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

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

The Memoir That Arrived Too Early

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

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

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

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

The Novel We Argued About for Six Months

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

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

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

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

The Nonfiction Book That Scared Us

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

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

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

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

The Poetry Collection Nobody Wanted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One That Got Away Because I Hesitated

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

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

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

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

Living With the Almosts

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

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

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

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

The first one-star review one of our books received said, in its entirety: “Boring. Nothing happens.” The book in question was a literary novel about a retired schoolteacher coming to terms with the end of her career. Quite a lot happens in it, actually, but all of it happens internally, in the character’s thoughts and memories and shifting self-understanding. If your definition of “something happening” requires car chases or murders, then I suppose the reviewer had a point. But I disagree with their definition.

That review was posted eight years ago. I can still quote it from memory. This tells you something about the relationship publishers have with negative reviews, which is that we remember every single one, usually in precise detail, long after the positive reviews have blurred together into a warm fog of gratitude.

I want to talk honestly about how we at ScrollWorks deal with negative reviews, because I think most publishers either lie about this or avoid the topic entirely. The standard line is something like “all feedback is valuable” or “we learn from every review.” Those statements are technically true and emotionally dishonest. The truth is more complicated, more human, and more interesting.

The Initial Reaction

When I see a negative review of a ScrollWorks book, my first reaction is always emotional and usually irrational. I feel defensive. I feel angry. I feel the urge to respond, to explain why the reviewer is wrong, to point out the things they missed, to defend the author who worked so hard on this book. These feelings are intense and immediate, and they are, without exception, feelings I should not act on.

I learned this lesson the hard way. Very early in my publishing career, before ScrollWorks existed, I once responded to a negative review of a book I’d edited. I was polite, or at least I thought I was polite. I pointed out, factually and calmly, that the reviewer had misunderstood a key plot point. The response was instantaneous and brutal. Other reviewers piled on. The author, who had been handling the negative review with grace, was suddenly dragged into a public argument she didn’t want. The incident generated more attention than the original review, all of it bad. I never responded to a review again.

This is now a firm policy at ScrollWorks: we do not respond to reviews, positive or negative. Not on Amazon, not on Goodreads, not on social media. Authors who publish with us are strongly encouraged (but not required) to follow the same policy. The temptation to respond is always there, and it is always wrong to give in to it.

The Sorting Process

After the initial emotional reaction passes, usually within a few hours, I start what I think of as the sorting process. I read the review again, trying to separate the useful information from the noise. Negative reviews, in my experience, fall into roughly four categories.

The first category is reviews that identify a genuine problem. These are the most valuable and the least common. A reviewer might point out a structural weakness, a character inconsistency, or a pacing issue that we should have caught during editing but didn’t. When this happens, I note the criticism and think about whether it applies to future projects. We can’t fix a published book, but we can learn from its shortcomings.

The second category is reviews that reflect a mismatch between the book and the reader. This is by far the largest category. Someone who loves fast-paced thrillers picks up one of our literary novels and is disappointed that it doesn’t read like a thriller. Someone who wants a traditional narrative structure is frustrated by an experimental approach. Someone who expected nonfiction is annoyed to discover they’re reading fiction. These reviews are not useful to us as editors, because the problem isn’t with the book; it’s with the reader’s expectations. But they are useful to us as marketers, because they tell us that our cover design, our jacket copy, or our positioning might be sending the wrong signals about what the book is.

The third category is reviews that are simply mean. These exist on a spectrum from casually dismissive (“waste of time”) to elaborately cruel (multi-paragraph takedowns that seem designed to hurt the author’s feelings rather than to evaluate the book). These reviews have no useful information. They tell you nothing about the book and everything about the reviewer. I try to ignore them, but I’m not always successful.

The fourth category is reviews that are wrong about facts. The reviewer says the book is set in the 1950s when it’s set in the 1940s. The reviewer attributes a plot point to the wrong character. The reviewer misquotes a passage. These are irritating in a specific way, because the review is publicly visible and contains misinformation that might influence other potential readers. But per our policy, we don’t respond, and we rely on other reviewers to correct the record if it matters.

The Author Conversation

The hardest part of my job, when it comes to negative reviews, is talking to the author. Authors read their reviews. I wish they didn’t, and I always advise against it, but they do. They read every single one, and they remember the bad ones the same way I do: permanently and in precise detail.

When an author calls me after a bad review, my job is not to make them feel better. Making someone feel better about a bad review is almost impossible, because the pain is genuine and specific. A stranger read something you spent years creating and said it was bad. That hurts. Pretending it doesn’t help nothing.

What I try to do instead is provide context. I remind the author that every book gets bad reviews. I can name specific books that are now considered masterworks and that received savage reviews upon publication. I point out that a bad review means someone read the book, which means the book is reaching people, and reaching people means some of those people won’t like it. This is not a failure; it’s a mathematical certainty. A book that everyone likes is either a unicorn or a book that nobody has strong feelings about, and I’d rather publish the latter than the former. Wait, I mean the former rather than the latter. Actually, I mean I’d rather publish a book that provokes strong reactions, both positive and negative, than one that generates universal indifference.

Some authors handle negative reviews with remarkable equanimity. One of our authors keeps a file of her worst reviews and reads them before she sits down to write, as a kind of motivational defiance. “If that person hated my last book,” she told me, “then I must be doing something right, because that person and I have nothing in common aesthetically.” I admire this attitude tremendously, even though I can’t quite manage it myself.

The Star Rating Problem

I have a specific grudge against star ratings, and I’m going to take a moment to articulate it. The five-star scale that Amazon and Goodreads use to rate books is a terrible system for evaluating literature. It reduces the entire spectrum of possible responses to a book, from intellectual stimulation to emotional devastation to quiet appreciation to profound boredom, into a single number between one and five. This is absurd. A book isn’t a hotel room. You can’t assess it on a linear scale of quality.

I’ve seen books that I consider genuinely great sitting at 3.5 stars on Goodreads, and books that I consider mediocre sitting at 4.3. The reason is usually that the great book is challenging or unusual in ways that polarize readers (some love it, some hate it, the average lands in the middle), while the mediocre book is pleasant and inoffensive in a way that generates uniform but unenthusiastic approval. The star rating rewards pleasantness and punishes ambition. It’s the wrong incentive for an art form.

As a publisher, I try not to let star ratings influence our decisions. But it’s hard, because star ratings influence reader behavior, and reader behavior influences sales. A book with a 3.5-star average will sell fewer copies than the same book with a 4.3-star average, all else being equal, because many readers use star ratings as a screening mechanism. They won’t even look at the reviews if the average is below some threshold. This creates a system where the most interesting books, the ones that provoke disagreement and passion, are systematically disadvantaged in the marketplace.

What We Actually Do With Negative Feedback

I’ve described a lot of emotional processing, but we also do practical things with negative feedback. Here’s what that looks like.

For each book, we maintain an internal document that tracks recurring themes in negative reviews. If five different reviewers mention that the middle section drags, that’s a pattern worth noting. It won’t change the current book, but it will inform how we edit the author’s next one. If several reviewers express confusion about a particular plot point, that tells us something about the clarity of the writing that we should pay more attention to in future editing passes.

We also look at negative reviews for marketing insights. If reviewers consistently describe a book differently from how we positioned it (for example, if we marketed it as a literary novel and reviewers keep calling it a thriller), that’s a sign that our positioning was off. We’ve adjusted marketing copy and even cover designs for paperback editions based on patterns we noticed in reviews.

And, honestly, we use negative reviews as a gut check on our own taste. If I loved a book during the editorial process and multiple thoughtful reviewers identify the same weakness, I have to consider the possibility that I was wrong about something. Not that the book is bad, necessarily, but that my closeness to the project blinded me to a problem that outside readers could see clearly. This kind of self-correction is uncomfortable but necessary. An editor who never questions their own judgment is an editor who’s stopped growing.

The Philosophical View

I’ve been in publishing long enough to have developed a philosophical framework for thinking about negative reviews, and I’ll share it, with the caveat that philosophical frameworks are easier to articulate than to practice.

A book is a communication between an author and a reader. Like all communications, it can fail in many ways: the message can be unclear, the receiver can be inattentive, the channel can introduce noise, the expectations can be misaligned. A negative review is often not a judgment on the book’s quality but a record of a failed communication. The book tried to say something and the reader didn’t hear it, or heard something different, or wasn’t interested in what was being said.

This framing helps me because it removes the moral dimension. A negative review is not an indictment of the author’s talent or the publisher’s judgment. It’s a data point about how a particular book landed with a particular reader at a particular moment. Some of those data points are informative. Some are not. The skill is in telling the difference.

The other thing I believe, and this one is harder to maintain in the face of a truly nasty review, is that negative reviews are a sign of a healthy literary culture. A culture where every book gets praised is a culture where no one is paying attention. Disagreement about books means that people care about what they read, that they have standards and opinions, and that they’re willing to express them publicly. I’d rather publish books that some people hate and some people love than books that everybody thinks are merely okay.

Our books, including The Cartographer’s Dilemma and Still Waters, have received their share of both enthusiastic praise and pointed criticism. We’re proud of all of them, and we’re grateful to every reader who took the time to share their honest response, whether that response was five stars or one.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We read the reviews. We feel the feelings. And then we get back to work.

It’s the last week of December and the office is quiet. Half the team is on vacation. The other half is here in body but drifting mentally, that pleasant end-of-year state where the urgency drains out of everything and you can finally think about something other than deadlines. I’m sitting at my desk with a cup of tea that went cold twenty minutes ago, looking at the stack of books we published this year, and trying to figure out what I actually feel about the past twelve months.

Gratitude, mostly. Also exhaustion. Also the specific satisfaction of having done hard things reasonably well, tempered by the awareness that we could have done some of them better. It’s been a year. Not our best or our worst, but one with its own character and its own lessons. Here’s some of what we learned.

The Books

We published four books this year, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that each one required roughly eighteen months of work from acquisition to finished copies. A book you hold in January was being edited in the previous spring and acquired the year before that. Publishing operates on timelines that make geological processes look hasty.

Of the four books, two performed more or less as expected. One significantly exceeded our projections, which was wonderful and slightly destabilizing because it meant scrambling to reprint faster than we’d planned. One underperformed, and I’ll talk about that honestly because I think transparency about failures is more useful than pretending everything goes according to plan.

The underperforming book was one we believed in deeply. The writing was strong. The reviews were positive, though fewer than we’d hoped. The cover was beautiful. The problem, as near as I can diagnose it, was timing. We released it in September, which seemed like a good idea at the time because the fall publishing season is when reader attention peaks. But September was unusually crowded this year, with several high-profile releases from major publishers dominating the conversation. Our book got lost in the noise. It deserved better, and I wish we’d released it in a quieter month where it would have had more room to breathe.

The lesson here is one I’ve learned before and apparently need to keep learning: the fall publishing season is not automatically the best time to release a book. Conventional wisdom says it is, because book sales peak in the fourth quarter. But peak sales also mean peak competition, and for a small publisher, getting noticed during a crowded season is much harder than getting noticed during a quieter one. Next year, I’m going to be more willing to publish in unconventional windows, January, March, August, and let the book find its audience without competing against every marquee title in publishing.

The Team

We added two people to the team this year, bringing our total headcount to a number that still fits comfortably around a single conference table. One is an editor who came to us from a larger publisher where she’d been working on commercial fiction. She’s brought a perspective on pacing and structure that has already improved our editorial process. She reads differently from the rest of us, faster and with a keener eye for narrative momentum, and the tension between her commercial instincts and our literary ones has been productive in ways I didn’t fully anticipate.

The other hire is a marketing coordinator, our first dedicated marketing person. Before this year, marketing was something everyone did as part of their other job, which is another way of saying nobody did it consistently or well. Having someone whose sole focus is connecting our books with readers has made an immediate difference. She built email lists, redesigned our social media approach, and developed relationships with bookstagrammers and BookTok creators that are already driving sales. I should have made this hire two years ago.

The rest of the team is the same group of people who have been doing this work for years, and I want to say something about them that I don’t say often enough: they’re extraordinary. Not in a promotional, website-bio kind of way. In the specific way that people are extraordinary when they care about their work and show up every day with the intention of doing it well. Our lead editor flagged a structural problem in a manuscript last month that would have been a serious issue if it had made it to print. Our production manager negotiated a paper price that saved us enough money to fund an additional print run of a backlist title. These aren’t the kinds of things that generate press releases, but they’re the things that keep a publishing company alive.

The Industry

This was a strange year for book publishing. Supply chain issues, which had been a persistent headache since 2020, finally eased. Print costs, which had been rising steadily, stabilized. These were welcome developments. Less welcome was the continued consolidation of the industry, with major publishers acquiring smaller ones and retail channels becoming increasingly concentrated. The gap between the biggest publishers and everyone else continues to widen, which makes life harder for independents like us.

I’m not going to pretend I have a macro-level analysis of the publishing industry that’s worth reading. I’m a small publisher, not an industry analyst. What I can tell you is what the macro trends feel like from where I sit, which is this: it’s getting harder to be small but it’s also getting easier to be good. The tools for producing high-quality books have improved. Print-on-demand technology has gotten better, which reduces the financial risk of publishing. Digital marketing allows us to reach readers directly without the intermediaries that large publishers depend on. If we can keep making good books and finding the people who want to read them, the size disadvantage matters less than it used to.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the independent publishing space, and “cautiously” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. We’re not going to become a major publisher. We’re not trying to. What we’re trying to do is sustain a small, financially viable operation that publishes books we believe in and finds them readers. This year, we managed it. Whether we can keep managing it depends on decisions we haven’t made yet and market conditions we can’t predict. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that uncertainty is the permanent condition of independent publishing, and you either make peace with it or you find a different career.

The Readers

Every year at this time, I look through the reader emails we’ve received over the past twelve months. We get more of these than you might expect for a small publisher, and I read every one. Some are brief: “I loved the book, thank you.” Some are long and detailed, describing what the book meant to them, how it connected to their life, what it made them think about. A few are critical, pointing out things they didn’t like or asking why we made certain editorial choices. All of them remind me why I do this work.

This year’s standout email came from a retired teacher in Wisconsin who read The Last Archive and wrote us a four-page letter (an actual letter, on paper, sent through the mail) about how the book connected to her experience of watching her local library close. She described specific scenes that resonated with her and asked if the author had been through something similar. I forwarded the letter to the author, who was moved to tears. That letter is, for me, the most important thing that happened in our publishing program this year, more important than any sales figure or review.

We also noticed this year that our reader demographics are shifting. Our audience is getting younger, which is encouraging and slightly surprising. Books that we expected would appeal primarily to readers in their forties and fifties are being picked up by readers in their twenties and thirties, often through social media discovery. I think this says something positive about the appetite for literary fiction among younger readers, and it challenges the narrative that young people only want commercial genre fiction. Some of them do, and that’s fine. But others are looking for something more contemplative and more challenging, and they’re finding it.

What We Got Wrong

I want to talk about this because I think the tendency, especially in end-of-year reflections, is to focus on what went well and gloss over what didn’t. Here’s an honest accounting of our mistakes.

We were too slow to adapt to changes in social media. By the time we had a real strategy for engaging with BookTok and Bookstagram, we’d missed months of potential audience-building. Our new marketing coordinator is fixing this, but we lost time that we shouldn’t have lost.

We underestimated the audiobook market for one of our titles. We produced a solid audiobook, but we didn’t invest in it the way we should have. The narrator was good but not great. The marketing push for the audio edition was an afterthought. Looking at the sales data, I believe we left significant revenue on the table by treating audio as secondary. This changes next year.

We had a communication breakdown with one of our authors over cover design that could have been handled much better. The author had a strong vision for the cover that differed from our designer’s approach. Instead of having an honest, early conversation about the disagreement, we went through several rounds of revision that pleased no one. The final cover is good, but the process of getting there was frustrating for everyone involved, and it strained a relationship that I value. I take responsibility for that. I should have facilitated the conversation earlier and more directly.

And we didn’t take enough risks with our acquisitions. Looking back at the manuscripts we considered this year, I think we were too conservative, too focused on books that felt safe and marketable, not adventurous enough in pursuing the weird, difficult, genre-defying projects that are often the most rewarding to publish. I’ve talked to the team about this, and we’ve agreed to be braver next year. What “braver” looks like in practice remains to be seen, but the intention is there.

Looking Ahead

We have three books in the pipeline for next year, with a possible fourth if an acquisition I’m working on comes together. I can’t say much about them yet, but I’m excited about all three in different ways. One is a novel that does something structurally interesting that I’ve never seen done before. One is a nonfiction book on a subject that I think a lot of people are hungry to read about but that hasn’t been well-served by existing publishing. And one is a second book by an author we published last year, which is always a privilege because it means they chose to come back to us.

On the business side, we’re investing in our infrastructure. Better project management tools (we’ve been using a combination of spreadsheets and hope for too long). A more professional approach to rights management. An updated website that better reflects who we are and what we’re doing. These aren’t exciting changes, but they’re necessary ones. A publishing company that can’t manage its own operations can’t serve its authors well, and serving our authors well is the whole point.

I also want to do more events next year. We’ve been largely absent from the conference and festival circuit, partly because of cost and partly because of the time commitment. But I’ve come to believe that in-person connections with readers, booksellers, and other industry people are worth the investment. We’ll be at a few book festivals in the spring, and I’m hoping to organize some author events in partnership with independent bookshops. If you’re in the business and want to collaborate, get in touch through our contact page.

The Gratitude Part

I know I said I’d mostly avoid generic conclusions, and I’ll try. But I do want to express some specific gratitude.

Thank you to the independent booksellers who stock our books, especially the ones who hand-sell them to customers with a genuine recommendation. That personal touch sells more books than any ad campaign, and we don’t take it for granted.

Thank you to the reviewers, both professional and amateur, who take the time to write thoughtful responses to our books. Even the negative reviews. Especially the negative reviews that teach us something.

Thank you to our authors, who trust us with their work and their careers. Publishing is a relationship built on trust, and the trust our authors place in us is something we try to earn every day.

And thank you to the readers. You’re the reason any of this exists. Every book we publish is, ultimately, a bet that someone out there wants to read it. Every time you buy one of our books, borrow it from a library, or recommend it to a friend, you validate that bet. We’re grateful for your attention and your time, and we’ll keep trying to be worthy of both.

The tea is definitely cold now. I’m going to reheat it, look at the stack of books one more time, and go home. It’s been a year. Next year will be different, because they always are. But the work continues, and I’m glad to be doing it.

Happy reading, and happy new year from everyone at ScrollWorks. You can find everything we’ve published at scrollworksmedia.com/books.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. See you in the new year.

I spent the better part of last Tuesday evening watching a seventeen-year-old in Oklahoma City explain, with more passion than most literature professors I’ve met, why Donna Tartt’s The Secret History changed her life. She held the book up to her phone camera, spine cracked and pages dog-eared, and talked for four straight minutes about the Greek concept of beauty and terror. The video had 2.3 million views. This is BookTok in 2023, and if you work in publishing, you ignore it at your own peril.

I’m not going to pretend I was early to this. When colleagues first mentioned BookTok to me about two years ago, I nodded politely and assumed it was a passing trend, the kind of thing that would burn bright for six months and then get replaced by whatever the internet decided to care about next. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The numbers tell a story that even the most skeptical publishing veteran can’t dismiss: according to the Book Industry Study Group, titles tagged with #BookTok have generated over $2 billion in print sales in the United States alone since the hashtag gained traction. That’s not a cultural footnote. That’s a structural shift in how books find readers.

Let me back up. For anyone not yet familiar, BookTok is the corner of TikTok where people talk about books. That description sounds almost comically simple, and in a way it is. The format is short video, usually between thirty seconds and three minutes, in which someone recommends a book, reacts to a plot twist, shows off their shelves, or records themselves crying over a final chapter. The production values range from professional to someone propped against their pillow at midnight. The authenticity is the point.

What makes BookTok different from every other book recommendation platform is the emotional register. Goodreads gives you star ratings and measured reviews. The New York Times gives you critical assessments. BookTok gives you a person looking directly into a camera and saying, with audible distress, that a fictional character’s death ruined their entire week. That kind of raw, unfiltered response to literature isn’t new, of course. People have always felt that way about books. What’s new is that millions of other people are watching them feel it, in real time, and then going to buy the book themselves.

The demographic skew matters here. BookTok’s core audience is roughly 16 to 30 years old, predominantly female, and disproportionately interested in romance, fantasy, dark academia, and literary fiction with strong emotional hooks. This isn’t the readership that the traditional publishing industry has spent decades courting through newspaper reviews and author tours. These are readers who discovered books through algorithms, who trust peer recommendations over institutional endorsements, and who will pre-order a debut novel from an author they’ve never heard of because a stranger on their phone told them it would wreck them emotionally.

I want to be clear about something: I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think it’s one of the best things to happen to reading in my professional lifetime.

The backlash against BookTok from certain corners of the literary establishment has been predictable and, frankly, tiresome. The criticism usually follows one of a few familiar lines. The books being promoted are too commercial. The recommendations lack critical depth. The audience doesn’t read “serious” literature. These complaints reveal more about the people making them than about the platform itself. Any movement that gets millions of young people excited about reading, that sends them into bookstores and libraries in numbers we haven’t seen in years, deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.

That said, I do think publishers need to understand what BookTok actually is before they can figure out how to work with it. And this is where things get complicated.

The first thing to understand is that BookTok is not a marketing channel. Or rather, it can function as one, but that’s not what it is at its core. BookTok is a community. The people who make BookTok videos, the “BookTokers” as they’re called, are not influencers in the way that term is usually understood. Most of them don’t have brand deals or media kits. They’re readers who found other readers and built something together. The moment you treat BookTok primarily as a place to push product, you’ve already misunderstood it, and your campaigns will almost certainly fail.

I’ve watched this play out in real time. A major publisher (I won’t name them, but you can probably guess) sent free copies of a highly anticipated release to about fifty BookTok creators last spring, along with a printed card suggesting talking points and preferred hashtags. The response was immediate and brutal. Several creators made videos about the card itself, mocking the corporate language and the assumption that their genuine enthusiasm could be directed like a press release. The book still sold fine, because it was a good book, but the publisher’s reputation within the community took a hit that will take years to repair.

Contrast that with what happens when BookTok picks up a book organically. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us was published in 2016 and had a solid but unspectacular initial run. In 2021, BookTok discovered it. Within months, it was the bestselling book in America. The publisher didn’t orchestrate that. No marketing department could have. A few creators read it, loved it, made emotional videos about it, and the algorithm did the rest. The book sold over two million additional copies in a single year.

This pattern has repeated itself dozens of times now. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, published in 2012, became a number-one bestseller nearly a decade after release because of BookTok. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo followed a similar trajectory. These aren’t flukes. They represent a fundamental change in how books move through culture, and the implications for publishers, both large and small, are enormous.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve been thinking about this a lot. We’re a small press, which means we don’t have the marketing budgets of the Big Five publishers. We can’t blanket social media with paid promotions or send hundreds of advance copies to creators. But we do have something that, I’ve come to believe, matters more in the BookTok ecosystem: genuine relationships with our authors and an authentic commitment to the books we publish.

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching our own titles interact with the BookTok ecosystem. Readers on the platform have an almost supernatural ability to detect inauthenticity. They can tell the difference between a publisher who cares about a book and one who is simply trying to capitalize on a trend. They respond to specificity, to passion, to the sense that the people behind a book actually read it and loved it themselves. This is where small presses have an inherent advantage. When I talk about The Last Archive or Still Waters, I’m talking about books I personally shepherded through years of editing and revision. That kind of investment shows, and BookTok rewards it.

The second lesson is about cover design. BookTok is a visual medium, which means covers matter more than they ever have before. A book with a beautiful, photogenic cover is exponentially more likely to get picked up, held in front of a camera, and shared. This doesn’t mean every cover needs to follow the same aesthetic trends (though if you’ve noticed that a lot of recent releases feature illustrated covers in similar color palettes, BookTok is a significant reason why). It means that covers need to be designed with the understanding that they will be photographed, filmed, and displayed as thumbnails on phone screens.

We’ve adjusted our cover design process accordingly. Our art director now considers what she calls “the three-second test,” meaning whether a cover communicates something compelling in the time it takes a viewer to scroll past it. This isn’t dumbing down the design. It’s recognizing that design context has changed. A cover that looks stunning on a bookstore shelf but reads as a muddy blur on a phone screen isn’t serving its purpose anymore.

The third lesson, and this is the one I find most interesting, is about backlist. Traditional publishing has always been heavily weighted toward frontlist titles, meaning the new releases that get the marketing push, the review attention, and the bookstore placement. BookTok has upended this completely. On BookTok, a book published ten years ago can suddenly become the most talked-about title of the week. There’s no expiration date on a good recommendation.

This has real financial implications. For publishers with deep backlists, BookTok represents an opportunity to generate significant revenue from titles that had been essentially dormant. But it requires keeping those titles in print, keeping the metadata current, and making sure that when a book suddenly trends, there’s actually stock available to meet demand. I’ve heard multiple stories of publishers caught flat-footed by a BookTok surge, unable to get reprints fast enough because they’d let a title go out of stock assuming its commercial life was over.

The fourth lesson is about genre boundaries, or rather, their increasing irrelevance. BookTok doesn’t organize books the way publishers and bookstores do. Instead of shelving by genre, BookTok organizes by mood, by emotional experience, by “vibe.” A recommendation might be “books that feel like autumn” or “books that will make you ugly cry” or “dark academia reads for when you want to feel intellectual and unhinged.” This kind of cross-genre, emotion-first categorization means that literary fiction, genre fiction, and everything in between can coexist in the same recommendation, in the same creator’s “favorites” list.

I think this is genuinely healthy for the industry. The walls between literary and commercial fiction have always been somewhat arbitrary, maintained more by institutional habit than by reader behavior. BookTok is just making visible what many readers have always known: that the same person who reads Sally Rooney also reads Sarah J. Maas, and there’s nothing contradictory about that.

Now, the concerns. Because there are legitimate ones, and I don’t want to sound like a cheerleader who can’t see the complications.

The concentration of discovery in a single platform is risky. TikTok’s future in the United States remains uncertain due to ongoing regulatory battles. If TikTok were to be banned or significantly restricted, the BookTok ecosystem would need to migrate somewhere else, and there’s no guarantee that the same magic would reassemble on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Publishers who have built their entire marketing strategy around BookTok are exposed to platform risk in a way that should make anyone nervous.

There’s also the question of what BookTok’s influence means for the kinds of books that get published. If publishers start commissioning books primarily because they seem “BookTok-friendly,” meaning books with high emotional hooks, specific aesthetic qualities, and built-in viral potential, we might see a narrowing of the kinds of stories that find their way into print. I don’t think we’re there yet, but the pressure is real, and I’ve heard editors at larger houses talk openly about whether a manuscript has “BookTok potential” as a factor in acquisition decisions.

The speed of BookTok cycles also presents challenges. A book can go from unknown to viral to oversaturated in a matter of weeks. The backlash cycle, where a book that was universally praised suddenly becomes the target of critical re-evaluation because “everyone” is talking about it, moves faster on BookTok than anywhere else. This can be disorienting for authors, who might experience the emotional whiplash of going from obscurity to overwhelming praise to skeptical pushback in less time than it takes to write a second draft.

For us at ScrollWorks, the approach has been measured. We’re not trying to “go viral.” We’re not manufacturing moments or gaming algorithms. What we are doing is being present, being authentic, and making sure that when someone does discover one of our books through BookTok or any other platform, the experience of actually reading it lives up to whatever recommendation brought them there. That means investing in the quality of the writing, the editing, the design, and the physical object itself. It means publishing books we believe in fiercely, not books we think will trend.

I keep coming back to that seventeen-year-old in Oklahoma City. She didn’t care about the publishing industry’s internal debates about literary merit versus commercial appeal. She didn’t know or care about marketing strategies or platform risk. She read a book that moved her, and she told people about it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And if we in the publishing industry can’t figure out how to respect and work with that impulse rather than trying to co-opt or dismiss it, then we deserve whatever irrelevance is coming our way.

The rise of BookTok doesn’t change what makes a book good. It changes how good books find the people who need to read them. From where I’m sitting, at a small press that has always relied on word-of-mouth more than advertising budgets, that feels less like a disruption and more like the world finally catching up to what independent publishing has always known: that the most powerful marketing force in the world is one real person telling another, “You have to read this.”

I can tell you the exact moment a book loses me. It’s usually somewhere around page three. Not page fifty, not the midpoint, not the ending that falls apart. Page three. If I’m still pushing through the prose by then, still waiting for the writing to catch and pull me forward, the book has probably already failed at its most important job. I know that sounds harsh. I also know, after fifteen years of reading manuscripts professionally, that it’s true more often than anyone in this industry wants to admit.

The first chapter of a novel carries a weight that is wildly disproportionate to its length. In a 300-page book, the first chapter might account for ten or fifteen pages, roughly five percent of the total text. But in terms of its influence on whether someone actually reads the other 95 percent, it’s everything. Every decision a reader makes about your book, whether to keep going, whether to buy it, whether to recommend it, starts in those opening pages. And yet, in my experience, first chapters are consistently the weakest part of most manuscripts that come across my desk.

I want to talk about why, and what I think writers can do about it.

First, the reality of how people actually encounter your opening. If your book is in a physical bookstore, a potential reader picks it up, looks at the cover, reads the back, and then opens to the first page. You have maybe ninety seconds of their attention before they either keep reading or put it back on the shelf. If your book is online, the situation is even more compressed. Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature typically shows the first ten to fifteen percent of a book. A reader clicking that link is making a purchase decision based almost entirely on what they find in your opening pages.

Literary agents face an even more extreme version of this. The standard query process asks for the first five to ten pages of a manuscript. Most agents I know, and I’ve talked to a lot of them, make their initial assessment within the first page. Not because they’re impatient or dismissive, but because they read hundreds of submissions a month and have developed a finely tuned sense for whether a piece of writing has the qualities they’re looking for. Fair or not, your opening is an audition, and the judges are making snap decisions.

So what goes wrong in first chapters? From what I’ve seen, the problems tend to cluster in a few specific areas.

The most common mistake is what I think of as “the weather report opening.” The book starts with a description of the setting, the time of day, the quality of the light, the temperature, the way the leaves are moving. It’s often competently written. Sometimes it’s even beautiful. But it tells the reader nothing about who they’re spending the next 300 pages with, and it does nothing to create the sense of forward motion that keeps pages turning. I read probably three or four of these a week. They all blur together.

The weather report opening persists because writers have been told, correctly, that setting matters. But setting matters in the way that a stage set matters in theater. It’s there to support the action, not to precede it. When a play begins, the audience registers the set design in seconds before the actors start doing things. The first chapter of your novel should work the same way. Setting can be woven in as the action unfolds, revealed through the character’s interaction with their environment rather than delivered as a standalone briefing before anything happens.

The second common problem is the backstory dump. A first chapter that opens with a character reflecting on their childhood, their failed marriage, their complicated relationship with their mother, their career trajectory. All of this information might be genuinely important to the story. But front-loading it before the reader has any reason to care about this character is like meeting someone at a party and having them immediately tell you their entire life story before you’ve even learned their name. It’s too much, too soon, delivered in the wrong order.

I think the backstory dump happens because writers know their characters intimately and can’t imagine the reader engaging with the story without that same level of knowledge. But readers don’t need to know everything about a character to be interested in them. They need to know one thing: what does this person want right now, in this moment, on this page? That single question, clearly established, will carry a reader forward more effectively than any amount of biographical context.

The third problem is what I call “the false start.” This is when the actual story begins in chapter two or three, and the first chapter is essentially preamble. Maybe it’s a prologue that takes place twenty years before the main action. Maybe it’s an extended scene that establishes the character’s “normal life” before the inciting incident disrupts it. The writer is following the classic story structure, ordinary world followed by the call to adventure, but they’re taking far too long in the ordinary world. Readers didn’t pick up your book to watch someone’s ordinary life. They picked it up because something on the cover or in the description promised them that ordinary life was about to get interesting.

I want to be careful here because I’m not arguing that every book needs to open with an explosion or a dead body or someone hanging from a cliff. That approach has its own problems, primarily the sense that the writer is desperately performing for the reader’s attention rather than trusting their story. What I am arguing is that the first chapter needs to establish a question, a tension, a sense that something is off balance and needs to be resolved. That question can be quiet. It can be internal. But it needs to exist.

Some of the best opening chapters I’ve ever read are almost aggressively low-key. The opening of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is essentially a woman sitting in a house, remembering her family. But the prose itself creates such a specific atmosphere of loss and strangeness that you can’t stop reading. The opening of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a butler considering whether to take a short road trip. The stakes could not be lower. But the voice is so precise, so carefully constrained, that you immediately sense something enormous being held just beneath the surface. These openings work not because of plot, but because of voice and implication.

This brings me to what I think is the single most important quality of a successful first chapter: voice. I can forgive almost any structural weakness in an opening if the voice is compelling enough. By voice, I mean the specific quality of the prose that makes this book sound like no other book, the rhythm of the sentences, the particular way the narrator sees and describes the world, the personality embedded in the word choices. Voice is what makes a reader think, “I want to spend time with this mind.”

When I was editing The Last Archive, we rewrote the first chapter four times. Not because the plot was wrong, though we adjusted that too, but because we couldn’t find the voice. The author had the story figured out. They knew what happened and why. But the how of the telling, the specific texture of the prose, didn’t click into place until the fourth attempt. That version was looser, more confident, more willing to let the narrator’s personality show through rather than hiding behind neutral, “literary” prose. The difference was immediate. Beta readers who had bounced off the earlier drafts read the new opening and kept going straight through to the end.

I think one reason writers struggle with voice in their opening chapters is that they’re trying too hard. They know the first chapter matters, so they write it in what they imagine to be their “best” prose, which usually means their most formal, most careful, most controlled prose. The sentences get longer and more elaborate. The vocabulary gets more ambitious. The writer is showing off, consciously or not, and the result feels stiff. I always tell our authors: write the first chapter last. Or at least, rewrite it last. By the time you’ve finished the book, you’ll have found the voice naturally, and you can go back and make sure the opening matches the rest.

Another quality I look for in first chapters is a sense of specificity. The more particular and concrete the details, the more real the world feels, and the more invested the reader becomes. “She walked into the kitchen” gives me nothing. “She walked into the kitchen and noticed the coffee pot was still on from this morning, the carafe reduced to a dark, burnt ring” gives me a character, a mood, and the sense of a life that has been interrupted or neglected. The specific detail implies a story without stating it outright.

This is related to a broader principle that I think applies to all good writing but is especially important in openings: show trust in your reader. A lot of first chapters over-explain because the writer doesn’t trust the reader to pick up on implication. They state the theme outright. They describe exactly what the character is feeling and why. They connect every dot, draw every conclusion, leave no room for the reader to actively participate in constructing the meaning. This is suffocating. The best opening chapters invite the reader in, give them just enough to orient themselves, and then let them do some of the work. Readers who feel trusted will reward you with their attention.

Let me talk about pacing for a moment, because it’s something that first chapters get wrong in both directions. Some openings are too slow, as I’ve discussed. But others are too fast, cramming so many characters, plot points, and complications into the first ten pages that the reader feels overwhelmed rather than intrigued. I’ve read manuscripts that introduce eight named characters in the first chapter. By page five, I can’t remember who anyone is or why I should care about any of them.

The ideal first chapter, in my opinion, focuses on one character in one situation. That situation can be complex, but the reader’s point of entry should be simple: one consciousness, one moment, one question. Everything else, the supporting characters, the subplots, the world-building, can come later. The first chapter’s job is to make the reader care about a single person enough to keep reading. That’s it. If you try to do more than that, you’ll probably end up doing less.

I also want to mention dialogue, because it’s one of the most effective tools for an opening chapter and one of the most underused. Good dialogue does several things simultaneously: it reveals character, advances the story, establishes relationships, and creates the sense of real people inhabiting a real world. A first chapter that opens with a conversation between two people, if the dialogue is sharp and specific, can accomplish in two pages what a descriptive passage takes ten pages to achieve. Dialogue is action. It moves. It creates immediate intimacy between the reader and the characters.

The flip side of this is that bad dialogue in an opening chapter is instantly fatal. If the characters all sound the same, if the conversations are stilted or unrealistic, if the dialogue is being used primarily as a vehicle for exposition (“As you know, Bob, we’ve been working at this company for fifteen years and the merger is scheduled for next Tuesday”), the reader will bail. Dialogue is high-risk, high-reward. When it works, nothing pulls a reader in faster. When it doesn’t, nothing pushes them away more efficiently.

Something I’ve noticed about the manuscripts that make it through our full editorial process versus the ones we pass on: the successful ones almost always have an opening chapter that creates what I think of as a “reading trance.” There’s a moment, usually within the first page or two, where you stop being aware that you’re reading words on a page and start experiencing the story directly. The technique, the craft, becomes invisible, and you’re just there. That trance state is fragile, and anything that breaks it, a clunky sentence, a confusing transition, a moment where the writer’s hand becomes visible, can shatter it. The first chapter’s job is to establish and protect that trance.

I realize I’ve been talking about what not to do more than what to do, so let me be more direct about what I think makes a first chapter work. Here’s what I’m looking for when I pick up a manuscript.

I want to meet a person, not a character type. I want specificity, personality, contradiction. I want to understand what this person cares about and what they’re worried about. I want a voice that sounds like a real human mind, with its own particular rhythms and observations. I want a situation, even a small one, that feels like it matters. I want to sense that there’s more beneath the surface than what’s being shown. I want the prose to be confident enough to leave gaps, to let me wonder, to make me fill in the blanks with my own imagination. And I want, above all, to feel that the writer knows exactly where they’re going, even if I don’t.

When we published Echoes of Iron, the first chapter went through what felt like an unreasonable number of revisions. The author joked that the first chapter took longer to finish than the entire second half of the book. But the result was an opening that dropped readers into the middle of a specific, charged moment and let the story expand outward from there. The reviews consistently mentioned the opening as one of the book’s strengths, which confirmed something I’ve always believed: readers notice first chapters. They remember them. They judge books by them, and they should, because a writer who can’t get the first chapter right probably can’t sustain a whole book.

Here’s my last thought on this, and it’s the one I come back to most often when I’m working with our authors. The first chapter is a promise. It tells the reader what kind of experience they’re in for, what kind of writer they’re dealing with, and what the emotional and intellectual rewards of continuing will be. If your first chapter promises depth but the rest of the book is shallow, readers will feel betrayed. If your first chapter is tepid but the book gets amazing by chapter five, most readers will never get there. The promise and the delivery have to match, and the first chapter is where that contract is established.

Write your first chapter like it’s the only chapter anyone will ever read. Because for more readers than you’d like to think, it will be.

Last October, I spent four days standing behind a folding table in a converted tobacco warehouse in Asheville, North Carolina, talking about books with strangers. My feet hurt. My voice was shot by day two. I ate more barbecue than any reasonable person should in a four-day span. It was, without question, the best week of my professional year, and I’m already planning to go back.

Literary festivals occupy a strange position in the publishing ecosystem. They’re expensive to attend, exhausting to participate in, and nearly impossible to quantify in terms of direct return on investment. If you ran the numbers purely on books sold at the event versus the cost of getting there, staffing a booth, and printing promotional materials, most festivals would look like terrible business decisions. I’ve had colleagues in the industry tell me exactly this. “Why bother?” they say. “Just put the money into online advertising.”

They’re missing the point so completely that I almost don’t know where to start explaining why they’re wrong.

I attend between six and eight literary festivals a year. Some are large, established events like the Brooklyn Book Festival or the Texas Book Festival in Austin. Others are smaller, more regional affairs with a few dozen vendors and a couple hundred attendees. Each one is different in character and scale, but they all share something that no digital platform, no social media campaign, no email newsletter can replicate: the experience of standing in a physical space surrounded by people who care about books.

That probably sounds sentimental. Let me make it concrete.

At the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville last year, I had a conversation with a woman in her sixties who told me she’d driven three hours from rural Tennessee to attend. She comes every year. She doesn’t buy books online because her internet connection is unreliable and she doesn’t trust entering her credit card number on websites. The festival is where she discovers new authors, touches the books, reads the first pages, and makes her purchasing decisions for the next several months. She left our table with four books, including Still Waters, which she said reminded her of the landscape around her home.

No algorithm would have connected that reader with that book. No targeted ad, no matter how sophisticated, would have found her. The festival did. And she’s not an outlier. At every event I attend, I meet readers who exist largely outside the digital ecosystem that dominates publishing conversations. They’re older. They’re rural. They’re people who still get their book recommendations from librarians, from friends, from walking past a table at a festival and being drawn in by a cover or a conversation.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is a different animal entirely. It takes over Borough Hall and the surrounding streets in downtown Brooklyn every September, drawing tens of thousands of people over a single weekend. The crowd there skews younger and more urban. There are panel discussions, readings, signings, and a massive outdoor marketplace. The energy is electric in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it. People are excited about books. They’re carrying bags full of them. They’re arguing about them on park benches while eating empanadas from food trucks.

What I love about Brooklyn specifically is the accidental discovery factor. Because the marketplace is so dense and varied, readers who came looking for poetry end up at a fiction table. People who were there for a panel on climate journalism wander into a booth selling literary magazines. The physical proximity of different kinds of publishing, from the Big Five imprints to tiny one-person operations, creates a kind of democratic leveling that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Your small press table is right next to Penguin Random House’s setup, and the readers don’t care about the size difference. They care about what’s on the table.

I should mention that festivals are also, frankly, important for our own morale. Publishing is a business conducted largely through email. You send manuscripts into the void and wait. You negotiate contracts over phone calls. You watch sales numbers tick up or down on a screen. It can feel abstract, disconnected from the actual humans who read the books you make. Festivals are the antidote to that abstraction. You watch someone pick up a book, open it, start reading, and decide to buy it. You see them come back the next day and tell you they stayed up until 2 AM finishing it. That feedback loop, immediate and human, is something I genuinely need to stay motivated in this work.

The Texas Book Festival deserves special mention because it’s one of the best-organized events in the country and because its programming is consistently excellent. Held on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin every fall, it manages to be both serious and accessible in a way that many festivals struggle with. The panel discussions are substantive, featuring major authors alongside emerging voices. The marketplace is well-curated. And the festival’s commitment to literacy programs, including donating books to Texas schools, gives the whole event a sense of purpose that goes beyond commerce.

I also want to talk about the smaller festivals, because I think they often do something that the larger events can’t. The Savannah Book Festival, for instance, is intimate enough that you end up having extended conversations with readers in a way that’s impossible at a massive event like Brooklyn. I spent forty-five minutes at the Savannah festival talking with a retired English teacher about the state of contemporary fiction. She had opinions, sharp ones, and she pushed back on some of my assumptions about what readers want. That conversation directly influenced how I wrote the catalog copy for our spring list. You can’t get that kind of unfiltered reader feedback from an Amazon review.

The Decatur Book Festival near Atlanta is another favorite. It’s community-focused in a way that feels genuine rather than performative. The whole downtown area gets involved; restaurants put up book-themed specials, local businesses sponsor events, and the streets fill with a mix of dedicated readers and curious passersby who wandered in because they saw the tents. Some of our most unexpected sales have come from people who weren’t specifically looking for books at all. They were out for a walk and got pulled in by the atmosphere.

One thing I’ve noticed across all these festivals is the importance of the author appearance. Readers want to meet the person who wrote the book. This might seem obvious, but I think we underestimate how much the personal connection matters. I’ve seen readers who were mildly interested in a book become committed buyers after spending five minutes talking with the author. There’s something about hearing a writer explain why they wrote a particular book, what compelled them, what kept them up at night during the writing process, that transforms the book from an object on a table into a personal communication from one human being to another.

We try to bring our authors to at least two or three festivals a year. It’s not easy, logistically or financially. Most of our authors have day jobs and families and can’t disappear for a long weekend on short notice. But the ones who do come consistently report that the festival experience re-energizes their relationship with their own work. Writing is solitary. The festival is the opposite. It’s the moment when the private act of creation meets the public act of reading, and something happens in that meeting that both parties need.

Let me talk about the practical side, because I know other small publishers read this blog and might be wondering whether festivals are worth the investment. Here’s my honest assessment.

The costs are real. A typical festival might run us between $1,500 and $4,000 all in, depending on location, booth fees, travel, lodging, and materials. For a small press operating on thin margins, that’s significant. We can’t attend everything, and we have to be strategic about which events we prioritize.

The direct book sales at festivals usually cover between a third and half of the cost. So purely on a per-unit-sold basis, festivals lose money. But that calculation misses everything that matters. The email signups we collect at festivals convert to purchases at a rate about three times higher than signups from our website. The readers we meet at festivals are dramatically more likely to leave reviews, recommend our books to friends, and buy our future releases. They become part of our community in a way that anonymous online buyers simply don’t.

There’s also the industry networking angle. At every festival, I end up in conversations with other publishers, with agents, with booksellers, with librarians. These relationships, built over years of bumping into each other at the same events, are genuinely valuable. Some of our best author referrals have come from connections made at festivals. An agent I met at the AWP Conference three years ago has since sent us two manuscripts, both of which we published. That relationship started with a conversation over bad conference coffee.

Bookstore relationships are another benefit that’s hard to quantify but very real. When I meet an independent bookseller at a festival and hand them a galley, that’s a fundamentally different interaction than sending a mass email to a list of bookstores. The personal recommendation, face to face, carries weight. Several of our strongest bookstore partners, stores that hand-sell our titles consistently, started as festival connections.

I want to address something that’s been on my mind lately, which is the question of whether literary festivals are becoming too homogeneous. There’s a valid criticism that the festival circuit can feel like a traveling show, with the same publishers, the same authors, and the same conversations appearing at event after event. I’ve seen this tendency, and I think it’s a real risk. When festivals start programming for other industry people rather than for readers, they lose the quality that makes them special.

The best festivals resist this by staying rooted in their local communities. The Mississippi Book Festival, held in the state capitol building in Jackson, feels distinctly Southern in a way that isn’t performative. The programming reflects the literary traditions and contemporary concerns of the region. The Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago has a Midwestern directness that I appreciate. These festivals have personality, and that personality comes from the place where they happen.

I also think festivals need to do a better job of reflecting the full diversity of who reads and writes in this country. Progress has been made here, particularly in the last five years, but there’s still a long way to go. The Leimert Park Book Fair in Los Angeles and the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. are good examples of events that prioritize diverse voices in their programming. More festivals should follow their lead.

For readers who have never attended a literary festival, I genuinely encourage you to find one near you and go. Most are free to attend (you pay for the books, obviously, but entrance is usually open). Bring a tote bag, wear comfortable shoes, and plan to be surprised. The magic of a good festival is that you go in looking for one thing and leave with something you never expected. Last year at the Baltimore Book Festival, I bought a poetry collection from a press I’d never heard of because the publisher described it so passionately that I couldn’t walk away. I’ve since recommended it to probably twenty people.

That’s the thing about festivals that I keep coming back to, year after year. They remind you that books are not content. They’re not product. They’re not units to be optimized and marketed and tracked. They’re objects made by people for people, and the best way to experience that reality is to stand in a room full of both and watch the connections happen in real time. Every October in Asheville, every September in Brooklyn, every November in Austin, I get to watch someone fall in love with a book. And every time, it reminds me why I got into this business in the first place.

We’ll have a table at the upcoming Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show and the AWP Conference in the spring. If you’re there, come say hello. I’ll be the one with sore feet and too many opinions about first chapters.

Every time we run a promotion that includes free shipping, someone on our team does the math and sighs audibly. I understand the sigh. The numbers are not, by any conventional accounting standard, encouraging. But I keep running the promotions anyway, and I want to explain why, because the real economics of free shipping in independent publishing are more complicated, more interesting, and honestly more hopeful than most people realize.

Let’s start with what it actually costs to mail a book. A single trade paperback, the kind of book we mostly publish at ScrollWorks, weighs somewhere between 10 and 16 ounces depending on page count and paper stock. Shipping it via USPS Media Mail, which is the cheapest option available for books, costs between $3.50 and $5.00 within the continental United States. Priority Mail runs $8 to $12. UPS and FedEx are even more expensive. If you’re a reader in Alaska or Hawaii, add a couple more dollars. International shipping is a whole different conversation, and not a cheerful one.

For a book that retails at $16.95, that shipping cost represents between 20 and 30 percent of the sale price. For a small publisher selling direct, where margins are already tight, absorbing that cost is genuinely painful. It’s not a rounding error. It’s a significant chunk of the revenue from each sale, and at our volume, it adds up to a number that makes the accounting software look a little red around the edges.

So why do we do it?

The short answer is that Amazon trained everyone to expect it, and fighting consumer expectations is a war you can’t win. But the longer answer is more nuanced, and it has to do with the particular psychology of how people buy books and the specific economics of direct-to-reader sales.

Let me walk through this step by step, because I think it reveals something important about the current state of book retail.

Amazon offers free shipping on book orders over $35 (or on any order for Prime members, who pay $139 a year for the privilege). This has effectively set the baseline expectation for online book purchases. When a reader goes to buy a book from our website and sees a $5 shipping charge added at checkout, they’re not comparing that to the actual cost of postage. They’re comparing it to the zero they’d pay on Amazon. And in that comparison, we lose. Every time.

The data backs this up unambiguously. A 2022 study by the Baymard Institute found that 48 percent of online shoppers abandon their cart because of unexpected shipping costs. Not because the total price was too high, but specifically because of the shock of seeing the shipping charge appear. Another study, this one from Digital Commerce 360, found that free shipping is the single most influential factor in online purchase decisions, outranking even price discounts. People will pay more for a product if the shipping is free than they will for a cheaper product with a visible shipping charge. This is not rational behavior. It’s deeply human behavior, and any business that ignores it is choosing principle over reality.

We tested this on our own site. For three months in early 2023, we ran an A/B test. Half our visitors saw a flat $4.99 shipping fee. The other half saw free shipping on orders over $30. The free shipping group converted at nearly double the rate of the paid shipping group, and their average order value was 40 percent higher. They were buying two books instead of one, specifically to reach the free shipping threshold. The math was clear: even though we were eating the shipping cost, the increased volume and order size more than compensated.

This is, I should note, exactly the dynamic that Amazon exploited to build its dominance. The $35 minimum for free shipping isn’t just a cost-saving measure for Amazon. It’s a behavioral nudge that encourages customers to add items to their cart. Amazon can afford to lose money on shipping because it makes it up on volume and because books are, for Amazon, primarily a traffic driver rather than a profit center. They sell books to get you into the ecosystem, where you’ll eventually buy batteries and dog food and streaming subscriptions.

We obviously can’t compete with Amazon on that basis. We sell books. That’s what we do. But we can learn from the behavioral insight, which is that free shipping isn’t really about shipping at all. It’s about removing friction from the purchase decision. Every additional step between “I want this book” and “I own this book” is an opportunity for the customer to change their mind. Shipping costs are the biggest friction point in online retail, and eliminating them keeps the momentum going from desire to purchase.

Now, someone at this point always asks: “Why not just raise your book prices by $4 and offer free shipping?” It’s a fair question, and it’s exactly what many retailers do. The problem in book publishing is that books have standard retail prices that are printed on the cover. You can’t easily sell a $16.95 book for $20.95 without it being immediately obvious that the price has been inflated. Readers are price-aware when it comes to books, more so than for most product categories, and the cover price creates a hard anchor that’s difficult to work around.

What we can do, and what we’ve chosen to do, is treat shipping as a marketing expense rather than a fulfillment cost. When I look at our budget, the line item for free shipping sits next to advertising and promotional spending, not next to postage and handling. This reframing changes how we evaluate it. We don’t ask, “Is this shipping cost justified by this individual sale?” We ask, “Is this shipping subsidy generating enough additional sales, enough repeat customers, enough goodwill, to justify its place in our marketing budget?” And the answer, consistently, has been yes.

The repeat customer effect is particularly significant. We track our customer data carefully (with proper privacy practices, I should add), and what we’ve found is that customers who place a first order with free shipping are significantly more likely to make a second purchase within six months than customers who paid for shipping on their first order. The free shipping experience, frictionless and pleasant, creates a positive association with buying directly from us rather than from Amazon. Over the lifetime of that customer relationship, the value of that positive association far exceeds the $4 we spent on postage.

There’s also a less tangible but very real brand effect. When a reader receives a book from us with free shipping, they feel like they’ve gotten a good deal. That feeling of satisfaction gets associated with our brand, with the reading experience, with the decision to support an independent publisher. When a reader pays for shipping and then has to wait two weeks for Media Mail delivery, the experience feels transactional and a little bit frustrating. The book is the same either way, but the emotional context of receiving it is completely different.

I want to be honest about the challenges, though, because this isn’t a simple win. The biggest challenge is that free shipping disproportionately benefits our most geographically distant customers. Shipping to a reader in Portland from our fulfillment partner in the Northeast costs more than shipping to someone in New Jersey. This means that our most expensive shipping customers are, paradoxically, the ones who benefit most from the free shipping policy. We could, theoretically, restrict free shipping to certain zip codes, but that would be a nightmare to communicate and would undermine the simplicity that makes the policy effective.

The weight issue is another complication. A slim novella costs almost as much to ship as a 400-page novel, but the novella retails for less, so the shipping cost represents a larger percentage of the sale. We’ve occasionally talked about whether it makes sense to have different shipping thresholds for different product types, but again, simplicity is king. “Free shipping on orders over $30” is a message that fits on a banner. “Free shipping on orders over $30, except for novellas which qualify at $20 but hardcovers require $40” is a message that makes everyone’s eyes glaze over.

The other challenge is returns. When a book ships for free and comes back, we eat both the outbound and the return shipping cost. Fortunately, book returns from direct-to-consumer sales are relatively rare compared to, say, clothing (where return rates can exceed 30 percent). Our return rate runs about 2 percent, which is manageable. But it’s a cost that needs to be factored into the overall equation.

Packaging is a hidden cost that deserves mention, too. You can’t just throw a book in a poly mailer and hope for the best. Books arrive damaged, and damaged books get returned, which costs you twice. We use rigid mailers for single books and small boxes with paper padding for multi-book orders. The mailer itself costs between $0.75 and $2.50 depending on size, and the packing materials add another $0.50 or so. These aren’t enormous numbers individually, but they compound with the shipping cost to create a meaningful per-order expense that the “free shipping” framing makes invisible to the customer. The customer sees “free.” We see a line item that includes postage, packaging, labels, labor for packing, and the occasional damage claim.

I should address the elephant in the room, which is whether offering free shipping is, at some level, participating in the same race-to-the-bottom dynamic that has hurt independent bookstores and small publishers. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I understand the concern. When Amazon uses its massive scale to offer free shipping, it creates an expectation that smaller players struggle to meet. By meeting that expectation ourselves, are we just reinforcing the standard that Amazon set?

Maybe. But I think the alternative is worse. If we don’t offer free shipping, readers who want our books will often just buy them on Amazon instead, where they’ll get free shipping along with a purchase experience that gives us less revenue, less data, and less relationship with the reader. I’d rather absorb the shipping cost and maintain the direct relationship than cede that relationship to Amazon in the name of an ideological stand against free shipping that the customer doesn’t care about.

The practical advice I’d give to other small publishers considering a free shipping policy is this: set a minimum order threshold that gets your average order value above the break-even point. For us, the $30 threshold works because our average book price is around $16, which means most free-shipping orders include at least two books. The margin on two books is enough to absorb the shipping cost and still generate a reasonable return. If your books are priced lower, you might need a lower threshold. If they’re priced higher, you might be able to offer free shipping with no minimum at all.

Also, consider using Media Mail aggressively. It’s slow, averaging about 7 to 10 business days, but it’s cheap, and most book buyers are patient people. We always offer a paid Priority Mail upgrade for readers who want faster delivery, but about 85 percent of our customers choose the free Media Mail option and never complain about the speed. Book buyers, in my experience, are not the same as Amazon shoppers who have been conditioned to expect everything in two days. They’re buying something they’re going to spend weeks reading; they don’t mind waiting a few extra days for it to arrive.

I’ll close with something I think about every time I process our monthly shipping invoices. The real question isn’t whether we can afford free shipping. It’s whether we can afford not to offer it. In a world where Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and every major retailer offers free or deeply subsidized shipping, asking readers to pay full freight to buy directly from a small publisher is essentially asking them to pay a premium for the privilege of supporting us. Some will do it happily, out of principle and loyalty. But most won’t, and I don’t blame them. Free shipping isn’t a gimmick. For us, it’s the cost of staying in the game.

If you want to see the policy in action, browse our catalog. Every title, from The Last Archive to The Cartographer’s Dilemma, ships free on orders over $30. We think you should have the book, not the receipt for the postage.

The paper for Still Waters took three months to select. Three months of requesting samples, holding pages up to different light sources, running test prints, debating opacity and texture with an intensity that, I’m aware, might seem absurd to anyone outside of publishing. The author asked me at one point if we could just pick one and move on. I told her no. The paper is not a detail. The paper is half the experience.

I realize that most readers don’t consciously think about paper. You pick up a book, you open it, you read the words. The paper is just the surface the words are printed on. But here’s what I’ve come to understand after years of making books: paper communicates. It communicates below the level of conscious attention, in the way that the acoustics of a room shape how you hear music without you thinking about the ceiling height. The weight of the page between your fingers, the way it reflects or absorbs light, the sound it makes when you turn it, the way ink sits on its surface, all of these things contribute to the reading experience in ways that are difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore once you start paying attention.

At ScrollWorks, paper selection is one of the earliest decisions we make in the production process, and it’s one of the most time-consuming. We don’t have a standard paper that we use for every book. Each title gets its own assessment based on the genre, the length, the aesthetic goals, and the practical constraints of budget and availability. I want to walk through how that process works, because I think it reveals something interesting about the physical side of bookmaking that gets overlooked in an increasingly digital industry.

The first consideration is always the type of book. Fiction and non-fiction have different paper needs, and within those categories, the specific character of the work matters enormously. A literary novel that aims for an intimate, contemplative reading experience wants a different paper than a fast-paced thriller. A book of essays that a reader might dip in and out of over months has different demands than a novel designed to be consumed in a weekend. These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. They’re functional decisions that affect how the book feels in the reader’s hands and how long it lasts on their shelf.

Let me get specific about what we actually evaluate when we’re choosing paper.

Weight, measured in pounds or grams per square meter (gsm), is the most basic characteristic. For trade paperbacks, we typically work in the range of 50 to 80 lb text weight, which translates to roughly 74 to 118 gsm. Lighter papers make for a thinner, more portable book, but they can feel flimsy and they’re more likely to show through, meaning you can see the text on the reverse side of the page when you’re reading. Heavier papers feel more substantial and luxurious, but they add bulk and weight, which increases shipping costs and can make a long book uncomfortably thick.

For The Last Archive, which runs about 320 pages, we went with a 60 lb uncoated text stock. It’s light enough to keep the book from feeling like a brick, but heavy enough that the pages feel solid and the show-through is minimal. For a shorter book like Echoes of Iron, we could afford to go slightly heavier at 70 lb, giving the book a more substantial feel that compensates for its modest page count. These seem like small decisions, and in a sense they are. But holding the finished books, you can feel the difference immediately.

Opacity is related to weight but isn’t the same thing. A paper’s opacity refers to how much light passes through it, and it’s affected by the paper’s composition and coating as well as its thickness. Low-opacity paper creates distracting show-through, where you can see a ghost of the text from the other side of the page bleeding through. This is one of those things that, once you notice it, you can’t un-notice. Some cheap paperbacks have such poor opacity that reading them is like trying to concentrate while someone whispers behind you. It’s not quite bad enough to make you stop, but it’s always there, pulling at the edge of your attention.

We test opacity by printing a sample page on each candidate paper and then holding it up to a bright window. If I can read the reverse side of the text, the paper fails. Simple as that. Good book paper should have an opacity of at least 92 percent, and we prefer 95 or higher.

Color is another major factor, and this is where things get surprisingly subjective. Paper comes in a range of whites, from bright blue-white to warm cream, and the choice has a significant impact on the reading experience. Bright white paper is crisp and clean, and it creates high contrast with black text. It’s also, in my opinion, harsh and tiring to read for extended periods, like having a conversation in a room with fluorescent lighting. Cream or natural white paper has a warmer tone that’s easier on the eyes and gives the book a more traditional, literary feel.

We lean heavily toward natural whites and creams at ScrollWorks. This is a deliberate choice that reflects our aesthetic priorities. Our books are meant to be read slowly, lived with, returned to. The warm paper invites that kind of engagement in a way that bright white doesn’t. There are exceptions, though. If a book has interior illustrations or photographs, we might need a brighter white to ensure accurate color reproduction. And some genres, particularly science fiction and contemporary thrillers, sometimes benefit from the cleaner, more modern feel of a brighter stock.

Texture is where paper selection becomes genuinely personal and, I’ll admit, a little obsessive. Paper can be smooth (calendered), slightly rough (vellum finish), or noticeably textured (laid or linen). Each finish interacts differently with ink and creates a different tactile experience. Smooth paper is the most versatile and produces the sharpest text reproduction. It’s the safe choice. Vellum finish has a slight tooth to it, a barely perceptible roughness that I find pleasurable to touch and that gives the page a handmade quality. Laid paper has visible lines running through it, a traditional look that connects to the history of papermaking but that can feel pretentious if overused.

For most of our books, we use a vellum or smooth uncoated stock. The specific choice depends on the character of the book. When we were producing The Cartographer’s Dilemma, the author and I spent an afternoon comparing three different vellum finishes side by side. They were almost identical, honestly. An untrained hand probably couldn’t have told them apart. But the middle sample had a grain that felt slightly more intentional, more considered, and it complemented the meticulous quality of the writing. We went with that one. Was the difference worth the extra $200 it cost for the print run? Probably not in any measurable sense. But making books is an accumulation of decisions like that, and the sum of those decisions is what separates a book that feels thoughtfully made from one that feels like it was assembled by default.

I should talk about practical constraints, because this isn’t all aesthetic reverie. Paper costs money, and paper costs have been volatile in recent years. Supply chain disruptions that started during the pandemic, combined with mill closures and consolidation in the paper industry, have pushed prices up and availability down. There have been times in the past two years when our preferred paper stock simply wasn’t available, and we had to scramble to find an acceptable substitute on a tight production timeline. The romance of paper selection bumps up against the reality of “this mill is backordered for four months” pretty regularly.

Environmental considerations also factor in, increasingly so. Most of the paper we use is either FSC-certified (meaning it comes from responsibly managed forests) or made with a significant percentage of post-consumer recycled content. We made a commitment several years ago to move away from virgin fiber wherever possible, and we’ve been able to source recycled papers that meet our quality standards for most applications. The recycled stocks have gotten much better in recent years. Five years ago, recycled book paper had a grayish tint and inconsistent texture that made it a compromise. Today, the best recycled stocks are nearly indistinguishable from virgin fiber in appearance and feel.

The printing method matters too, because different papers interact differently with different printing technologies. We use offset printing for most of our runs, which tends to produce the best results on uncoated papers. Digital printing, which we use for short runs and print-on-demand titles, requires papers that can handle toner adhesion, and not every beautiful offset paper works well in a digital press. This means we sometimes have to compromise, choosing a paper that works adequately with both printing methods rather than one that’s optimal for just one.

Bulk and spine width are considerations that connect paper choice directly to the book’s visual identity. The spine of a book is the only part that’s visible on a shelf, and its width is determined by the paper. A 300-page book printed on 50 lb stock will have a noticeably thinner spine than the same book on 70 lb stock. This affects whether the title and author name can be printed legibly on the spine, which in turn affects the cover design. I’ve seen situations where a switch from one paper weight to another required the entire cover to be redesigned because the spine text no longer fit. Paper choice, cover design, and printing are all interconnected, and changing one variable ripples through the others.

There’s also the question of longevity. Acid-free paper resists yellowing and deterioration over time, while acidic paper (common in cheap mass-market paperbacks) will become brittle and discolored within a few decades. Every book we publish uses acid-free stock, because we’d like our books to be readable in fifty years, not just five. This is a small additional cost that most readers never think about, but it reflects a commitment to the idea that a book is a permanent object, not a disposable one.

I’ve been asked whether any of this actually affects sales. The honest answer is: probably not directly. No one has ever told me they bought a book because of the paper it was printed on. But I believe, with some conviction, that it affects the reading experience in ways that ultimately translate to word-of-mouth and repeat readership. A reader who finishes a book and thinks, “That was a beautiful object to hold,” even if they can’t quite articulate why, is a reader who is more likely to seek out other books from the same publisher. They associate the physical experience with the emotional experience of the story, and both get remembered together.

I think about paper the way a chef thinks about ingredients. You can make a perfectly adequate meal with commodity ingredients, and most diners won’t know the difference. But there’s a pleasure in sourcing the good olive oil, the right flour, the tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes. The meal is better for it, even if the improvement is subtle, and the care that went into the sourcing is itself a kind of respect for the people you’re feeding. Our readers deserve that respect. The authors who trusted us with their manuscripts deserve it. And the physical book, this remarkable technology that has been delivering human thought for centuries, deserves it too.

The next time you pick up a book, try this: before you start reading, close your eyes and just feel the pages. Run your thumb across the surface. Notice the weight. Open the book and put your nose in the gutter (the crease where the pages meet the spine) and breathe in. Good paper has a smell, a clean, slightly sweet smell that is one of the most underrated sensory pleasures in the world. That smell, that texture, that weight, someone chose them. Someone spent three months holding samples up to the light and deciding that this paper, not that one, was the right home for these particular words. I think that’s worth knowing about.

When someone asks me what kind of books we publish at ScrollWorks, I usually say “literary fiction” and then immediately regret it. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because the term is so loaded, so fought over, and so frequently misunderstood that saying it out loud often creates more confusion than clarity. It’s like telling someone you’re a “moderate” in politics; both sides assume you belong to the other.

I’ve been in meetings where the phrase “literary fiction” was used to mean four completely different things by four different people, and nobody noticed the disconnect until an argument broke out. I’ve watched authors bristle at having their work called literary, as though it were an accusation of difficulty rather than a compliment. I’ve seen booksellers shelve the same novel in literary fiction and in thriller, depending on which store you walked into. The category is, to put it charitably, a mess. But it’s our mess, and since we publish books under this banner, I figure we owe it to our readers to explain what we actually mean by it.

Let me start with what literary fiction is not, at least as we think about it.

It is not fiction that is deliberately obscure. There’s a persistent idea, particularly among people who don’t read much of it, that literary fiction exists to make readers feel stupid. That it’s full of long sentences, pretentious references, and plots that don’t go anywhere, all designed to signal the author’s intellectual superiority. This idea isn’t entirely without basis. There are books that fit this description, and some of them get praised by critics who mistake difficulty for depth. But equating literary fiction with obscurity is like equating fine dining with tiny portions. It’s a stereotype that contains a grain of truth and a mountain of distortion.

Literary fiction is also not fiction without plot. This is another misconception that drives me a little crazy. The criticism goes: “Literary fiction is all style and no substance. Nothing happens. It’s just someone thinking about their feelings for 300 pages.” I’ve read literary novels that fit this description, and I didn’t enjoy them either. But the best literary fiction, the kind we publish and the kind that keeps me reading, is deeply plotted. Things happen. Characters make decisions that have consequences. The difference is that the plot in literary fiction tends to be driven by character psychology rather than by external events. The story moves forward because of who these people are, not because of what happens to them.

Consider a book like The Last Archive. It has a clear narrative arc, with tension, complication, and resolution. A reader who needs to know what happens next will keep turning pages. But the engine driving that narrative is internal: a character wrestling with memory, responsibility, and the gap between who they thought they were and who they’ve turned out to be. The external events of the plot matter because of what they reveal about the character’s interior life, not the other way around. In genre fiction, typically, the arrow points in the other direction. The character’s interior life matters because of how it affects their ability to navigate external events.

Neither approach is inherently better. I want to be really clear about that. I read and enjoy genre fiction regularly. I have a shelf full of crime novels and science fiction that I return to with genuine pleasure. The distinction between literary and genre fiction is not a quality ranking. It’s a description of where the center of gravity sits in the storytelling.

So what do we actually mean when we call something literary fiction? Here’s my working definition, the one that guides our editorial decisions at ScrollWorks.

Literary fiction is fiction in which the quality of the prose is not merely a vehicle for delivering the story but is itself a significant part of the reading experience. The way the sentences are constructed, the precision of the word choices, the rhythm and music of the language, these things matter in literary fiction in a way that they typically don’t in genre fiction, where the prose is expected to be transparent, to get out of the way and let the reader focus on the plot.

I want to be careful about how I phrase that, because it can easily be misread as a claim that literary fiction has “better” prose than genre fiction. That’s not what I’m saying. Transparent prose is its own skill, and doing it well is extraordinarily difficult. What I’m saying is that in literary fiction, the reader is expected to notice the prose, to be affected by it, to find pleasure or discomfort or surprise in the specific way something is expressed. The prose is doing double duty: delivering information and creating an aesthetic experience.

Think about the difference between a window and a stained glass window. A regular window’s job is to let you see what’s on the other side. A stained glass window does that too, but it also asks you to look at the window itself, to appreciate the colors and patterns and the way light moves through them. Genre fiction is generally a regular window, literary fiction a stained glass one. Both are windows. Both serve the basic function. But the experience of looking through them is fundamentally different.

The second element of our working definition involves ambiguity, specifically a tolerance for it. Literary fiction tends to leave certain questions unanswered. Characters’ motivations may be complex and contradictory. The ending may not provide neat resolution. The reader is often left to draw their own conclusions about what a story means, and reasonable readers might disagree. This isn’t carelessness or evasion on the author’s part. It’s a reflection of the literary fiction writer’s commitment to representing human experience honestly, and honest representation of human experience includes a lot of uncertainty.

Genre fiction, by contrast, typically resolves. The mystery is solved. The lovers get together. The hero defeats the villain. The world is saved or at least stabilized. This resolution is part of the genre contract with the reader, and violating it feels like a betrayal. Literary fiction operates under a different contract. The reader agrees to accept ambiguity in exchange for a deeper, more textured engagement with the characters and their world.

The third element is thematic seriousness, by which I don’t mean that literary fiction is always somber or heavy. Some of the best literary fiction is very funny. But there’s generally an engagement with ideas, with questions that don’t have easy answers, with the complexities of being alive in a specific time and place. Literary fiction wants to understand something about the human condition, and it’s willing to sit with difficulty and discomfort in pursuit of that understanding.

Now, I know that all of this sounds very abstract. Let me make it concrete by talking about the specific books we’ve published and what makes them “literary” in our estimation.

Still Waters is, on its surface, a quiet book about a family in a small town. If you described the plot in a sentence, it might sound like any number of domestic novels. But what makes it literary, in our sense of the word, is the specificity and beauty of the prose, the way the author uses the landscape as an extension of the characters’ emotional states, and the book’s willingness to sit with silence, with the things that people in families don’t say to each other but that shape every interaction. A genre novel with the same plot would likely provide more explanations, more overt conflict, more resolution. This book trusts the reader to hear what’s being said in the spaces between the words.

Echoes of Iron has more conventional narrative momentum, a plot that pulls you forward in a way that’s almost thriller-like in its pacing. But the prose is doing things that a typical thriller wouldn’t attempt, using sentence structure and imagery to create dissonance and unease that mirrors the protagonist’s psychological state. And the ending, without spoiling it, asks questions that it deliberately doesn’t answer. A reader who needs closure might find that frustrating. A reader who accepts the book on its own terms will find it haunting.

I think the most honest thing I can say about literary fiction is that it’s fiction that asks more of its readers. Not more intelligence, not more education, not more cultural capital. More attention. More willingness to slow down, to re-read a sentence, to sit with confusion, to trust that the author is taking them somewhere even when the destination isn’t visible. In exchange for that attention, literary fiction offers something that I find irreplaceable: the experience of inhabiting another consciousness so fully that you come out of the book slightly changed, seeing the world in a way you didn’t before.

This exchange, attention for transformation, is what we’re publishing for. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and what keeps me reading manuscripts at night. It’s what I mean when I say literary fiction, even though I know the term is imperfect and contested and probably always will be.

There’s a practical dimension to this that I should mention, because the “literary fiction” label has real market consequences. Bookstores shelve literary fiction separately from genre fiction, and the two sections attract different browsing behaviors. Readers who go to the literary fiction section are typically looking to discover rather than to satisfy a specific appetite. They’re open to surprise in a way that genre browsers often aren’t, because genre readers usually know what they want (a mystery, a romance, a fantasy) and are looking for the best version of that specific thing. Literary fiction readers are more likely to pick up a book based on the first paragraph than on the back cover description. This is why voice matters so much in our category: the first paragraph is the audition, and the voice is what determines whether the reader keeps going.

The market for literary fiction is also, I should note, smaller than the market for most genre categories. Romance alone outsells literary fiction by a factor of roughly four to one. Mystery and thriller combined outsell it by an even larger margin. This means that publishing literary fiction is, by definition, a decision to pursue quality of readership over quantity. Our readers may be fewer in number, but they tend to be intensely engaged, deeply loyal, and unusually likely to recommend books to other people. They’re the readers who write letters to authors, who come to readings, who follow a publisher’s list the way music fans follow a record label. That kind of readership is precious and, I’d argue, worth the trade-off in volume.

I want to address one more thing, which is the increasingly blurry boundary between literary and genre fiction. This is a trend I’m enthusiastic about. Some of the most interesting writing happening right now exists in the overlap: literary novels that borrow the structures of genre fiction, genre novels that bring literary ambition to their prose. Kazuo Ishiguro writes a novel about clones and wins the Nobel Prize. Susanna Clarke writes a fantasy novel that’s also a profound meditation on loneliness and art. Colson Whitehead writes an alternate-history adventure about the Underground Railroad that’s both a page-turner and a work of serious literary art.

At ScrollWorks, we’re interested in this boundary-crossing work. We don’t require our books to fit neatly into the literary fiction box. We require them to care about prose, to respect their readers’ intelligence, and to aim for something deeper than entertainment alone. If a book does those things while also telling a gripping mystery or a love story or a speculative what-if, so much the better. The category labels are a convenience for bookstores and marketers. The actual experience of reading doesn’t care about categories.

So the next time someone asks me what we publish, maybe I should skip “literary fiction” altogether and just say: we publish books that you read slowly, that you think about for days afterward, and that you press into the hands of someone you love with the words, “You need to read this.” That’s clunky as a marketing tagline, but it’s closer to the truth than any genre label will ever be.

I own a first edition of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair that I bought at a used bookstore in Philadelphia about twelve years ago. The previous owner, whose name I don’t know, read it with a pencil. The margins are full of their handwriting: questions, reactions, small drawings, underlined passages connected by arrows to notes on the facing page. On page 147, next to a passage about jealousy, they wrote “this is exactly it” and underlined the phrase three times. I have never met this person. I know them, in some ways, better than people I see every day.

That book, with its penciled marginalia, is one of my most prized possessions. It has given me more sustained pleasure than almost any other object I own. And it represents something that I think we’re in danger of losing: the tradition of writing in books, of treating the margins as space for conversation between reader and text. This is my love letter to that tradition, and my argument for why it matters more than most people think.

Marginalia, for the unfamiliar, refers to notes, comments, and marks made in the margins of books by their readers. The practice is as old as books themselves. Medieval monks annotated manuscripts with commentary and corrections. Renaissance scholars filled margins with cross-references and disputes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was such a prolific marginalia writer that his notes on other people’s books have been published as a multi-volume set. Mark Twain’s marginalia was acidic, funny, and revealing of a mind that could not encounter a sentence without having an opinion about it. Edgar Allan Poe literally reviewed other writers’ work in the margins of their own books.

These aren’t just historical curiosities. They tell us something important about what reading actually is when it’s done with full engagement. Reading is not passive reception. It’s an active, creative process in which the reader’s mind interacts with the text to produce meaning that neither the text nor the reader could have generated alone. Marginalia is the visible trace of that interaction, the evidence that someone was here, thinking, reacting, arguing, being moved.

I started writing in books in college, mostly because a professor I admired told me that any book I wasn’t willing to mark up was a book I wasn’t reading seriously enough. I resisted at first. Like many people, I’d been taught to treat books as sacred objects, to be kept pristine and handled with care. Writing in a book felt transgressive, almost violent. It took me several months to get past that feeling, and when I did, my reading life changed fundamentally.

Here’s what happens when you read with a pencil in your hand. You slow down. Not dramatically, but noticeably. The pencil creates a kind of accountability. You can’t just let your eyes drift over the words in that semi-attentive mode that accounts for, if I’m honest, a lot of my casual reading. The pencil demands that you engage, that you decide whether each passage is worth marking, and that you articulate, even if only in a word or a phrase, what your reaction is. This slowing down is not a cost. It’s the benefit. It’s the thing that transforms reading from consumption into conversation.

My marginalia has a personal vocabulary that has evolved over the years. An exclamation mark in the margin means I found the sentence striking, either for its beauty or its insight. A question mark means I disagree or don’t understand. “Yes” means the author has articulated something I’ve felt but never been able to express. A squiggly line under a sentence means the prose itself is doing something interesting, rhythmically or structurally. A star means I want to find this passage again. “NB” (nota bene) means this idea connects to something else I’ve been thinking about. None of this system is particularly original. But it’s mine, and returning to a book I’ve marked up is like returning to a journal from a particular period of my life.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because I think it gets at something that highlighting on a Kindle simply cannot replicate. When I open a book I read ten years ago and see my own marginalia, I’m encountering two texts simultaneously: the author’s and my own. The notes I made reveal who I was as a reader at that specific moment in time. Sometimes I’m embarrassed by them. (My twenty-year-old self had some terrible opinions about Thomas Hardy.) Sometimes I’m surprised by them, discovering that I once had an insight I’ve since forgotten and that, reading it again, strikes me as genuinely good. The marginalia creates a record of my intellectual and emotional life that photographs and journals don’t capture, because it’s specifically tied to the act of reading, which is the act I most consistently use to think.

I want to make an argument here that might be controversial: marginalia is an act of love, not destruction. I know that many book lovers recoil at the thought of writing in books. I understand the impulse. A beautiful book, well-designed and carefully made (and we try very hard to make beautiful books at ScrollWorks), feels like something that should be preserved as it is. But a book that sits on a shelf, unread or read without engagement, is a book that isn’t fulfilling its purpose. A book with pencil marks in the margins is a book that has been lived in, wrestled with, made personal. The marks are evidence that the book did its job.

There’s a wonderful essay by the philosopher Mortimer Adler, written in 1941, called “How to Mark a Book.” Adler makes the case that there are two kinds of book ownership: having a book on your shelf and having a book in your mind. Marginalia, he argues, is the bridge between the two. I think he’s right, and I think the argument has only gotten stronger in the decades since he made it, as the sheer volume of reading material available to us has increased to the point where passive, un-engaged reading is the default mode for most people most of the time.

The rise of digital reading has complicated this conversation in interesting ways. E-readers allow highlighting and note-taking, and these features are popular; Amazon reports that millions of Kindle users highlight passages regularly. But there’s something qualitatively different about digital marginalia and handwritten marginalia that I want to try to articulate.

Handwritten marginalia is physical, spatial, and personal. The handwriting itself carries meaning. A note written in confident, large letters feels different from one squeezed into the corner of a margin in tiny script. The placement of a note, whether it’s next to the relevant passage or jammed at the bottom of the page because you ran out of room, tells you something about the reader’s engagement and process. Over time, the pencil marks become part of the book’s physical character, as much a feature of the object as the binding or the typography.

Digital highlights, by contrast, are uniform, disembodied, and impermanent. They look the same regardless of the reader’s emotional state when they were made. They’re stored in a database somewhere, detached from the physical act of reading. They can be deleted. They don’t age. They don’t have handwriting. They’re useful as a retrieval tool, certainly. But they lack the intimate, personal quality that makes handwritten marginalia feel like a conversation with your past self.

I’m not making an anti-technology argument here. I read on a Kindle sometimes, and I highlight when I do. But I notice that the books I read digitally leave a lighter impression on my memory than the books I read in print and annotate by hand. This might be a personal quirk. But research on the “haptic” qualities of reading, the way physical engagement with a book affects comprehension and retention, suggests that there’s something real happening here, something connected to the hand-brain pathway that typing and tapping don’t activate in the same way.

Let me talk about the social dimension of marginalia, because this is where it gets really interesting. Used books with marginalia are a form of accidental communication between strangers. When I bought that Graham Greene novel in Philadelphia, I entered into a one-way conversation with its previous owner. Their notes revealed what moved them, what confused them, what they cared about. I found myself agreeing with some of their observations and arguing with others. At one point they wrote “too Catholic” in the margin, which made me laugh because Greene’s Catholicism is so central to the novel that objecting to it is a little like complaining that the ocean is too wet. But the note told me something about this person, about their intellectual limits, their preferences, their blind spots. Reading a book through someone else’s marginalia is the literary equivalent of walking through someone else’s house. You learn about them whether they intended you to or not.

Some of the most valuable research materials in literary studies are annotated books from the personal libraries of writers. Knowing what Virginia Woolf underlined in her copy of Montaigne tells us something about her intellectual formation that no biography can capture. Herman Melville’s marginalia in his copies of Shakespeare reveals the specific passages and ideas that fed into Moby-Dick. These annotated books are primary sources, windows into creative processes that would otherwise be invisible.

I sometimes think about what happens to my own annotated books after I’m gone. My children will presumably inherit my library, and they’ll find, in the margins, a record of their father’s reading life that spans decades. The thought is a little mortifying (do I really want them to know how many times I’ve re-read certain novels?) but also comforting. The marginalia will be there long after I’m not, a trace of a mind engaging with the words that mattered most to it.

For anyone who wants to start writing in books but feels inhibited, here’s my practical advice. Start with a pencil, not a pen. Pencil feels less permanent and therefore less intimidating. Use a soft lead, 2B or softer, which leaves a dark enough mark to see but doesn’t dig into the paper. Start by just underlining passages that strike you. You don’t have to write full sentences in the margins. A checkmark, a question mark, a single word is plenty. The goal isn’t to produce a scholarly apparatus. It’s to create a record of your attention.

And if you’re still uncomfortable writing in books, at least consider the dog-ear. I know this is another line in the sand for book purists, but a dog-eared page is a page you wanted to return to, and wanting to return is the highest compliment a reader can pay. Some of my favorite books have corners so worn from repeated dog-earing that the pages have become soft and rounded, like stones in a river. Those worn corners tell a story about how much the book has been loved, and I’d rather have a battered, loved book than a pristine, neglected one every time.

At ScrollWorks, we make books to be read, not preserved. We choose paper that takes pencil well. We set generous margins that have room for notes. We want our books to be lived in, argued with, returned to. When I hear that a reader has written in one of our books, I feel a particular kind of satisfaction. It means the book did what it was supposed to do. It started a conversation that is still going on, in the margins, long after the last page was turned.

There’s a used bookstore in my neighborhood that has a section labeled “annotated copies.” The owner started it as a joke, setting aside the books with the most interesting marginalia, and it became one of the most popular sections in the store. Customers browse the annotations as much as they browse the books. They like seeing how other people read. They like the intimacy of it, the sense of eavesdropping on someone else’s encounter with a text. I think that tells you everything you need to know about why marginalia matters. Reading is a private act. Marginalia makes it communal, one reader reaching across time and space to another, saying: I was here, and this mattered to me.

So this is my love letter, not just to marginalia, but to the kind of reading that marginalia represents: slow, attentive, personal, and endlessly renewable. The book on your nightstand is not a museum piece. It’s an invitation. Pick up a pencil and accept it.