it does for a literary fiction title like The Cartographer’s Dilemma, because the audiences are different and the channels that reach them are different.

Distribution and Sales

Getting a book into stores is another publisher function, and it’s one of the most complex. Distribution, the physical process of warehousing books and shipping them to retailers, is handled by distributors, which are specialized logistics companies that work with publishers. A publisher contracts with a distributor (Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and the Big Five’s own distribution arms are the major players in the US) to store inventory, process orders from bookstores, and handle returns.

The returns system, incidentally, is one of the oddest features of the book business. Unlike almost any other retail industry, bookstores can return unsold books to the publisher for a full refund. This means that when a bookstore orders 20 copies of a new title, they’re not making a firm commitment to buy those copies. They’re taking them on consignment, essentially. If the books don’t sell, they come back. This system was established during the Great Depression to encourage bookstores to take risks on new titles, and it has persisted ever since, despite being economically irrational for publishers. We budget for returns (typically 20 to 30 percent of shipped copies come back), and the cost is factored into our financial planning for each title.

Sales, as distinct from distribution, involves convincing bookstores and online retailers to stock your books. At large publishers, dedicated sales representatives visit bookstores months before a book’s publication date, presenting the upcoming catalog and taking orders. At small publishers, we often handle sales ourselves or through a shared sales force that represents multiple small presses. Getting a bookstore to carry your book is not automatic. Shelf space is limited, and bookstore buyers have to be convinced that a title will sell well enough to justify the space it occupies.

Rights and Licensing

Publishers also manage subsidiary rights: the right to publish the book in other formats (audiobook, e-book), in other languages (translation rights), and in other territories (foreign rights). A book originally published in English in the United States might be translated into twenty languages and published by different publishers in each country. The original publisher negotiates these deals, either directly or through a rights agent, and the revenue is split between the publisher and the author according to the terms of their contract.

Film and television options are another form of subsidiary rights. When a Hollywood studio options a book for adaptation, the deal is typically negotiated by the author’s agent, but the publisher benefits from the increased visibility and sales that come with a screen adaptation. Some publishers have dedicated rights departments that pitch books to film producers; others leave this to the agent.

So What’s the Difference, Really?

The difference between a publishing house and a printing press is the difference between a movie studio and a film developing lab. The lab processes the physical medium. The studio develops the creative product, manages the talent, handles the marketing, and distributes the finished work to audiences. Both are necessary; neither can replace the other.

When someone self-publishes a book, they are, in effect, taking on the publisher’s role themselves. They edit (or hire editors), design (or hire designers), market (or try to), and distribute (usually through Amazon’s self-publishing platform). The printing itself is typically handled by a POD service like Amazon’s KDP or IngramSpark. The self-published author is the publisher. The POD service is the printer.

There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing, and some self-published authors do extremely well. But it’s worth understanding that when you choose to self-publish, you’re taking on all the functions I’ve described above. Every decision that a publisher would make, from cover design to pricing to marketing strategy, falls on your shoulders. Some authors thrive with that level of control. Others find it overwhelming and discover that they’d rather focus on writing and leave the publishing to people who do it professionally.

At ScrollWorks Media, we handle all of these functions for the authors we work with. From the first editorial conversation to the final marketing push, we manage the process of turning a manuscript into a book and putting it into readers’ hands. You can see the results in our catalog, where every title represents the full range of publishing work: editorial development, design, production, marketing, and distribution, all coordinated to give each book its best chance of reaching the readers who need it.

I spend a lot of time in my car, which means I spend a lot of time listening to things. Music, obviously, but increasingly podcasts. And because I work in publishing, my podcast queue has gradually shifted from general-interest shows to ones that focus on books, reading, writing, and the literary world. Some of them are fantastic. Some are fine. A few have become so essential to my week that I get genuinely annoyed when they skip an episode.

Here’s our team’s list of favorites, with honest assessments of what each show does well and where it falls short. These aren’t ranked in any particular order, and I’m sure I’m leaving out some good ones. If you’ve got recommendations we should know about, get in touch through our contact page.

The Ezra Klein Show

Okay, this isn’t technically a literary podcast. It’s a wide-ranging interview show that covers politics, technology, philosophy, and culture. But Ezra Klein reads more books than almost anyone in media, and his interviews with authors are consistently some of the best conversations about ideas I’ve encountered anywhere. When he talks to a nonfiction author, he’s clearly read the book closely and thought about it seriously. He asks the questions I would ask if I were smarter and better prepared.

What makes Klein’s show relevant for book people is that his interviews often reveal the thinking behind the book in ways that reviews don’t. You hear the author explain why they chose to frame an argument a particular way, what they left out and why, and how their thinking evolved during the writing process. It’s like getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the book’s construction. I’ve bought more books based on Klein’s interviews than on any other single recommendation source.

The downside is that Klein can be a bit long-winded in his questions, sometimes spending two minutes setting up a question that could be asked in ten seconds. And the show’s production style is very NPR: polished, deliberate, and occasionally a little too pleased with itself. But those are minor complaints about a consistently excellent show.

Backlisted

Backlisted is a British podcast dedicated to older books that deserve more attention. Each episode, the hosts (John Mitchinson and Andy Miller) pick a book that’s been somewhat forgotten or underappreciated and spend an hour discussing it with a guest who loves it. The books they cover range from mid-century literary fiction to forgotten memoirs to obscure genre classics. I’ve discovered more new (old) books through Backlisted than through any other single source.

What I love about this show is its genuine enthusiasm. Mitchinson and Miller clearly love reading and love talking about books, and their guests usually share that enthusiasm. There’s no pretension, no academic jargon, and no scoring of cultural points. It’s just three people sitting around talking about a book they admire, explaining why it matters, and reading passages aloud. The passage readings are a particular strength, because hearing a paragraph from a book is often more persuasive than any amount of description or analysis.

The show’s focus on backlist titles (books that are still in print but no longer new) aligns perfectly with something I care about in my professional life. In publishing, there’s an obsessive focus on new releases, on the next big thing. But most of the best books in the world are not new. They’re five or ten or fifty years old, still in print, still being read, but rarely discussed in media that’s oriented toward the new. Backlisted is a corrective to that bias, and the world of literary podcasts is better for it.

The Book Review Podcast (New York Times)

The New York Times Book Review has been the most influential book review publication in America for decades, and its podcast extends that influence into audio. Each episode features conversations with authors, critics, and editors about new books and literary trends. The production quality is high, the guests are usually interesting, and the show’s connection to the Times means it covers the books that are driving the cultural conversation.

My main criticism is that the show can feel like an extension of the Times’ brand rather than a genuinely independent voice. The books discussed tend to be the same books reviewed in the paper, which means they skew toward literary fiction, prestige nonfiction, and celebrity memoirs. Smaller publishers, genre fiction, and books from outside the New York publishing world get less attention. This isn’t surprising given the show’s institutional affiliation, but it limits its usefulness for someone looking for under-the-radar recommendations.

That said, the author interviews are usually well done. The hosts prepare thoroughly and ask substantive questions. And the show’s “What We’re Reading” segments, where critics share their personal recommendations, often surface books I wouldn’t have found otherwise. It’s a solid show, even if its focus is narrower than I’d like.

Print Run

Print Run is a podcast about the business side of publishing, hosted by Laura Zats and Erik Hane. If you want to understand how the publishing industry actually works, from advances and royalties to distribution and marketing, this is your show. Zats and Hane are both industry professionals (an agent and an editor, respectively) who are refreshingly frank about the realities of the business. They don’t sugarcoat the challenges facing authors or publishers, and they don’t pretend that the industry is a meritocracy where good books automatically find their audience.

Episodes cover topics like how agents evaluate manuscripts, why certain books get big advances and others don’t, the economics of independent bookstores, and the impact of Amazon on publishing. The discussions are detailed enough to be useful for industry professionals but accessible enough for interested outsiders. I particularly appreciate their willingness to discuss money, which is something the literary world tends to be squeamish about. Understanding the financial mechanics of publishing helps authors make better decisions about their careers, and Print Run provides that understanding clearly.

The tone is conversational and sometimes blunt, which I prefer to the polished diplomacy of some other literary podcasts. When something in the industry doesn’t make sense, Zats and Hane say so. When they disagree with each other, they argue it out on air. It’s honest and educational, and I wish more industry podcasts had this level of transparency.

Literary Friction

Literary Friction is hosted by Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt, and each episode is organized around a theme (desire, escape, power, home, etc.) with author interviews woven through the conversation. The thematic structure is what sets it apart from other interview shows. Instead of just asking an author about their latest book, the hosts explore how the book connects to a bigger idea, and how that idea plays out across different works of literature.

The show is smart without being intimidating. Bright and Plitt are well-read and articulate, and they have an easy chemistry that makes the conversation feel natural rather than performative. Their guests are a good mix of established names and newer voices, and the show has a knack for introducing me to authors I haven’t encountered before. Several of those introductions have led to books that I’ve loved and, in a couple of cases, to authors I’ve subsequently approached about publishing opportunities.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the episodes can sometimes feel a bit short for the amount of ground they cover. An hour isn’t always enough to explore both the theme and the author’s work in depth. But I’d rather a show leave me wanting more than one that overstays its welcome.

Shelf Awareness

Shelf Awareness is primarily a daily email newsletter rather than a podcast, but they’ve expanded into audio, and both formats are worth your time. The newsletter is aimed at booksellers, librarians, and publishing professionals, and it provides daily updates on industry news, new releases, and author interviews. It’s concise, well-curated, and consistently informative.

What I appreciate about Shelf Awareness is its focus on the book trade as a whole, not just the reading experience. They cover bookstore openings and closings, industry trends, publishing deals, and the practical concerns of people who work with books for a living. For someone in my position, this is valuable information. Knowing what booksellers are excited about, what categories are trending, and which debut authors are getting buzz helps me make better decisions about our own publishing program.

The audio content tends to be shorter than the other podcasts on this list, which makes it good for a quick listen during a coffee break. It won’t give you the deep dive you get from Print Run or Backlisted, but it will keep you informed about the daily pulse of the book world.

Otherppl with Brad Listi

Brad Listi’s podcast Otherppl has been running since 2011, which makes it one of the longest-running literary podcasts in existence. Listi, who is himself a novelist and the founder of The Nervous Breakdown literary community, interviews authors in long, unstructured conversations that wander freely between their work, their lives, their creative processes, and whatever else comes up. The vibe is more late-night conversation than formal interview, and I find that intimacy appealing.

The guest list over the years has been remarkable. Listi has talked to virtually every significant literary figure of the past decade, from established stars to debut authors who went on to win major prizes. The archive alone is worth exploring. If there’s an author whose process or perspective you’re curious about, there’s a decent chance Listi has interviewed them.

The loose, conversational format is both the show’s strength and its weakness. When the chemistry between Listi and his guest is good, the conversation flows naturally and reveals things that a more structured interview wouldn’t. When the chemistry is off, the conversation can meander without arriving anywhere particularly interesting. But the hit rate is high enough that I keep coming back, and the occasional misfire is the price of the format’s authenticity.

I Should Be Writing

Mur Lafferty’s long-running podcast I Should Be Writing is aimed at aspiring and working writers, and it covers the craft, business, and emotional challenges of writing. Lafferty is a science fiction and fantasy author, so the show has a slight genre lean, but the advice and discussions are applicable to writers in any genre. Topics range from the practical (how to find an agent, how to handle rejection) to the psychological (imposter syndrome, procrastination, maintaining motivation during a long project).

What I like about this show is its honesty about the difficulty of writing as a profession. Lafferty doesn’t pretend that following the right steps guarantees success, and she’s open about her own struggles and setbacks. This makes the show feel genuine in a way that some craft-focused podcasts don’t. Writing is hard, the publishing industry is unpredictable, and sometimes the best thing a writer can hear is that other writers are going through the same frustrations.

The show is particularly good for writers who are early in their careers and trying to figure out the basics: how the industry works, what a reasonable timeline looks like, and how to develop a sustainable writing practice. It’s less useful for experienced professionals, but it’s not aimed at them. If you’re just starting out or stuck in the middle of a project, Lafferty’s voice is a reassuring companion.

The Penguin Podcast

The Penguin Podcast is produced by Penguin Books UK, and before you dismiss it as corporate content marketing, give it a listen. The production quality is excellent, the interviews are substantive, and the hosts (who have varied over the years) bring genuine curiosity and literary knowledge to the conversations. Yes, the show naturally features Penguin authors, but Penguin’s list is so large and varied that this isn’t as limiting as it might sound.

The show’s best episodes are the ones where an author gets the time and space to talk about their work in depth, explaining their choices, their influences, and their creative process. Some of these conversations have been among the best author interviews I’ve heard in any medium. The show also occasionally does themed episodes or series, exploring a topic like translation, memoir, or the relationship between literature and politics across multiple episodes and guests.

My main reservation is the same one I’d have about any publisher-produced podcast: you’re not going to hear criticism of Penguin’s books or honest discussion of the company’s business practices. The show is, at the end of the day, a marketing tool for Penguin, even if it’s an unusually good one. But as long as you’re aware of that framing, there’s a lot of value here.

The Bibliofile

The Bibliofile, hosted by Jenn, focuses on book reviews, reading recommendations, and book-adjacent topics. It’s aimed squarely at avid readers rather than industry professionals, and its tone is warm, enthusiastic, and accessible. Episodes typically cover a mix of new releases and older titles, with honest assessments of what works and what doesn’t.

What I appreciate about this show is that it’s unabashedly for readers, not for the industry. There’s no insider jargon, no name-dropping, and no assumption that the listener knows who won the Booker Prize last year. It’s a show about the pleasure of reading, and it communicates that pleasure effectively. I sometimes find industry-focused podcasts exhausting (too much shop talk, too much anxiety about the state of the business), and The Bibliofile is a refreshing change of pace.

The recommendations are eclectic, covering literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction, and young adult, which means you’re likely to discover something new regardless of your usual reading diet. I’ve picked up several unexpected recommendations from this show, including a couple of books I probably wouldn’t have looked at twice in a bookstore but ended up thoroughly enjoying.

A Few More Worth Mentioning

I can’t give full write-ups to every podcast that deserves one, but here are a few more that our team listens to regularly. Between the Covers, hosted by David Naimon, features unusually in-depth interviews with literary authors. The conversations are long and detailed, and Naimon is one of the most thoughtful interviewers in the literary podcast space. It’s not a quick listen, but it’s rewarding if you’re willing to invest the time.

The Honest Authors Podcast deals with the indie and self-publishing side of the business, and while that’s not our world at ScrollWorks, understanding how indie authors think about marketing, pricing, and reader engagement is useful for any publisher. The indie world has figured out some things about direct-to-reader sales that traditional publishing is only starting to learn.

And for something completely different, LeVar Burton Reads features the beloved actor reading short fiction aloud. It’s not a discussion show or an interview show. It’s just one person reading excellent short stories with warmth and skill. It’s perfect for when you want the experience of being read to, which, as it turns out, doesn’t lose its appeal when you grow up.

Why Podcasts Matter for Publishing

I’ll close with a thought about why literary podcasts matter from a publisher’s perspective. The traditional channels for discovering books (newspaper reviews, bookstore browsing, word of mouth) are still important, but they’re shrinking or changing. Newspaper book sections have been cut back. Bookstore visits are less frequent for many people. And word of mouth, while still the most powerful driver of book sales, is increasingly happening online rather than in person.

Podcasts have emerged as a significant new channel for book discovery, and I think their influence will continue to grow. A thoughtful podcast interview can reach tens of thousands of listeners, many of whom are exactly the kind of engaged, curious, book-buying readers that publishers want to reach. When one of our authors gets booked on a well-known podcast, the sales impact is often immediate and measurable.

For readers, podcasts offer something that reviews and bestseller lists don’t: the sound of genuine enthusiasm. When a podcast host gets excited about a book, you can hear it in their voice. When an author explains what they were trying to accomplish and how they went about it, you get a dimension of understanding that no printed review can provide. It’s an intimate medium, and intimacy is exactly what books need.

Browse our catalog to see the titles we’ve been talking about on podcasts and in literary conversations. From fiction like The Last Archive and Still Waters to nonfiction like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, we’re always happy to talk about the books we’ve put into the world.