I subscribe to more literary magazines than I can keep up with. At last count, the number was somewhere around fourteen, which means that on any given week, there’s a new issue arriving in my mailbox or my inbox that… Read more →

In March of 2021, we had 4,000 copies of a new title sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey, ready to ship. The books had been printed on schedule, the orders were in, and the release date was three weeks… Read more →

The manuscript arrived in early spring, about 280 pages, double-spaced, with a cover letter that said simply: “This is the story of my mother’s life. I’ve been writing it for five years. I hope you’ll consider it.” I read the… Read more →

A few months ago, I was reading submissions from two writers who were telling very similar stories. Both had written literary fiction set in small towns. Both featured a woman returning home after years away. Both dealt with family secrets… Read more →

I got into an argument at a dinner party last year about whether non-fiction publishers actually check their facts. A friend of a friend, a novelist, said something like, “Non-fiction is just opinion with footnotes.” I nearly choked on my… Read more →

Nobody at ScrollWorks expected it. We had printed 2,000 copies, which felt optimistic at the time. The book was a quiet literary novel about a woman who restores old photographs for a living, set in a small town in Vermont… Read more →

A few months ago, I was flipping through a new release from another publisher and noticed something that made me unreasonably happy. The acknowledgments page was four pages long. Four pages of the author thanking specific people, telling little stories… Read more →

I collect old book covers the way some people collect vinyl records. Not the books themselves, necessarily. Just the covers. I have a drawer in my office with about two hundred of them, torn from damaged copies I found at… Read more →

I am going to be honest with you: I have watched talented authors sabotage themselves trying to build a platform. I have watched them burn out on Twitter, post on Instagram with the hollow cheerfulness of someone who would rather… Read more →

On March 16, 2020, we sent our entire staff home. At the time, I thought we would be back in two weeks, maybe three. I remember packing my laptop and a single notebook, leaving everything else on my desk. The… Read more →