I subscribe to more literary magazines than I can keep up with. At last count, the number was somewhere around fourteen, which means that on any given week, there’s a new issue arriving in my mailbox or my inbox that I haven’t finished the previous issue of. This is a problem I’m happy to have. Literary magazines are, in my opinion, the most underrated part of the reading ecosystem, and I want to make the case for them here, along with some specific recommendations for magazines worth your time and money.

First, a clarification. When I say “literary magazine,” I’m talking about periodicals that publish fiction, poetry, essays, and sometimes art or criticism. Some are print-only. Some are online-only. Some do both. They range in size from tiny hand-stapled chapbooks run by one person to established institutions with decades of history and paid staff. What they all have in common is that they publish work that might not find a home anywhere else: short stories that are too weird for mainstream magazines, poems by emerging writers, essays that wander in productive ways, translations from languages you don’t speak. If the publishing industry is a forest, literary magazines are the understory, the layer beneath the canopy where all the interesting stuff grows.

I want to start with why literary magazines matter, especially now. In an era when most book marketing is driven by algorithms and bestseller lists, literary magazines are one of the last places where editorial judgment, actual human taste, determines what gets published. An editor at a literary magazine reads submissions and selects work based on quality, not marketability. This means you encounter writing that no algorithm would ever surface: a story about a dentist’s existential crisis, a poem about a grandmother’s hands, an essay about the architecture of parking garages. These are not clickbait topics. They are the stuff of literature, and they’re alive in literary magazines in a way they’re not anywhere else.

Literary magazines are also where most writers get their start. Before an author publishes a novel, they’ve usually published stories or poems in magazines. The magazine publication is a credential, a signal to agents and editors that someone with taste has read this writer’s work and deemed it worth sharing. For emerging writers, getting into a good literary magazine is the first rung on a very long ladder. For readers, it’s a chance to discover writers before the rest of the world catches on. I’ve found some of my favorite authors by reading their early stories in small journals. By the time their first book came out, I felt like I’d known them for years.

So here are some magazines I think are worth reading. I’m going to be opinionated, because the whole point of a recommendation list is having opinions, and I’m going to explain what I like about each one rather than just listing names.

The Paris Review is the obvious starting point, and I almost didn’t include it because everyone knows about it. But it deserves its reputation. The fiction is consistently excellent, the poetry is well-curated, and the interviews with writers (their “Art of Fiction” series, which has been running since the 1950s) are some of the best conversations about writing that exist in any form. Each issue feels like a small anthology. If you’re only going to subscribe to one literary magazine, this is probably the one.

Tin House was a Portland-based magazine that ran from 1999 to 2019, and even though it stopped publishing its print magazine (they now run a book imprint), the back issues are worth seeking out. Tin House had a knack for finding writers right before they broke through. Their fiction was smart and surprising, their essays were personal without being self-indulgent, and they had a sense of humor that a lot of literary magazines lack. If you can find back issues at a used bookstore, grab them.

Granta, published in London, is excellent if you want a global perspective. Each issue is themed (“Travel,” “Family,” “Work”), and they draw contributors from around the world. The writing tends toward long-form nonfiction and literary fiction, and the quality is remarkably consistent. Granta has been publishing since 1889, which gives it a kind of institutional confidence. They know what they’re doing, and it shows. The themed format also makes each issue feel cohesive in a way that many magazines don’t.

One Story, based in Brooklyn, publishes exactly one short story per issue. That’s it. One story, in a slim, elegantly designed pamphlet that arrives in the mail every three or four weeks. I love the simplicity of the concept. Instead of competing for attention with twenty other pieces, the single story gets your complete focus. And because the editors are staking the entire issue on one piece, the selection is ruthless. Every story they publish has to be strong enough to stand alone, and they almost always are.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is unlike any other literary magazine in existence. Each issue is a physical object designed to surprise you: one issue came in a box of smaller booklets, another was shaped like a letter, another included a comb. The design is part of the experience. The writing tends toward the experimental and playful, which isn’t everyone’s taste, but if you’re tired of conventional literary fiction, McSweeney’s is a tonic. Dave Eggers founded it in 1998, and it’s maintained a consistent identity of smart weirdness for over two decades.

The Sun, out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is my personal favorite, and it’s the one I always recommend to people who think they don’t like literary magazines. The Sun publishes personal essays, fiction, poetry, and interviews, and it does so with a warmth and honesty that I’ve never found elsewhere. There are no ads. The design is clean and understated. The writing is deeply human, often drawn from personal experience, and ranges from quietly devastating to unexpectedly funny. I’ve read every issue for the past six years, and I’ve never been disappointed.

Ploughshares, affiliated with Emerson College, is one of the longest-running literary magazines in the country. Each issue is guest-edited by a different writer, which means the aesthetic shifts from issue to issue. This can be a strength or a weakness depending on the guest editor, but over time, the variety is refreshing. You get exposure to different tastes and sensibilities, which keeps the reading experience from getting stale.

AGNI, published by Boston University, is another excellent long-running journal that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The fiction is strong, but their real standout is essays and translated work. If you’re interested in writing from other countries and traditions, AGNI is a reliable source. They also maintain a generous online archive, so you can sample their work before committing to a subscription.

Zyzzyva, out of San Francisco, focuses on West Coast writers and has a distinctive visual aesthetic that sets it apart from East Coast literary magazines. The fiction and nonfiction tend to be adventurous without being inaccessible, and there’s a sense of place in many of the pieces that I find appealing. It’s a magazine that feels rooted in a specific geography, which gives it character.

For poetry specifically, I’d recommend Poetry magazine, which has been publishing since 1912 and remains the gold standard. If you think you don’t like poetry, read a few issues of Poetry; there’s a good chance your opinion is based on the poetry you encountered in high school, which is nobody’s best introduction to the form. Poetry publishes work that ranges from formal to experimental, accessible to challenging, and the variety is part of the appeal.

On the online side, Electric Literature publishes excellent fiction and essays, with a particular strength in literary criticism that’s actually readable (a rarer quality than you’d think). They also run “Recommended Reading,” a series that pairs a new short story with an introduction by an established writer, which is a great way to discover new voices.

The Rumpus, founded by Stephen Elliott, is an online magazine that covers books, culture, and the writing life. Their book reviews are honest and thoughtful, their essays are personal and often moving, and they have a feature called “Dear Sugar” (originally written by Cheryl Strayed) that is, in my opinion, some of the best advice writing ever published. The Rumpus feels like a conversation with a smart, slightly irreverent friend who reads a lot.

Guernica is an online magazine focused on the intersection of art and politics. If you want writing that engages with the world, that wrestles with questions of justice and power and identity without being preachy, Guernica is excellent. They publish fiction, poetry, essays, and art, and the editorial voice is confident without being strident.

I should also mention a few university-affiliated journals that punch well above their weight. The Georgia Review, published by the University of Georgia, is a longstanding quarterly with particularly strong essays and book reviews. The Gettysburg Review, out of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, has a quiet, deliberate editorial approach that results in consistently high-quality fiction and poetry. The Iowa Review, connected to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, publishes a mix of emerging and established writers, and reading it gives you a sense of what’s happening at one of the most influential writing programs in the country. University-affiliated journals sometimes get overlooked because they don’t have the name recognition of The Paris Review or McSweeney’s, but the writing is often just as good, and the subscription prices tend to be lower.

For readers interested in genre-adjacent literary fiction, Conjunctions, edited by Bradford Morrow, is a journal that lives at the intersection of literary and experimental, with a willingness to publish work that defies easy classification. Each issue has a theme, and the themes tend to be expansive enough to accommodate a wide range of approaches. I’ve discovered more genuinely surprising writing in Conjunctions than in almost any other magazine.

A word about gift subscriptions. A literary magazine subscription is, in my opinion, one of the best gifts you can give a reader. It arrives regularly, it’s always different, and it introduces the recipient to writers they wouldn’t have found on their own. It’s the kind of gift that keeps giving for an entire year, and at the end, the recipient has a stack of magazines that they can revisit whenever they want. I’ve given more magazine subscriptions as gifts than I can count, and the response is almost always the same: genuine surprise, followed by enthusiastic engagement once the first issue arrives.

Now, a few practical notes about reading literary magazines. First: you don’t have to read every piece. A literary magazine is not a novel. You can skip the poem that doesn’t grab you and go straight to the essay. You can read one story, put the issue down, and come back to it a week later. The format rewards browsing, and there’s no obligation to be completist about it.

Second: subscriptions are almost always a better deal than buying individual issues, and they also support the magazines financially, which matters. Most literary magazines operate on razor-thin budgets. Your subscription money goes directly toward paying writers and keeping the lights on. Subscribing to a literary magazine is one of the most direct ways a reader can support living writers.

Third: if you’re a writer, reading literary magazines is part of your education. You need to know what’s being published, what the current conversations are, what editors are interested in. You also need to know which magazines are a good fit for your own work before you start submitting. Submitting blindly to magazines you’ve never read is like applying for a job at a company you’ve never researched. It wastes your time and the editors’ time.

I’ll close with this: every book begins as something shorter. A novel starts as an idea that could have been a short story. A nonfiction book starts as an essay. The literary magazine is where those seeds are planted and watered. When you read a literary magazine, you’re reading the future of literature in its earliest form. You’re watching writers find their voices, test their ideas, take risks that a full-length book can’t afford. It’s one of the most exciting kinds of reading there is, and it costs less than a streaming subscription. Give one a try. I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.

In March of 2021, we had 4,000 copies of a new title sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey, ready to ship. The books had been printed on schedule, the orders were in, and the release date was three weeks away. Then our distributor called to tell us that the trucking company they used had raised their rates by 40% overnight, citing a driver shortage. A week later, we learned that the paper mill supplying our printer had reduced its output because of a chemical shortage originating in East Asia. By the time our book actually reached bookstores, it was six weeks late, and the extra shipping costs had eaten most of our margin on the first print run.

This is the story of 2021 in publishing, multiplied across thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of titles. The supply chain crisis that disrupted nearly every industry hit publishing with particular force, for reasons that are worth understanding if you care about where your books come from.

Let me start with paper, because that’s where the problems began for most publishers. Publishing depends on a specific kind of paper: book-grade paper, typically uncoated, with particular weight, opacity, and texture characteristics. This paper comes from a relatively small number of mills, concentrated in the United States, Canada, Finland, and a few other countries. When demand for paper surged across multiple industries simultaneously, and some mills reduced capacity due to pandemic-related labor shortages, the supply tightened dramatically. Lead times for paper orders went from a few weeks to several months. Prices climbed 20 to 30 percent. For a small press like ours, where paper is one of the largest line items in our production budget, this was a serious problem.

The paper shortage had a cascading effect. Because paper was harder to get, printers had to schedule their jobs differently, prioritizing large orders from major publishers (who had the buying power to secure paper contracts) and pushing smaller orders to the back of the queue. This meant that small and independent presses, which is to say the presses that can least afford delays, were the ones most affected. Our print runs are modest, a few thousand copies at most, and we don’t have the leverage to demand priority from a printer who’s juggling orders from houses that print in the hundreds of thousands.

I want to explain how a book gets from a manuscript to a bookstore, because most people have no idea how many steps are involved, and every one of those steps was disrupted in 2021. The simplified version goes like this. The publisher finalizes the manuscript and sends the typeset files to a printer. The printer obtains paper and ink, prints the interior pages (called the “text block”), prints the cover separately on heavier stock, binds everything together, and ships the finished books to a warehouse. From the warehouse, the books are shipped to a distributor, who fills orders from bookstores, libraries, and online retailers. Each of these handoffs involves a different company, a different set of logistics, and a different set of potential failure points.

In 2021, every single one of those handoffs was slower, more expensive, or both. Paper was scarce and expensive. Printers were backlogged by weeks or months. Warehouses were short-staffed due to pandemic-related labor issues. Trucking companies were charging premium rates because they couldn’t hire enough drivers. Shipping containers from overseas suppliers, which some publishers use for large print runs done in China, were either unavailable or absurdly expensive. (Container shipping rates went up by something like 500% at the peak.) And at the retail end, bookstores were dealing with their own staffing shortages, which meant that even when books arrived, they might sit in the back room for days before being shelved.

For a publisher our size, the practical consequences were painful but manageable. We delayed two titles by about six weeks each. We reduced our initial print runs to conserve cash, betting that we could reprint if demand warranted it, which is a reasonable strategy until you realize that reprinting was also delayed by weeks. We absorbed higher costs on paper, printing, and shipping, which reduced our already-thin margins. We had some anxious conversations with authors about pushback on their pub dates, which is never fun, because authors have been waiting for their book to come out and telling them “actually, it’ll be another month and a half” feels like breaking a promise.

I should note that we were luckier than some. We print domestically, which means we weren’t exposed to the worst of the container shipping crisis. We also have a good relationship with our printer, built over years of consistent business, and they made an effort to accommodate us even when their schedule was packed. Small presses that relied on overseas printing or that were newer and hadn’t built those relationships had a much harder time. Some had books delayed by three, four, even six months.

The ripple effects extended beyond production. When a book’s release date shifts, everything else shifts with it. Marketing campaigns that were timed to coincide with the release need to be reworked. Review copies that were supposed to go out four months before publication are now going out two months before, which gives reviewers less time and reduces the chances of coverage. Bookstore events that were planned around the pub date need to be rescheduled. Pre-orders that were placed for a specific week need to be updated. For a small team, each of these adjustments takes time and attention that could be spent on other things.

There’s a deeper issue here that the supply chain crisis exposed, which is that the publishing industry’s logistics infrastructure is more fragile than most people realize. The entire system depends on a series of specialized, interdependent companies (paper mills, printers, binders, distributors, trucking firms) operating smoothly and in sequence. When any one of those links weakens, the whole chain slows down. And because publishing has been consolidating for decades, with fewer printers, fewer distributors, and fewer paper mills, the system has less redundancy than it used to. There aren’t a lot of backup options when your primary printer is booked solid for three months.

I’ve talked to other small publishers about their experiences, and the stories are remarkably consistent. Everyone dealt with paper shortages. Everyone dealt with printer backlogs. Everyone dealt with higher shipping costs. And everyone made compromises. Some switched to lighter paper stock to reduce costs, which changed the feel of the book. Some reduced trim sizes to use paper more efficiently. Some delayed titles until the following year, essentially losing an entire season. Some, and this is the one that stings the most, reduced their list, publishing fewer books than planned because they couldn’t afford the higher production costs.

The major publishers felt the squeeze too, of course, but they have advantages that small presses don’t. They have long-term paper contracts. They have dedicated print capacity at large facilities. They have teams of logistics professionals whose entire job is managing the supply chain. They can absorb cost increases without immediately cutting their list. This isn’t a criticism of the big houses; it’s just a description of the structural inequality in the industry. A crisis that’s an inconvenience for a major publisher can be an existential threat for a small one.

One of the less visible effects of the crisis was on debut authors. If your first book was scheduled for 2021 and it got pushed back by two months, you lost two months of your launch window. For a debut, the launch window is everything. It’s the period when your book is new, when stores are most likely to stock it prominently, when reviewers are most likely to cover it. A delayed debut book might arrive at bookstores alongside a flood of other delayed titles, all competing for the same limited shelf space and attention. Some debuts that might have broken through in a normal year got lost in the shuffle. We’ll never know how many.

The crisis also accelerated some trends that were already underway. Print-on-demand, which allows publishers to print copies one at a time as orders come in, gained ground as a hedge against the uncertainty of large print runs. If you can’t predict how long it’ll take to print 3,000 copies, printing on demand eliminates the inventory risk, though it comes with higher per-unit costs and lower print quality. Ebook and audiobook sales, which don’t depend on paper or shipping, held steady or grew during the period. Some readers, frustrated by delayed print editions, switched to digital, and it’s unclear how many will switch back.

The holiday season of 2021 was particularly stressful. Holiday sales account for a disproportionate share of annual revenue for most publishers, and the supply chain issues meant that some titles simply weren’t available when demand peaked. We had a book that was getting strong word-of-mouth recommendations in November, exactly the kind of organic buzz that publishers dream about, and we couldn’t keep it in stock. Our reprint order was stuck in a queue at the printer. By the time the reprint arrived in mid-January, the holiday window had closed, and the momentum had slowed. We’ll never know how many copies we lost. My estimate, based on the order rate during the stock-out period, is somewhere between 300 and 500, which for a small press is a significant number. That’s revenue we’ll never recover, from a moment we’ll never get back.

Libraries were affected too, in ways that rippled back to publishers. Libraries order many of their books through specific distributors and jobbers, and those intermediaries were dealing with the same shipping and staffing issues as everyone else. Library orders were delayed, which delayed the visibility of new titles in library catalogs, which reduced the number of patron holds, which reduced reorder rates. For small presses, library sales are an important revenue stream and a significant source of reader discovery. When that pipeline slows down, the effects compound over months.

I also want to talk about the human cost, not just the financial cost. The people who work at small presses are, by and large, not well-compensated. They do this work because they love books. Watching the supply chain crisis eat into budgets, delay books, and force difficult decisions was demoralizing in a way that’s hard to quantify. The emotional toll of calling an author to say their book won’t come out on time, or of looking at a spreadsheet and realizing you can only afford to publish five titles next year instead of seven, is real. It contributes to burnout, which was already a problem in publishing before the pandemic.

Things have improved since the worst of 2021. Paper supply has stabilized, though prices haven’t returned to pre-crisis levels. Printer backlogs have eased. Shipping costs have come down from their peaks. But the industry hasn’t fully recovered, and some of the cost increases appear to be permanent. Our per-book production cost is about 15% higher now than it was in 2019, and we don’t see that coming down. That increase gets passed along in the cover price, which means books are more expensive for readers, which isn’t great for anyone.

What did we learn? Mostly, we learned that we need to plan further ahead and build more buffer into our schedules. We used to finalize print orders about four months before pub date. Now we start six months out. We maintain a slightly larger inventory of our backlist titles, because reprinting on short notice is no longer reliable. We’ve diversified our printer relationships, so that if one printer is backed up, we have alternatives. These are boring, operational lessons, but they’re the kind of lessons that keep a small business alive.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the crisis made readers more aware of the physical supply chain behind their books. A book is not just content. It’s paper, ink, glue, cardboard, and labor. It’s a physical object that has to be manufactured and transported, and that process is more complex and more vulnerable than most people realize. The next time you hold a book, consider the journey it took to get to your hands. It’s longer and more precarious than you might think.

The manuscript arrived in early spring, about 280 pages, double-spaced, with a cover letter that said simply: “This is the story of my mother’s life. I’ve been writing it for five years. I hope you’ll consider it.” I read the first chapter that evening and knew two things immediately. First, the writing was good, sometimes very good, with a specificity and emotional precision that you can’t teach. Second, editing this book was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

Memoir is a different animal than fiction. When you edit a novel, you’re working with invented characters and constructed situations. If a scene doesn’t work, you can change it. If a character is flat, you can deepen them. If the ending falls short, you can reimagine it. The author might resist these changes, but the material is malleable. With memoir, the material is someone’s life. The characters are real people, many of them still alive. The events actually happened. And the person who wrote it down is sitting across from you, waiting for you to tell them what you think.

I’ve edited several memoirs over the course of my career, and each one has demanded something from me that fiction editing doesn’t. A kind of emotional endurance, a willingness to sit with someone else’s pain and then make dispassionate suggestions about how to shape that pain into a readable narrative. It sounds cold when I put it that way, and it’s not. It’s actually the opposite of cold. But it requires holding two things simultaneously: deep empathy for the author’s experience and rigorous attention to the craft of storytelling. Those two impulses sometimes pull in opposite directions, and navigating the tension between them is the central challenge of editing memoir.

The manuscript about the author’s mother was, at its core, a story about grief. The mother had died of a long illness, and the daughter had spent those final years as a caregiver. The book covered the illness, the caregiving, the death, and the aftermath. It was unflinching about the less pretty aspects of caring for a dying parent: the exhaustion, the resentment, the guilt about the resentment, the bureaucratic hell of insurance and medical decisions, the way your own life shrinks to the dimensions of a sick room. The writing was raw and honest in a way that made me uncomfortable, which is how I knew it was working.

But raw honesty, by itself, is not enough to make a good book. This is one of the hardest things to explain to memoir writers. The fact that something happened, and that it was painful, and that you’ve rendered it honestly, does not automatically make it compelling to read. Plenty of honest memoirs are boring. Plenty of painful experiences, when written down without sufficient craft, become a list of things that happened rather than a narrative that pulls the reader through. The editor’s job is to help the writer find the shape inside the experience, the arc that transforms a sequence of events into a story.

With this particular manuscript, the first major editorial challenge was structure. The author had written the book chronologically, starting with the diagnosis and ending with the aftermath. Chronological structure is the default for memoir, and it’s often the wrong choice, because life doesn’t unfold in a dramatically satisfying sequence. The most powerful parts of this manuscript were in the middle, during the worst of the caregiving, when the author was sleep-deprived and making impossible decisions. The beginning was slow, weighed down with medical details that were important to the author but tedious on the page. The ending trailed off into a series of reflections that didn’t land.

I suggested restructuring: starting with a scene from the thick of the caregiving, then moving backward to the diagnosis, then forward through the illness, the death, and the aftermath. This would hook the reader immediately and create a narrative tension, because the reader would know things were going to get worse before they got better. The author resisted this suggestion initially, and I understood why. She’d written the book in the order she’d experienced it, and rearranging that order felt like a violation of the truth. We talked about it for a long time. I explained that restructuring isn’t lying; it’s storytelling. The facts wouldn’t change. The sequence of the telling would change, and that’s a fundamentally different thing.

She came around, eventually, and the restructured version was significantly stronger. But the conversation took emotional energy from both of us. This is what I mean by the emotional labor of editing memoir. Every editorial suggestion, no matter how technical, touches a nerve, because the material is personal. When I said “this scene drags,” I was saying “the description of your mother’s hospital room goes on too long.” When I said “this character needs more dimension,” I was saying “the way you’ve written your brother makes him seem one-dimensional, and I suspect the real person is more complicated.” When I said “the ending isn’t working,” I was saying “the way you’ve made sense of your mother’s death doesn’t yet feel earned on the page.”

These are not easy things to hear when the material is autobiographical. A fiction writer whose ending doesn’t work can brainstorm alternatives without personal distress. A memoirist whose ending doesn’t work is being told that the meaning they’ve assigned to one of the most significant experiences of their life isn’t coming through. The distinction between “the writing isn’t there yet” and “your life experience isn’t valid” can feel paper-thin from the author’s side, even when the editor is being careful.

I’ve developed some strategies over the years for navigating these conversations. The most important one is to always start with what’s working. Not as a diplomatic tactic, though it is that, but because it’s genuinely useful. If I can identify the passages where the author’s voice is strongest, where the emotional truth is most vivid, those passages become the standard that the rest of the manuscript is measured against. I can say, “This paragraph on page 73 is extraordinary. Let’s figure out how to get the rest of the book to that level.” That’s a different conversation than “most of this needs work.”

Another strategy is to ask questions rather than make pronouncements. Instead of saying, “You should cut this scene,” I’ll ask, “What is this scene doing in the narrative? What do you want the reader to take away from it?” Sometimes the author has a clear answer, and the problem is execution, not inclusion. Sometimes asking the question helps the author realize that the scene is there for their own emotional processing, not for the reader, and they’re willing to let it go. Asking the author to articulate their intention is both more respectful and more productive than simply telling them what to do.

The privacy issue is another layer of complexity. Memoir involves real people, and those people may not want to appear in the book, or may disagree with the way they’ve been portrayed. I’ve worked with memoirists who had difficult conversations with family members about what would and wouldn’t be included. I’ve seen families torn apart by memoirs, and I’ve seen families brought closer together. The editor can’t solve these interpersonal problems, but we can raise the questions early and encourage the author to think through the consequences of what they’re publishing.

With the mother’s memoir, the author’s brother was a significant character. He appeared throughout the book as distant and unhelpful during the caregiving period. The author wrote about him with frustration that was clearly long-held: he lived across the country, he visited rarely, he made promises he didn’t keep. The portrait was damning. It was also, I suspected, incomplete. Real people are rarely as one-dimensional as they appear when filtered through the perspective of someone who’s angry at them. I asked the author whether her brother had his own experience of their mother’s illness, his own guilt, his own grief, that the book wasn’t capturing. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I know he was suffering too. I just don’t want to write about it because it makes it harder to be angry.”

That moment was, I think, the turning point of the edit. The author’s willingness to acknowledge complexity, to resist the temptation of a simple narrative where she was the good child and her brother was the absent one, opened up space for a much richer, more honest book. The final version includes passages where she grapples with her own unreliability as a narrator, where she admits that her perspective is partial and her anger is mixed with love and guilt and confusion. These passages are the best writing in the book, and they wouldn’t exist if the author hadn’t been willing to sit with discomfort and write through it.

I want to talk about what happens to the editor during this process, because it’s something I don’t hear discussed often. When you spend months immersed in someone else’s grief, it affects you. I read this manuscript four times over the course of the editing process. By the third read, I knew the mother’s medications, her favorite foods, the view from her hospital window. I dreamed about the family. I cried during a late-night editing session, not because the writing was sentimental (it wasn’t) but because the accumulation of specific, unsentimental details had worn down my defenses. This is, I think, a form of emotional labor that doesn’t get acknowledged enough. Editors are not just technical experts. They’re empathic readers who absorb a significant amount of the emotional content of the books they work on.

I don’t say this to invite sympathy. I chose this work, and I love it. But I think it’s worth noting that the distance between editor and text is not as clean as the professional framing suggests. When I send editorial notes on a memoir, I’m not a dispassionate technician adjusting a machine. I’m a person who has been living inside another person’s most painful memories, trying to help them shape those memories into something that will reach other people who’ve had their own painful memories. The work is technical and emotional at the same time, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

There’s another dimension of memoir editing that deserves mention: fact-checking. Memory is unreliable, and memoirists frequently get details wrong. Dates, sequences of events, who said what to whom, these things drift in memory over the years. A good editor catches inconsistencies and flags them. Was your mother diagnosed in 2008 or 2009? You say you moved to the new apartment before the surgery, but earlier in the manuscript you place the surgery in June and the move in October. These aren’t accusations of dishonesty; they’re routine corrections that any text written from memory requires. But raising them with a memoirist is different from raising them with a historian. The memoirist isn’t just getting a fact wrong; they’re discovering that their memory of a significant personal event is different from what actually happened. That realization can be disorienting, and the editor has to handle it with care.

I’ve also learned that the hardest scenes to edit are often the ones the author wrote first. These scenes tend to be the most emotionally charged, the ones the author needed to get out before they could write anything else. They’re often over-written, because the author was trying to capture something overwhelming and used more words than the scene needed. Suggesting cuts to these foundational scenes can feel, to the author, like you’re minimizing the experience. The conversation requires patience on both sides. I try to frame it not as “this scene says too much” but as “this scene is so important that every sentence needs to earn its place.”

The book was published last year. The reviews were kind, which mattered to the author more than sales numbers. Her brother read it and called her afterward. She told me they talked for two hours, longer than they’d spoken in years. She said, “He said he didn’t know I felt that way about a lot of things, and I said I didn’t either until I wrote it down.” That’s the power of memoir when it works. The writing process itself becomes a way of understanding an experience that was too overwhelming to understand while it was happening.

I’m working on another memoir now, a very different story with very different challenges. And I know the drill. I’ll read it with my full attention. I’ll form a relationship with the material that goes beyond professionalism. I’ll have difficult conversations about structure and honesty and what to include. I’ll absorb some of the emotional weight. And at the end, if we’ve done our work well, there will be a book that is honest and shaped and human, a book that tells one person’s story in a way that makes other people feel less alone. That’s the goal. It’s always the goal. And it’s worth the labor, emotional and otherwise, every time.

A few months ago, I was reading submissions from two writers who were telling very similar stories. Both had written literary fiction set in small towns. Both featured a woman returning home after years away. Both dealt with family secrets and the weight of the past. The plots were structurally similar, the themes almost identical. And yet one manuscript felt alive on the page, electric with personality and surprise, while the other felt like competent furniture, well-built but inert. The difference was voice.

Voice is the most important quality in writing and the hardest to define. I’ve been in publishing for over a decade, and I still struggle to explain what I mean when I say a writer has a strong voice. It’s easier to identify its absence than its presence. When voice is missing, the prose feels generic, like it could have been written by anyone. When voice is present, the prose feels specific, like it could only have been written by this particular person. But what, exactly, makes it feel that way?

Let me start by saying what voice is not, because I think there are some common misconceptions. Voice is not style. Style is a component of voice, but they’re not the same thing. A writer can have a polished, elegant style and still lack voice. Style is about technique: sentence structure, word choice, rhythm, the mechanical choices a writer makes at the prose level. Voice is about something behind the technique, the personality, the worldview, the specific way a writer sees and processes reality. You can teach style. You can’t really teach voice.

Voice is also not tone. Tone is the emotional register of a piece of writing: funny, somber, angry, wistful. A writer can shift tones from book to book or even within a single work. But their voice remains consistent. Joan Didion writing about grief sounds different in tone from Joan Didion writing about California, but the voice is unmistakably the same: precise, slightly detached, analytical, with an undertow of unease. The tone changes. The voice persists.

Voice is not quirkiness, either. This is a trap that a lot of young writers fall into. They think that having a distinctive voice means writing in an unusual way: sentence fragments, invented words, experimental punctuation, self-conscious asides. Sometimes these techniques are part of a genuine voice. More often, they’re affectations layered on top of a voice that hasn’t developed yet. The quirkiness is a disguise, and when you strip it away, the writing underneath is unremarkable. Real voice doesn’t need tricks. It just needs to be itself, which is simultaneously the simplest and most difficult thing in writing.

So what is voice? Here’s my best attempt at a definition, knowing that any definition will be incomplete. Voice is the evidence of a mind at work on the page. It’s the accumulation of choices, conscious and unconscious, that reveal how a writer thinks, what they notice, what they find funny or sad or strange, how they understand the relationship between words and the things those words point at. Voice is the writer’s fingerprint. It’s what makes you read a sentence and think, “Nobody else would have written it exactly this way.”

I’ll give some examples, drawn from writers I admire, to try to make this concrete. When I read Toni Morrison, the voice is lush and rhythmic, drawing on oral storytelling traditions, with a moral authority that feels ancient. When I read George Orwell, the voice is stripped-down, direct, almost confrontational in its clarity, like someone who refuses to let you look away. When I read Lorrie Moore, the voice is funny and sharp, with a wit that masks profound sadness, the kind of writer who makes you laugh and then realize a beat later that you’re heartbroken. These writers don’t sound alike at all. What they share is that each has a voice so distinctive that you could identify their work from a single paragraph.

Voice comes from, I think, several sources. The first is reading. Every writer’s voice is shaped by the voices they’ve absorbed. You can hear, in a writer’s prose, the echoes of everything they’ve read. This is not the same as imitation. It’s more like the way a musician’s sound is shaped by the music they grew up listening to. The influence is deep and diffuse, not a matter of copying specific techniques but of internalizing certain rhythms, certain attitudes toward language, certain ways of constructing a sentence or a scene. The writers who read widely tend to have richer, more complex voices than the writers who read narrowly, because they’ve absorbed more raw material.

The second source is life experience. A writer who has done things, lived in different places, worked different jobs, interacted with different kinds of people, will have a voice that carries the texture of that experience. This doesn’t mean you have to live an extraordinary life to have a good voice. It means you have to be paying attention to the life you’re living. The specificity that makes voice come alive on the page comes from noticed details: the way a particular building smells, the sound a specific machine makes, the precise expression on someone’s face when they’re trying not to cry. A writer who notices these things and stores them and uses them will have a more interesting voice than a writer who deals in generalities.

The third source is opinions. This might sound odd, but I think having strong opinions is directly related to having a strong voice. A writer who takes a stand, who has a point of view about the world, who is willing to say “this is how I see it” rather than hedging into bland neutrality, will almost always have a more compelling voice than a writer who tries to be balanced and fair. I’m not talking about political opinions necessarily, though those can be part of it. I’m talking about opinions about everything: food, weather, architecture, the way people talk, the way institutions work, the proper way to make coffee. Opinionated writers are interesting writers. Their voices have edges, and edges are what make prose memorable.

The fourth source, and this is the one that’s hardest to talk about, is selfhood. Voice is, ultimately, an expression of who you are. Not who you think you should be, not who you’re trying to impress, not the version of yourself that shows up at dinner parties, but the real, unguarded, slightly messy version that exists when nobody’s watching. Finding your voice as a writer is, to a significant extent, finding yourself. This is why voice often emerges slowly, over years and many drafts, and why it can’t be rushed. You have to write a lot of bad prose, a lot of imitative prose, a lot of prose that sounds like someone else, before you burn through all the pretenses and arrive at something that’s genuinely yours.

I see this process all the time in the submissions I read. A young writer submits a manuscript that’s technically skilled but voiceless. The sentences are clean, the plot is structured, the dialogue is competent. Everything works, and nothing sings. Three years later, the same writer submits something new, and it’s completely different. It’s rough in places, less polished, but it has a pulse. The writer has stopped trying to write like a “good writer” and has started writing like themselves. That transition, from competence to authenticity, is where voice lives.

As an editor, my relationship with voice is complicated. I can recognize it instantly. I can tell, within a page, whether a manuscript has voice or doesn’t. But I can’t create it. I can help a writer refine their voice, sharpen it, remove the things that are obscuring it. I can point to passages where the voice is strongest and encourage the writer to lean into those qualities. I can identify moments where the writer is slipping into someone else’s voice, usually a writer they admire, and gently redirect them. But the voice itself has to come from the writer. It’s the one thing I can’t supply.

This is why voice is the first thing I look for when I read a submission, before plot, before character, before theme. A manuscript with a strong voice and a weak plot can be fixed. A manuscript with a brilliant plot and no voice is dead on arrival. I’ve turned down technically excellent manuscripts because they lacked voice, and I’ve championed rough, imperfect manuscripts because the voice was undeniable. Every editor I know has a version of this story. We’re all, in the end, listening for that signal in the noise: the sound of someone saying something only they could say.

I want to address something that comes up often in conversations about voice: the concern that voice can be faked or manufactured. Especially now, with AI writing tools that can generate text in different “styles,” there’s a worry that voice is just a collection of tics that can be assembled mechanically. I understand the concern, but I think it misunderstands what voice actually is. A language model can mimic patterns, sentence lengths, vocabulary ranges, syntactic habits. What it can’t do is have a relationship with the world. It can’t have opinions born from experience. It can’t notice the specific detail that a human notices because of where they’ve been and what they’ve lived through. The surface features of voice can be copied. The thing underneath them can’t.

This is also, by the way, why voice is so hard to maintain over the course of a career. A writer’s first book often has the strongest, most natural voice, because they’re not yet self-conscious about it. They haven’t read reviews of their work that identify their stylistic habits. They haven’t been compared to other writers. They’re just writing the way they write. After the first book, things get complicated. Some writers become more polished but less distinctive. They sand off the rough edges that made their voice interesting. Others become so attached to their own mannerisms that the voice calcifies into a caricature. The writers who sustain a living voice over many books are the ones who keep growing, keep reading, keep being surprised by the world. Their voice evolves because they evolve.

For writers trying to develop their voice, my best advice is: write a lot and read a lot, and don’t be in a hurry. Your voice will emerge on its own schedule, and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up. Write badly on purpose sometimes. Write about things that embarrass you. Write without thinking about the audience. Write the sentence that scares you. Your voice lives in the places you’ve been avoiding, the subjects that feel too personal, the opinions that feel too strong, the observations that feel too small. Go there. That’s where the interesting writing is.

I want to say one more thing about voice, which is that it matters beyond literature. Voice is what separates interesting communication from boring communication in every context: journalism, criticism, business writing, personal essays, even email. We live in an era of increasingly homogeneous prose. Corporate voice, internet voice, social media voice, they all tend toward the same breezy, flattened register, stripped of personality and specificity. Against this backdrop, a genuine individual voice is startling. It wakes people up. It makes them pay attention. Whether you’re writing a novel or a newsletter, a memoir or a marketing plan, your voice is the thing that makes people want to read what you have to say.

When we publish a book at ScrollWorks, the first question we ask is: does this writer have something to say that only they can say? It’s not about the plot or the subject or the genre. It’s about the voice. Is there a person behind this prose who is thinking and feeling and noticing the world in a way that’s unmistakably their own? If the answer is yes, we want to publish that book. If the answer is no, no amount of technical skill will change our mind. Voice is the thing. Everything else follows from it.

And as a reader, the same principle applies. The books that stay with you, the ones you recommend and reread and think about years later, are almost always the ones with the strongest voices. The plot fades. The characters blur. But the voice, that particular way of seeing and saying, that stays. It becomes part of how you think. It changes, however slightly, the way you experience the world. That’s what a real voice does. It doesn’t just tell you a story. It gives you a new pair of eyes.

I got into an argument at a dinner party last year about whether non-fiction publishers actually check their facts. A friend of a friend, a novelist, said something like, “Non-fiction is just opinion with footnotes.” I nearly choked on my wine. Not because it was entirely wrong, but because it was wrong in a way that revealed how little most people understand about what happens behind the scenes at a publisher like ScrollWorks Media. So I figured it was time to pull back the curtain.

Fact-checking in publishing is not glamorous work. There are no montage sequences of determined researchers slamming dusty volumes onto desks. Most of it involves spreadsheets, phone calls that go to voicemail, and a lot of cross-referencing databases that crash at the worst possible moment. But it is real work, and at ScrollWorks, we take it seriously enough that it shapes how we acquire, develop, and produce every non-fiction title on our list.

Let me start with what happens before we even sign a book. When an author pitches us a non-fiction project, part of our evaluation process includes a preliminary fact assessment. This is not a full fact-check. It is more like a smell test. We look at the proposal, the sample chapters, and any supporting materials. Then one of our editors will spend a few hours spot-checking claims. Are the statistics the author cites actually from the sources they reference? Do the dates line up? Are the quoted experts real people who actually said those things?

You might think this sounds paranoid, but I have personally caught fabricated quotes in at least three proposals over the past five years. In one case, an author had attributed a lengthy statement to a well-known economist. When I emailed that economist’s office, they had never heard of the author and the quote did not appear in any of the economist’s published works or public appearances. The author later admitted they had “paraphrased from memory.” That proposal did not move forward.

Once we do sign a book, the real work begins. Our fact-checking process has three main phases, and I will walk through each of them honestly, including where we sometimes fall short.

The first phase is what we call source auditing. When an author submits their manuscript, we ask them to also submit what we call a source document. This is a separate file, keyed to the manuscript by paragraph or section number, that lists every factual claim and its source. If the author writes “The average American eats 23 pounds of pizza per year,” we need to see exactly where that number came from. A USDA report? A food industry survey? A blog post that cited another blog post that misquoted a tweet?

The source document is not optional at ScrollWorks. Some publishers treat it as a nice-to-have. We treat it as a requirement. This sometimes means we lose authors who find the process tedious, and I understand their frustration. Writing a 300-page book is hard enough without having to create what amounts to a parallel document justifying every claim. But our position is firm on this. If you cannot tell us where a fact came from, we cannot verify it, and we will not publish it as fact.

I should be honest about a limitation here. We do not require source documents for every type of statement. Personal anecdotes, clearly labeled opinions, and widely accepted general knowledge (water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level, that sort of thing) are exempt. The judgment call about what counts as “general knowledge” is genuinely difficult. Is it general knowledge that the Great Wall of China is not visible from space? It is now, but twenty years ago that myth was still widely believed. Our editors have to make these calls case by case, and we do not always get it right.

The second phase is independent verification. This is where we go beyond the author’s own sources and try to confirm key claims through separate channels. We do not verify every single fact in every single book. I want to be upfront about that. A 90,000-word non-fiction title might contain thousands of discrete factual claims, and checking every one of them against independent sources would take months and cost more than the book would ever earn. We are a small press, not the New York Times investigative unit.

What we do instead is prioritize. We focus our independent verification on several categories of claims. First, any claim that is central to the book’s argument or thesis. If the entire premise of a book rests on a particular historical event having occurred in a particular way, we need to be very sure about that event. Second, any claim that is surprising or counterintuitive. These are the facts that readers are most likely to share, and therefore the ones most likely to spread if they are wrong. Third, any claim about a living person. This is partly a legal concern (libel is expensive) but also an ethical one. People deserve to have accurate things written about them.

For our title The Cartographer’s Dilemma, this phase was particularly intensive. The book deals with historical claims about mapmaking and territorial disputes, and many of the primary sources are in archives scattered across multiple countries. Our fact-checker spent three weeks just on the chapters covering 18th-century boundary disputes, corresponding with archivists in London, Paris, and Madrid. In one instance, we discovered that a document the author had cited was actually a known forgery that had been debunked in a 2003 academic paper. The author was unaware of the debunking. We caught it. The passage was rewritten.

The third phase is what I think of as contextual review. This is less about whether individual facts are correct and more about whether the overall picture they create is accurate. A book can contain nothing but true facts and still be misleading. You can cherry-pick statistics, omit relevant context, or arrange true events in a sequence that implies a causal relationship that does not exist.

This is the hardest part of fact-checking, and the part where reasonable people can disagree. When we published a title last year about changes in American dietary habits, one of our reviewers flagged that while every individual statistic in a particular chapter was accurate, the chapter as a whole painted a picture that was more alarming than the data really supported. The author had chosen the most dramatic numbers from each study and placed them next to each other. None of it was false. But the impression it created was, in my view, slightly distorted.

We had a long conversation with the author about this. They pushed back, arguing that they had a right to emphasize the data points they found most significant. They were not wrong about that. But we ultimately asked them to add some balancing context, a few sentences acknowledging the less dramatic interpretations of the same data. They agreed, though they were not thrilled about it.

This is where fact-checking shades into editorial judgment, and it is uncomfortable territory. I do not think publishers should be in the business of telling authors what to think or what arguments to make. But I do think we have a responsibility to ensure that the factual foundation of those arguments is solid, and that readers are not being led to conclusions by selective presentation of data.

Now, let me talk about the people who actually do this work. At ScrollWorks, we have one in-house editor who handles the source auditing phase for most of our non-fiction titles. For the independent verification phase, we usually hire freelance fact-checkers. These are often journalists or researchers with subject-matter expertise relevant to the specific book. For a book about marine biology, we will find a fact-checker with a science background. For a book about economic policy, we will find someone who has covered economics.

We pay our fact-checkers between $2,500 and $5,000 per title, depending on the length and complexity of the book. I mention this because I think it is important for readers to understand that fact-checking has a real cost. When publishers cut corners on fact-checking, it is usually because of budget pressure. A small press operating on thin margins has to decide how to allocate limited resources, and fact-checking competes with cover design, marketing, distribution fees, and author advances for the same pool of money.

We have made the decision that fact-checking is not the place to cut. This means our books sometimes have less flashy covers or smaller marketing budgets. I think that is the right trade-off, but I recognize it is a trade-off. Other publishers might reasonably make different choices.

I also want to address something that comes up a lot in conversations about fact-checking, which is the question of author responsibility versus publisher responsibility. Some people in the industry argue that fact-checking is entirely the author’s job. The author makes the claims; the author should stand behind them. The publisher’s role is to edit for clarity and coherence, not to second-guess the author’s research.

I understand this position, but I disagree with it. When ScrollWorks puts our name on a book, we are implicitly telling readers that we believe this book meets certain standards. If a reader buys one of our non-fiction titles and discovers it is full of errors, they are not just going to blame the author. They are going to blame us, and rightly so. Our imprint is a promise, and fact-checking is part of how we keep that promise.

That said, the author does bear primary responsibility. We are not going to catch everything. No fact-checking process will. What we can do is catch the most significant errors and ensure that the author has done their due diligence. If an author’s source document is thin, or if they cannot tell us where their facts came from, that is a problem we need to address before publication.

Let me give you a specific example of how this played out with one of our recent titles. We were working on a book about the history of a particular American city. The author made a claim about the founding date of a local institution, citing a plaque on the building. Our fact-checker discovered that the plaque was installed in the 1950s and actually contained an incorrect date. The real founding date, according to city records, was three years later than the plaque stated. The author had relied on a primary source (the plaque) that happened to be wrong.

This is the kind of error that is easy to make and hard to catch. The author had physically visited the site and copied the date from the plaque. That feels like solid research. But primary sources can be wrong, especially commemorative plaques, which are often created decades after the events they describe and sometimes get the details muddled. Our fact-checker caught this because they checked the date against multiple sources, not just the one the author had used.

I should also mention what happens when we find errors late in the process. This is more stressful than I would like it to be. If we catch a factual error after the manuscript has already been typeset and the cover has been designed and the publication date has been announced, we are in a bind. Fixing the error might mean delaying publication, which has financial consequences. But publishing a known error is not acceptable either.

We have delayed publication twice in the last four years because of late-stage fact-checking discoveries. Both times, it was painful. Both times, it was the right call. In one case, a late discovery revealed that a key source the author had relied on had been retracted from the academic journal where it was originally published. The retraction had happened just weeks before our publication date. The author had to substantially revise two chapters, and we pushed the release by six weeks. Readers never knew, but that is exactly the point. They did not need to know because we caught the problem first.

There is also the question of how fact-checking interacts with the author’s voice. Some authors worry that a rigorous fact-checking process will strip the personality from their writing, turning everything into hedged, qualified, lawyerly prose. I sympathize with this concern. Nobody wants to read a book where every claim is surrounded by so many caveats that the reader loses track of the actual point.

Our approach is to separate the fact-checking from the prose editing. We verify the facts, and if something is wrong, we tell the author what is wrong and why. But we do not rewrite their sentences for them. It is their job to figure out how to make the corrected information work within their narrative voice. Sometimes this means an author needs to tone down a dramatic claim. Sometimes it means adding a brief note of context. But the words remain theirs.

I think the most important thing I can say about fact-checking is that it is not about perfection. Despite everything I have described, errors do sometimes make it into our published books. When that happens, we correct them in subsequent printings and, if the error is significant, we post a correction on our website. We are not perfect, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But I believe there is a meaningful difference between a publisher that has a rigorous fact-checking process and occasionally makes mistakes, and a publisher that has no process at all and just hopes for the best. The reader deserves to know which kind of publisher they are buying from. At ScrollWorks, we want to be the kind that takes the extra time, spends the extra money, and catches as many errors as we can before a book reaches your hands.

If you are curious about the results of our process, I would point you to The Cartographer’s Dilemma, which went through one of our most rigorous fact-checks to date. You can also browse our other non-fiction titles knowing that each one went through the same three-phase process I have described here. We are proud of the work, even when it slows us down. Especially when it slows us down.

Nobody at ScrollWorks expected it. We had printed 2,000 copies, which felt optimistic at the time. The book was a quiet literary novel about a woman who restores old photographs for a living, set in a small town in Vermont that the author had invented from scratch. The cover was nice but not flashy. The author had no social media following to speak of. Our marketing budget for the title was, to put it charitably, modest.

Six weeks after publication, we were out of stock. By the eight-week mark, we had rushed two additional print runs and could not keep up with orders. By the end of the year, that quiet little novel had outsold everything else on our list combined. I am still not entirely sure how it happened, and that uncertainty is part of what makes the unexpected bestseller one of the most fascinating phenomena in publishing.

I want to write about this honestly, which means admitting upfront that publishers are terrible at predicting which books will break out. We have decades of data, industry expertise, sophisticated pre-publication review processes, and relationships with booksellers who have excellent instincts. And despite all of that, the books that become surprise hits are, by definition, surprises. If we could predict them, they would not be unexpected.

The publishing industry has a dirty secret that nobody likes to talk about at conferences. Most of our revenue projections for individual titles are wrong. Not slightly wrong. Sometimes spectacularly wrong, in both directions. We overestimate books that we think will be big, and we underestimate books that turn out to be the ones readers actually wanted. The industry keeps functioning because the hits, when they come, are profitable enough to cover the losses from the misses. But the process of figuring out which will be which? That is mostly guesswork dressed up in spreadsheets.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately because we have had two unexpected successes in the past three years, and looking at them side by side has taught me some things I did not expect to learn.

The first thing I have learned is that unexpected bestsellers almost never come from nowhere. When I say our Vermont novel was a surprise, I do not mean there were zero early signals. There were signals. We just did not know how to read them. The book had received a couple of very enthusiastic early reviews from independent bookstores that participated in our advance reader program. One bookstore in Portland, Oregon, hand-sold over 200 copies in the first month. The owner told me later that she had been pressing the book into customers’ hands with a level of personal conviction she reserved for maybe three or four books a year.

That kind of bookseller passion is incredibly powerful, and it is almost impossible to manufacture. You cannot pay for it. You cannot engineer it through a clever marketing campaign. It happens when a particular book connects with a particular reader in a way that makes them feel genuinely compelled to share it. Word of mouth is the oldest and most effective marketing channel in existence, and it runs entirely on authentic enthusiasm.

The second signal we missed was in our own correspondence. The author had been receiving emails from readers at a rate that was unusual for a debut novelist with a small press. Within the first two weeks, she had gotten over fifty personal emails from readers, not just “I liked your book” messages, but long, detailed letters about how specific passages had affected them. One woman wrote three pages about how the novel’s depiction of grief had helped her process the loss of her mother. A retired photographer wrote to say the book had captured something about his profession that he had never been able to articulate himself.

The author mentioned these emails to her editor in passing, almost as an afterthought. Nobody at ScrollWorks connected the dots at the time. In retrospect, fifty heartfelt reader emails in two weeks for a debut novel from a small press is an extraordinary signal. It suggests the book is hitting an emotional frequency that resonates deeply with the people who find it. And deeply resonant books get recommended.

Here is what I think happens with an unexpected bestseller, at least based on what I have observed. The book finds its first few hundred readers through normal channels: bookstore placement, a handful of reviews, the author’s personal network. Among those first few hundred, a disproportionate number have an intense reaction. They do not just enjoy the book; they feel compelled to tell someone about it. So they recommend it to friends, family, book clubs, coworkers. Some of them post about it online. A few of those posts gain traction.

At some point, the book crosses a threshold where the recommendations are generating more new readers than the publisher’s own marketing efforts. This is the tipping point, and when it happens, the publisher’s role shifts from driving demand to simply trying to keep up with it. Our job becomes making sure the book is in stock, that bookstores can reorder quickly, and that we are not leaving readers unable to buy a book they have already decided they want.

We failed at this during our first unexpected hit. We ran out of stock for almost two weeks while we waited for the second print run. During those two weeks, the book was functionally unavailable at many retailers. I am convinced we lost sales permanently during that gap. Some percentage of people who wanted to buy the book during those two weeks moved on to something else and never came back. The momentum of an unexpected bestseller is fragile, and a stock-out can break it.

Since then, we have adjusted our approach. We now have a standing agreement with our printer that allows us to trigger a reprint within 72 hours for any title that is selling above a certain threshold. This costs us a little more per unit because we are not batching our print orders as efficiently. But the insurance against a stock-out is worth it. Lost sales during a breakout moment are the most expensive kind of lost sales, because each lost sale also represents a lost recommendation.

The second lesson from our unexpected bestsellers is about the role of timing. Both of our surprise hits were published during periods when their subject matter happened to align with something the culture was collectively processing. The Vermont novel came out during a period when a lot of people were thinking about small-town life, solitude, and the question of what makes a community. It was not written in response to those cultural currents. The author had started it years before. But it arrived at a moment when readers were primed for exactly what it offered.

I do not think you can plan for this kind of timing. Publishing a book takes so long, typically 12 to 18 months from acquisition to publication, that trying to chase cultural trends is a fool’s errand. By the time your trend-chasing book hits shelves, the trend has usually moved on. What you can do is publish books that are genuinely good, that deal with themes and emotions that are always relevant to human experience, and hope that the timing works out. Sometimes it does. Most of the time, it does not.

The third thing I have learned is how differently the publishing ecosystem treats a book once it starts showing unexpected strength. Before our Vermont novel broke out, getting review coverage was like pulling teeth. We sent review copies to dozens of publications and received mostly silence. After the book started selling, those same publications came to us. Reviewers who had ignored the advance copy suddenly wanted to write about it. Media outlets that had passed on author interviews were now requesting them.

This is frustrating, and I think it reveals something honest about how literary media works. There is a strong herd instinct. Once a book is perceived as successful, it becomes much easier to get coverage of it, which in turn makes it more successful. The rich get richer. Meanwhile, the books that might have been equally good but did not get that initial spark of organic enthusiasm remain invisible.

I do not say this bitterly. It is just the reality of how attention works in a market where thousands of new books are published every week. Reviewers and media outlets have limited space and have to make choices about what to cover. A book with demonstrated reader enthusiasm is a safer bet for coverage than an unknown quantity. I get the logic. But it does mean that the path to becoming an unexpected bestseller is front-loaded with difficulty. You have to generate that initial enthusiasm with very little institutional support, and then once you have it, the institutional support suddenly materializes.

Let me talk about what an unexpected bestseller does to a small press internally, because this is something that does not get discussed much. When a book dramatically outperforms expectations at a publisher the size of ScrollWorks, it creates both opportunities and pressures that can be destabilizing if you are not prepared for them.

On the opportunity side, a bestseller generates cash flow that can fund future acquisitions. It raises the profile of the press, making it easier to attract good manuscripts. It gives you leverage with distributors and bookstores. Authors who might not have considered a small press suddenly see you as viable. All of this is good.

On the pressure side, there is a temptation to try to replicate the success. After our Vermont novel hit, we received a flood of manuscripts that were essentially “quiet literary novel set in a small New England town.” Authors and agents had noticed what was selling for us and were trying to give us more of the same. And honestly, we were tempted. The data said this type of book could sell. Why not publish more of them?

We resisted that temptation, and I am glad we did. Because the thing about an unexpected bestseller is that its success was not really about its category or setting. It was about the specific quality of that specific book meeting that specific moment. Trying to reverse-engineer a formula from one data point is bad statistics and bad publishing. The next book that breaks out for us might be a historical epic. It might be a collection of essays. It might be something we cannot even categorize. The only consistent predictor I have found is quality combined with authentic emotional resonance, and you cannot systematize either of those things.

There is also the question of what an unexpected bestseller does to the author’s career. This is complicated territory. On one hand, a breakout book opens doors that were previously locked. The author gets invited to festivals, receives foreign rights inquiries, and suddenly has a readership eagerly awaiting their next book. On the other hand, that eager readership creates pressure. The second book has to live up to the first, and that expectation can be paralyzing.

I have watched this play out with two authors now, and the pattern is similar. There is an initial period of elation and disbelief. Then a period of anxiety about the next book. Then a long stretch of hard work during which the author has to somehow write something genuine and personal while knowing that tens of thousands of people are waiting to judge it. My advice to both authors was the same: ignore the sales numbers, ignore the expectations, and write the book you need to write. Whether they managed to follow that advice is their story to tell.

One more thing about unexpected bestsellers that I think is worth mentioning. They change your relationship with risk. Before our first surprise hit, I was fairly conservative about acquisitions. I wanted to see clear market comps, identifiable audiences, and realistic sales projections before I would sign a book. After watching a book with none of those things become our biggest seller, I loosened up.

I now give more weight to my own gut reaction when reading a manuscript. If a book makes me feel something genuine, if it lingers in my mind after I finish it, if I find myself wanting to describe it to people at dinner, those are the signals I trust most. They are not scientific. They are not data-driven. But they are exactly the signals that predicted our unexpected bestsellers, and they are exactly the signals that our spreadsheets and market analysis completely missed.

The publishing industry spends a lot of time and money trying to figure out what readers want. We analyze trends, study bestseller lists, commission market research, and attend conferences where experts share their predictions for the next big thing. All of that has some value. But the unexpected bestseller is a humbling reminder that readers are individuals, not data points, and that the books that move them most deeply are often the ones that nobody saw coming.

Our latest titles, from Still Waters to Echoes of Iron, were each acquired because they made someone on our team feel something real. Whether any of them becomes the next unexpected hit, I honestly have no idea. And I have come to think that not knowing is part of what makes this work worth doing. Every book we publish is a bet on the possibility that it will find its readers. Some bets pay off in ways we never imagined. That possibility, even when it remains unrealized, is what keeps me showing up.

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

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

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

I do not care. We are keeping it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I collect old book covers the way some people collect vinyl records. Not the books themselves, necessarily. Just the covers. I have a drawer in my office with about two hundred of them, torn from damaged copies I found at library sales or rescued from recycling bins. The oldest is from 1947, a hardcover mystery with a dust jacket in deep burgundy and gold lettering that feels almost sculptural under your fingers. The newest is from last month, a glossy trade paperback with a cover that looks like every other book in its genre: minimalist, stylish, and forgettable.

Between those two covers sits roughly seventy-five years of design history, and looking at them laid out on my desk tells a story that I find more interesting than most of the books about design I have actually read. It is a story about technology, economics, cultural anxiety, and the slow, messy evolution of how we decide what a book should look like before anyone reads a word of it.

Let me start in the 1950s, because that is where the modern book cover really begins. Before the 1950s, most book covers were fairly utilitarian. Hardcovers had dust jackets, but the jackets were often simple affairs: the title, the author’s name, maybe a small illustration, and a lot of blank space. The covers existed to protect the book and identify it. Selling the book was the job of the bookseller, the reviewer, and word of mouth. The cover itself was not expected to do heavy marketing work.

That changed in the postwar period for several reasons. The paperback revolution, which had started in the late 1930s with Penguin in the UK and Pocket Books in the US, was in full swing by the 1950s. Paperbacks were sold in drugstores, newsstands, and bus stations alongside magazines and newspapers. They competed for attention in a way that hardcovers in bookshops did not. A paperback on a spinner rack had maybe two seconds to catch a shopper’s eye, and the cover was the only tool it had.

This created an entirely new design challenge. Covers had to function as miniature advertisements. They needed to convey genre, tone, and appeal at a glance. And so the lurid, painted paperback cover was born. If you have ever seen a 1950s pulp paperback, you know what I mean. Bold colors, dramatic figures, titles in aggressive typography. A crime novel might feature a woman in a red dress and a man with a gun, rendered in a style somewhere between illustration and propaganda poster. A science fiction novel might show a rocketship or a menacing alien landscape. The covers were not subtle, and they were not trying to be.

I have mixed feelings about this era of cover design. On one hand, the covers were often gorgeous as pieces of illustration. The artists who painted them, people like James Avati, Robert McGinnis, and Mitchell Hooks, were genuinely talented. Their work had energy and emotion and craft. On the other hand, the covers were frequently misleading. A thoughtful literary novel might be given a cover that made it look like a torrid romance. A serious science fiction book might get a cover so garish that readers interested in the actual content would pass it by. The covers sold books, but they did not always sell them honestly.

The 1960s brought a shift that I think was driven partly by design trends and partly by the growing respectability of the paperback format. As paperbacks moved from spinner racks in drugstores to actual bookstore shelves, the covers began to reflect a different sensibility. The painted illustrations did not disappear overnight, but they were increasingly joined by covers that used photography, graphic design, and more restrained typography. The psychedelic influence of the late 1960s produced some wonderfully weird covers, particularly in science fiction and counterculture non-fiction. Hand-lettering and experimental layouts became more common.

This was also the period when the concept of the “author brand” began to influence cover design. Certain bestselling authors, particularly in genre fiction, started to have their names displayed more prominently than the titles of their books. The logic was simple: if readers were buying the book because of who wrote it, the author’s name should be the largest element on the cover. This trend has only accelerated since then. Today, a Stephen King or a James Patterson novel has the author’s name in type so large that the title is almost an afterthought.

The 1970s, in my opinion, were the worst decade for book covers. I know this is a controversial take, but I stand by it. The combination of cheap printing, a preference for muted earth tones, and a general aesthetic of “serious” minimalism produced covers that were often dull and indistinguishable from one another. Literary fiction covers from this period tend to feature a lot of brown, a lot of Helvetica, and a lot of empty space that feels less like a design choice and more like nobody could be bothered. There were exceptions, of course. But as a generalization, if you hand me a cover from the 1970s, I can usually identify the decade within seconds by how boring it looks.

The 1980s changed things again, primarily through the influence of computers on the design process. Early computer-aided design was crude by modern standards, but it expanded the toolkit available to designers. Photographic covers became cheaper and easier to produce. Embossed and metallic effects became popular, particularly for commercial fiction. The 1980s bestseller cover is immediately recognizable: glossy, photographic, with the author’s name in raised metallic type. Think of Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, or Sidney Sheldon. These covers screamed “major commercial release” and they did it through sheer production value.

What I find interesting about the 1980s shift is how clearly it divided the market. Literary fiction covers went in one direction (restrained, artistic, often featuring fine art reproductions or abstract photography) while commercial fiction covers went in another (big, bold, luxurious). The cover became a signal not just of genre but of audience. You could tell at a glance whether a book was positioning itself as literature or as entertainment. This division persists today, though the specific visual codes have changed.

The 1990s brought the rise of Photoshop, and with it a democratization of cover design that had both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, small publishers and independent designers suddenly had access to tools that had previously been available only to large publishing houses with big design budgets. A skilled designer with a computer could produce a cover that rivaled anything coming out of the major New York publishers. On the negative side, the ease of digital manipulation led to an explosion of bad Photoshop covers, particularly in genre fiction. Over-processed photographs, awkward composites, heavy-handed filters. You know the look. It has aged badly.

The late 1990s and early 2000s also saw the beginning of what I think of as the “trend cycle” in book covers. Before this period, cover design trends evolved gradually. A particular style might dominate for a decade or more. But starting around 2000, the cycle accelerated dramatically. A hit book would establish a visual template, and within months, dozens of similar-looking covers would appear. The “headless woman in a pretty dress” trend in women’s fiction. The “big bold sans-serif title on a solid background” trend in non-fiction. The “close-up of a person’s face with part of it obscured” trend in literary thrillers. Each of these trends had a lifespan of maybe two to three years before being replaced by the next one.

This acceleration was driven partly by the speed of digital design (you can iterate a cover much faster on a computer than you can with traditional methods) and partly by the visibility of covers online. When books started being sold primarily through online retailers, the cover had to work as a thumbnail image. This fundamentally changed what made a cover effective. Fine detail, subtle texture, and nuanced color became less important. High contrast, bold typography, and simple compositions became more important. A cover that looked beautiful in a bookshop window might be an indistinguishable smudge at 150 pixels wide on a screen.

I think about this tension a lot at ScrollWorks, because we care about physical books. When we design a cover, we are designing for two very different contexts simultaneously. The cover needs to work as a small digital thumbnail for online retail and social media sharing. But it also needs to work as a physical object that someone picks up, holds in their hands, and feels good about owning. These requirements are sometimes in conflict. A cover optimized for thumbnail visibility might feel garish or simplistic in person. A cover that is beautiful and tactile in person might be invisible online.

Our approach is to start with the physical object and then verify that it works digitally, rather than the other way around. I have seen publishers who design for the thumbnail first and the physical book second, and the results always feel slightly hollow to me. The physical book is the real product. The thumbnail is just a photograph of it. If the real thing is not compelling, the photograph will not save it.

Now, let me talk about where I think cover design is heading, because the current moment is interesting. We are in a period where several trends are competing with each other. The dominant trend in literary fiction for the past few years has been a kind of refined minimalism: simple illustrations, limited color palettes, careful typography. Think of covers with a single object, a piece of fruit, a chair, a window, rendered in a flat or semi-flat style against a clean background. These covers are elegant and distinctive, and they photograph beautifully for social media. But they are also starting to feel formulaic, which is the inevitable fate of any design trend that gets widely adopted.

In commercial fiction, there has been a return to illustration, particularly hand-drawn or painterly styles, after years of photographic dominance. Romance covers have moved away from the classic “shirtless man” photograph toward whimsical, colorful illustrations. Thrillers have experimented with typographic covers where the title itself is the primary visual element, manipulated or distorted to create a sense of unease. Non-fiction has been through a phase of bright, solid-color covers with bold sans-serif type, which I think is now giving way to something more textured and nuanced.

The most interesting development, in my view, is the growing influence of self-publishing and indie publishing on mainstream cover design. Self-published authors, working with freelance designers on tight budgets, have been forced to be creative and responsive to reader preferences in ways that traditional publishers sometimes are not. The best indie covers are often ahead of the trend curve because indie designers are not constrained by the slow-moving processes and conservative instincts of large publishing houses. I have noticed major publishers quietly adopting visual approaches that first appeared in the indie market, sometimes with a lag of a year or two.

At ScrollWorks, we have designed covers for titles like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma with an eye toward what I think of as timeless clarity. I want our covers to look good in ten years, not just this season. That means avoiding the most fashion-forward trends and instead focusing on strong composition, readable typography, and colors that feel specific to the book rather than to the current aesthetic moment. Whether we succeed at this is for others to judge, but it is the intention behind every cover we produce.

Looking back at my collection of old covers, the ones I return to most often are the ones that feel like they were designed for the specific book they are attached to, rather than for the genre or the market. They have a sense of personality that transcends the design trends of their era. The best cover I own is a 1963 edition of a novel I have never actually read. The cover features a single photograph of a rain-slicked street at night, with one lit window in the distance. It tells you everything you need to know about the book’s mood without telling you anything about its plot. Sixty years later, it still works. That is what I am aiming for every time we sit down to design a new cover, and I suspect I will be chasing that standard for as long as I am in this business.

I am going to be honest with you: I have watched talented authors sabotage themselves trying to build a platform. I have watched them burn out on Twitter, post on Instagram with the hollow cheerfulness of someone who would rather be doing literally anything else, and start newsletters they abandoned after four issues. The publishing industry tells authors they need a platform, and it is right about that, but it rarely tells them how to build one without losing their minds in the process. So I am going to try.

First, let me define what I mean by “author platform,” because the term gets thrown around loosely. Your platform is the sum of your ability to reach potential readers directly. It includes your social media following, your email list, your website traffic, your speaking engagements, your media contacts, your professional network, and any other channel through which you can communicate with people who might buy your book. It is not the same as your reputation, though the two are related. You can have a great reputation among other writers and editors but no platform if those people are not also your potential readers.

The reason publishers care about platform is simple math. When we publish a book, we are making a financial bet. The money we spend on editing, design, printing, distribution, and marketing has to be recouped through sales. An author with an existing platform brings a built-in audience to that bet, which reduces the risk. An author with no platform at all requires us to generate all the awareness from scratch, which is expensive and uncertain.

I say this not to stress you out but to explain the reality. At ScrollWorks, we have published authors with large platforms and authors with essentially no platform at all. Both can work. But having a platform does make everything easier, for you and for us. So how do you build one without making yourself miserable?

The first and most important piece of advice I can give is this: pick one thing and do it well. The biggest mistake I see authors make is trying to be everywhere at once. They set up accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. They start a blog, a newsletter, and a podcast. They attend every conference, join every online community, and accept every invitation to do a guest post or interview. Within three months, they are exhausted, their content is spread thin across a dozen platforms, and none of those platforms has enough consistent activity to actually grow an audience.

Do not do this. Pick one primary platform and one secondary platform. That is it. Your primary platform is where you invest most of your time and energy. Your secondary platform is where you maintain a minimal presence. Everything else can wait until your primary platform is running smoothly.

Which platform should you pick? This depends on you. Not on what the latest marketing guru recommends, not on which platform has the most users, and not on what your author friends are doing. It depends on which platform feels the most natural to you. If you enjoy writing longer pieces and engaging in detailed conversations, a newsletter or blog might be your best bet. If you are visual and like sharing images, Instagram could work. If you are witty and enjoy rapid-fire exchanges, Twitter (or whatever it is calling itself these days) might be right. If you are comfortable on camera and like explaining things, YouTube or TikTok could be the move.

The platform that works best is the one you will actually use consistently. Consistency matters more than reach, at least in the early stages. An author who posts thoughtful content on Instagram three times a week for a year will build a more engaged audience than an author who posts on five different platforms sporadically for the same year. The algorithm on every platform rewards consistency, and more importantly, your potential readers reward it too. People follow accounts that feel alive and active. They unfollow accounts that feel abandoned.

Now, what should you actually post? This is where a lot of authors get stuck, and I think the problem is that they are overthinking it. They feel like every post has to be a performance, a perfectly crafted piece of content that entertains, informs, and promotes their book simultaneously. That is an impossible standard, and trying to meet it is a fast track to burnout.

Here is my framework. Think of your platform content as falling into four categories: insight, process, personality, and promotion. The ratio should be roughly 30-30-30-10. Let me explain each one.

Insight content is where you share your expertise or perspective on topics related to your book’s subject matter. If you have written a historical novel set during the Civil War, your insight content might be interesting historical facts, lesser-known stories from the period, or your take on how that era is represented in popular culture. If you have written a self-help book about productivity, your insight content might be practical tips, observations about work habits, or responses to current discussions about work-life balance. The key is to provide genuine value. Give people a reason to follow you beyond the fact that you have a book to sell.

Process content is where you share what it is like to be a writer. People are genuinely curious about this. How do you structure your writing day? What does your revision process look like? How do you handle rejection? What books are you reading right now and how are they influencing your work? Process content works because it makes your audience feel like they know you, which builds the kind of connection that eventually translates into book sales. It also tends to attract other writers, who are often enthusiastic book buyers and recommenders.

Personality content is where you let people see who you are beyond your professional identity. Your hobbies, your interests, your sense of humor, your opinions about things that have nothing to do with writing. This might feel irrelevant, but it is actually the glue that holds the rest together. People do not buy books from brands. They buy books from people they feel connected to. If your audience knows that you are obsessed with competitive birdwatching, or that you cook elaborate meals when you are stuck on a plot problem, or that you have strong opinions about the correct way to make coffee, they feel like they know you as a human being. That feeling of familiarity and connection is what turns a casual follower into someone who preorders your book.

Promotion content is where you directly ask people to buy, preorder, review, or share your book. This should be the smallest slice of your content, roughly 10 percent. I know that feels counterintuitive. The whole point of building a platform is to sell books, right? Yes, but direct promotion is the least effective form of content for building an audience. Nobody follows an author for the ads. They follow for the insight, process, and personality, and then when a promotional post appears in that context, they are receptive to it because they already feel invested in you and your work.

The biggest mistake I see authors make with promotion is going too hard too soon. They build a following of 500 people and then start posting “BUY MY BOOK” three times a day. Those 500 people either unfollow or mute them. A better approach is to build your audience to a meaningful size by providing consistent value, and then promote your book occasionally and naturally within that stream of valuable content. Your followers will be much more responsive to a promotional post from someone they have been enjoying following for six months than to a promotional post from someone who has been doing nothing but promotion.

Let me talk about email newsletters specifically, because I think they are the most underrated platform-building tool for authors. Social media platforms can change their algorithms at any time, reducing your reach overnight. Your social media followers belong to the platform, not to you. If Twitter implodes or Instagram changes its algorithm (again), your carefully built audience can evaporate.

An email list is different. Those subscribers are yours. You own that relationship. No algorithm sits between you and your readers. When you send an email, it lands in their inbox. They might not open it, but at least it arrives. And email open rates for author newsletters are typically much higher than social media engagement rates. A well-maintained author newsletter might have a 40-50 percent open rate. A social media post might reach 5-10 percent of your followers organically. The math is clear.

Starting a newsletter is simple. Pick a platform (Substack, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, whatever), set up a landing page, and start publishing. The hard part is growing the list, and the secret to that is offering something worth subscribing to. “Sign up for my newsletter” is not compelling. “Sign up and get a free short story set in the world of my novel, plus monthly behind-the-scenes notes on my writing process” is compelling. Give people a concrete reason to hand over their email address.

How often should you send your newsletter? Once or twice a month is the sweet spot for most authors. Weekly is ambitious and will lead to burnout unless you genuinely enjoy the format. Less than monthly and your subscribers will forget who you are. The content should follow the same 30-30-30-10 framework I described above: a mix of insight, process, personality, and occasional promotion.

Now let me address the mental health aspect of this, because it is real and it does not get talked about enough. Building a platform is emotionally taxing. You are putting yourself out there repeatedly, and the feedback is often silence. You post something you spent an hour crafting and it gets three likes. You send a newsletter and your open rate drops. You see other authors with massive followings and feel like you are failing.

Here is what I tell our authors at ScrollWorks: set process goals, not outcome goals. An outcome goal is “I want 10,000 followers by the end of the year.” A process goal is “I will post three times a week and send one newsletter a month.” You can control the process. You cannot control the outcome. And if you tie your emotional well-being to follower counts and engagement metrics, you will make yourself miserable because those numbers fluctuate for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your content.

I also recommend time-boxing your platform work. Decide in advance how many hours per week you are going to spend on platform building, and stick to that limit. For most authors, three to five hours per week is plenty. That is enough time to create a few pieces of content, respond to comments and messages, and do a little bit of engagement with other accounts. It is not enough time to fall into the social media doom scroll, which is where the real mental health damage happens.

When you sit down to do your platform work, set a timer. When the timer goes off, close the app and go do something else. Preferably, go write. Because the best thing you can do for your author platform, the thing that matters more than any amount of social media strategy, is write a great book. A great book creates its own platform through word of mouth, reviews, and reader enthusiasm. All the social media savvy in the world will not save a mediocre book, and a truly excellent book will find readers even if the author’s social media game is nonexistent.

One more thing. It is okay to take breaks. If platform building is making you anxious, or if it is interfering with your writing, step back. Take a month off social media. Skip a few newsletters. Your audience will still be there when you come back, and the break might actually generate goodwill. When you return, you can be honest about why you took a break. “I needed to focus on finishing my book” is a perfectly valid reason, and your followers will respect it because they want you to write the next book more than they want you to post on Instagram.

Building an author platform is a long game. Most overnight successes in publishing were actually built over years of quiet, consistent effort. The authors I know with the strongest platforms are the ones who found a sustainable rhythm, who showed up regularly without burning out, and who focused on being genuinely interesting rather than relentlessly promotional. If you can do that, even imperfectly, you will be fine. And if your book is as good as I suspect it is, the platform will eventually catch up to the work. You can see how some of our own authors at ScrollWorks have approached this by checking out their book pages, where the work speaks for itself alongside whatever platform they have built around it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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