Most people have never heard of a manuscript auction, and even among writers, the details are surprisingly murky. I’ve participated in a handful from the publishing side, and the experience is nothing like what the word “auction” conjures. There’s no gavel. No one shouts bids across a crowded room. It happens over the phone and via email, stretched across hours or days, and it’s simultaneously one of the most exciting and most agonizing processes in publishing.

Here’s how it works, roughly. An author writes a book, or more commonly, writes a proposal and sample chapters. Their literary agent submits the manuscript or proposal to editors at multiple publishing houses simultaneously. This is called going “on submission” or “on sub,” and it’s the point where the manuscript leaves the agent’s hands and enters the wild. The agent typically targets 10 to 20 editors who they believe are a good fit for the book, based on the editor’s taste, their publisher’s strengths, and what they’ve acquired recently.

If only one editor wants the book, there’s no auction. The agent and the editor negotiate a deal directly. Simple enough. But if two or more editors want the book, the agent has leverage, and they can initiate an auction. This is where things get interesting.

The agent sets the rules. There are several auction formats, and the agent chooses whichever one they think will maximize the outcome for their client. The most common formats are the “best bids” auction, the “round” auction, and the preempt. Each has its own dynamics, and understanding them reveals a lot about how publishing really works behind the scenes.

In a best bids auction, the agent tells all interested editors to submit their best offer by a certain deadline. Each editor submits a package: an advance amount, a royalty rate, rights included, marketing commitments, and sometimes a personal letter explaining their vision for the book. The agent and author review all the bids and choose the one they like best. It’s not always the highest number. An editor who offers a smaller advance but has a brilliant marketing plan and a track record of bestsellers might win over someone who offers more money but less enthusiasm. The relationship matters. The author is going to work with this editor for months or years. Chemistry counts.

Round auctions are more structured. The agent sets a floor price (the minimum bid) and asks editors to submit opening offers. After the first round, the agent goes back to each bidder and tells them (in vague terms) where they stand. Bidders can raise their offers, hold, or drop out. This continues for as many rounds as necessary until one bidder remains. Round auctions can drag on for days. I’ve been in auctions that went seven or eight rounds, with incremental increases each time, and the emotional toll on everyone involved is significant. Each round requires going back to your publisher and asking for more money, which means justifying why this book is worth the escalating price. It’s stressful for editors, who are essentially gambling their reputation on each bid.

The preempt is the most dramatic option. A preempt happens when one editor sees a manuscript they want so badly that they offer a large sum to take it off the table before an auction can happen. The agent brings the preemptive offer to the author and says, essentially, “someone is offering you a lot of money right now, but if you turn it down and go to auction, you might get more. Or you might not.” It’s a bird-in-hand calculation. A $200,000 preempt is concrete. The possibility of a $300,000 auction is theoretical. Some authors take the sure thing. Others roll the dice. I’ve seen both decisions pay off and both blow up.

The advance amounts in these auctions span an almost absurd range. For a debut literary novel, a competitive auction might push the advance from $25,000 to $75,000 or $100,000. For a celebrity memoir, we’re talking millions. Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” reportedly commanded a $65 million deal. That’s an extreme outlier, but it illustrates the ceiling. Most auctions settle in the low six figures, which sounds like a lot until you remember that the author’s agent takes 15 percent, taxes take another 25 to 35 percent, and the remaining amount is typically paid in installments over two to three years. A $100,000 advance might net the author $15,000 to $20,000 per year after agent commission and taxes. It’s a living, but barely.

What fascinates me about manuscript auctions is how subjective the bidding is. Editors aren’t bidding on a product with a known market value, like a house or a painting at Sotheby’s. They’re bidding on potential. They’re looking at an unfinished or recently finished manuscript and trying to predict whether it will resonate with readers a year and a half from now, when the book actually hits shelves. That prediction is based on gut instinct, market analysis, comparable titles (“comps”), and the editor’s personal taste. It’s an educated guess, but it’s still a guess. The history of publishing is littered with expensive manuscripts that flopped and cheap acquisitions that became phenomena. Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman famously said about Hollywood. The same is true for publishing.

The emotional dynamics of an auction are worth examining. For the author, it’s validation. After months or years of writing, often in isolation, someone is fighting to publish your work. Multiple someones, competing against each other, throwing money at the chance to put your words into the world. It’s intoxicating. I’ve watched first-time authors go through auctions, and the transformation is visible. They go from anxious and self-doubting to giddy within hours. The danger is that the giddiness can cloud judgment. A high advance creates high expectations. If your book got a $200,000 advance, the publisher needs it to sell enough copies to justify that investment. If it doesn’t, your next book will be a harder sell, regardless of its quality. In publishing, you’re only as good as your last sales figures.

For editors, auctions are a mix of excitement and dread. Excitement because they’ve found a manuscript they love, dread because winning the auction means they’ve spent their publisher’s money on a promise. Every editor has a budget, and every dollar spent on one book is a dollar not spent on another. Acquiring an expensive book means taking a risk, and if the risk doesn’t pay off, it affects the editor’s ability to acquire future books. Senior editors at major houses have been fired over expensive acquisitions that tanked. The stakes are real.

I want to talk about what happens after the auction, because the money is only the beginning. Once a deal is struck, the author and editor begin what can be an intense revision process. The editor who won the auction might have very specific ideas about how the manuscript should change. Sometimes those ideas align with the author’s vision. Sometimes they don’t. The auction’s romantic glow can fade quickly when you’re on your third round of structural revisions and your editor wants you to cut a character you love. The advance check is long since deposited. Now comes the actual work.

The auction process also has a dark side that’s worth acknowledging. It can create a hype machine that the book can’t sustain. Publishing is an industry that runs on buzz. A big auction generates trade press coverage (in outlets like Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace), which generates excitement among booksellers, which generates pre-orders, which generates more coverage. This feedback loop can propel a book to success based partly on the perception that it must be good because so many publishers wanted it. But sometimes a book gets overhyped in the auction phase and underdelivers on publication. The readers don’t care how much the publisher paid. They care whether the book is good. And a highly anticipated book that disappoints readers gets punished harder than a book nobody expected anything from.

Small presses like ours rarely participate in auctions for the simple reason that we can’t compete on advance size with the Big Five. Our acquisitions process is more straightforward: we find manuscripts we love, we make offers we can afford, and we trust that our editorial attention and care will compensate for smaller advances. Some authors prefer this model. They’d rather have a publisher who’s deeply invested in their specific book than a large publisher where they’re one title among hundreds. Others want the resources and distribution that only a large publisher can provide. Both are reasonable positions.

For aspiring authors, the takeaway from all of this is that the auction is the exception, not the rule. Most books are not auctioned. Most books are sold in quiet, bilateral negotiations between one agent and one editor. The goal should be writing a book good enough to attract a great editor, not engineering a bidding war. If a bidding war happens, wonderful. Your agent will handle it. But chasing the auction as an end in itself leads to writing for the market rather than writing the book only you can write, and market-chasing almost always produces worse books.

I also want to mention what auction culture does to the books that don’t get auctioned. When publishing media covers a big auction, the implicit message is that the value of a book can be measured in dollars. A $500,000 acquisition gets trade press coverage. A $15,000 acquisition does not. This creates a false hierarchy where expensive books seem more important than cheap ones, which is obviously nonsense. Some of the best books published in any given year were acquired for small advances with no auction at all. The editor saw something they loved, made a fair offer, and the agent accepted. No drama. No headlines. Just two people agreeing that a book was worth publishing. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’d argue it’s healthier than the frenzy of a competitive auction, because the expectations are realistic and the pressure is manageable.

The auction also affects what kinds of books get written, in ways that aren’t always positive. Agents know that certain types of books are more likely to generate competitive interest. High-concept thrillers, celebrity memoirs, narrative nonfiction with a “hook” that can be described in one sentence: these are auction-friendly. Quiet literary fiction, experimental work, poetry, essay collections: these almost never go to auction. If agents are steering their clients toward auction-friendly work (and some agents definitely do this), then the auction system is subtly shaping the literary ecosystem, favoring certain kinds of books over others and making it harder for less commercially obvious work to find a home.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve built our list almost entirely outside the auction system. The books we publish, works like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are books we found through direct relationships with authors and agents, acquired at prices we could afford, and published with the kind of attention that a small press can provide. They didn’t arrive with six-figure price tags or bidding wars. They arrived because someone believed in them, and that belief turned out to be enough.

The manuscript auction is one of publishing’s more theatrical rituals. It’s where art meets commerce in the most explicit way, where a manuscript’s value is determined not by its literary merit but by how many people want to bet on it. It can launch careers, generate life-changing money, and create the kind of industry buzz that keeps booksellers and reviewers paying attention. It can also create unrealistic expectations, inflate advances beyond what the market will bear, and set up authors for a disappointment that has nothing to do with the quality of their writing. Like most things in publishing, it’s complicated. The money is real. The excitement is real. The risk is also real. And the only thing that matters in the end, long after the auction is forgotten and the checks are cashed, is whether the book was worth reading. That part has nothing to do with auctions at all.

I have a confession: I used to care about literary awards. A lot. I’d follow the Booker Prize longlist announcements the way some people follow the NFL draft. I’d read the National Book Award finalists every year, form opinions about who deserved to win, and feel genuinely aggrieved when the “wrong” book took the prize. This was before I worked in publishing. Before I understood how the sausage gets made.

Now I still follow the awards, but with a different set of eyes. I see the machinery behind the selections. I understand the politics, the economics, and the compromises that go into every shortlist. And while I still think literary awards do some good in the world, I’ve become skeptical about how much they actually tell us about the quality of the books they honor.

Let me back up. Literary awards have been around for over a century. The Nobel Prize in Literature was first awarded in 1901. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction started in 1918. The Booker Prize in 1969. The National Book Awards in 1950. These prizes were created, in theory, to identify and celebrate the best writing being produced. They were supposed to be meritocratic: a panel of qualified judges reads widely and selects the most deserving work. In practice, it’s never been that simple.

The first complication is that “best” is a subjective judgment, and the judges are human beings with tastes, biases, and blind spots. A Booker Prize jury of five people might include a novelist, a critic, an academic, a broadcaster, and a former politician. Their reading preferences, their politics, their idea of what literature should do, will all differ. The winning book is usually a compromise, the book that the most jurors could agree on, which is not the same as the book any one juror would have chosen on their own. Consensus tends to favor the unobjectionable over the bold. I’ve talked to former Booker jurors who admitted that their personal favorite didn’t win because they couldn’t persuade their fellow judges. The book that wins is often the second or third choice of most jurors rather than the first choice of any of them.

The second complication is that awards judges can only consider books they know about. This sounds obvious, but the implications are significant. For the major prizes, publishers submit books for consideration. A small press with a limited marketing budget might publish a brilliant novel that never reaches the judges’ attention because it wasn’t submitted, or was submitted too late, or arrived in a pile of 300 other books and got lost. The logistics of reading for a major prize are staggering. The Booker Prize typically considers 150 to 170 submissions. The judges have about six months to read them, which means reading roughly one book every day and a half. Under those conditions, some deserving books inevitably get short shrift.

Publisher lobbying is another factor that doesn’t get discussed enough. The major publishers invest significant resources in positioning their books for awards consideration. They send advance copies to jurors with carefully crafted notes. They take jurors out to lunch. They orchestrate review coverage timed to awards season. None of this is illegal or even unethical in the formal sense, but it creates an uneven playing field. A debut novel from an independent press is competing for attention against books backed by professional publicity campaigns. The playing field isn’t level, and pretending it is does a disservice to the smaller publishers and the authors they represent.

The commercial impact of winning a major literary prize is enormous and well-documented. Winning the Booker Prize typically increases a book’s sales by 500 to 1,000 percent. Even being longlisted can double or triple sales. For the Pulitzer, the effect is similar. A prize sticker on the cover is the single most powerful marketing tool in publishing, more effective than any review, any advertising campaign, or any celebrity endorsement. This commercial power is both the prize’s greatest strength and its most corrupting influence, because it means the stakes are high enough to invite gaming.

The diversity question has reshaped literary awards more than any other force in the last decade. For most of their history, the major prizes overwhelmingly honored white male authors writing in a realist tradition. The numbers are stark. Of the first 50 Booker Prize winners, the vast majority were white, and many came from a narrow band of Anglophone literary culture (British, Irish, Australian, South African, Canadian). The National Book Award has a similarly homogeneous history. This wasn’t an accident; it reflected the demographics of publishing, criticism, and academia, where the judges were drawn from.

In recent years, there’s been a conscious effort to diversify both the judging panels and the shortlists. The results have been dramatic. The Booker Prize has gone to authors from India, Nigeria, Scotland, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka in recent years. The National Book Award has recognized a much broader range of voices and styles. The Pulitzer has expanded its scope to include graphic novels and genre-adjacent work. Whether you view this as a correction of historic injustice or as a dilution of standards depends entirely on your prior assumptions about what “literary merit” means, and who gets to define it.

I think the diversification has been largely positive, and I say that not as a political statement but as a literary one. The old prizes were drawing from an unnecessarily narrow pool. There’s no reason to believe that the best novel published in any given year is more likely to come from London than from Lagos, or from a professor than from a prison inmate. Expanding the pool of consideration doesn’t lower the bar. It widens the net. Some of the most exciting fiction I’ve read in the last five years has come from traditions that the old prize committees would never have considered.

That said, the overcorrection risk is real. There’s a version of prize culture where books are selected primarily for their identity politics rather than their literary accomplishment, where the author’s biography becomes more important than the work itself. I’ve seen shortlists that felt assembled for demographic balance rather than literary quality, and I don’t think that serves anyone, least of all the authors who deserve to be recognized for their writing rather than their identity. The ideal is a prize culture that considers a wide range of work on its merits, recognizing that “merits” includes formal innovation, emotional power, intellectual ambition, and cultural significance. We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we were.

The proliferation of literary prizes is another trend worth examining. There are now thousands of literary awards worldwide, from the Nobel down to hyper-specific prizes for books about particular regions, themes, or demographics. The Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize, formerly the Baileys Prize) was created in 1996 because women were consistently underrepresented on the Booker shortlist. The Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Hugo Awards for science fiction, the Edgar Awards for mystery: the list goes on. Each prize has its own criteria, its own judges, its own constituency.

This proliferation has diluted the impact of any individual prize while increasing the overall attention paid to literary fiction. A book can now be longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and win the Kirkus Prize, accumulating stickers on its cover like a frequent flyer collecting miles. Each recognition brings a bump in attention and sales. The cumulative effect can be substantial. But it also creates a kind of awards industrial complex, where publishers strategize about which prizes to target and position their books accordingly. The publishing calendar is now structured around awards season in a way that it wasn’t twenty years ago.

Self-published and independently published books remain largely excluded from major literary prizes, which is one of the most significant barriers remaining for those authors. Most major prizes require books to be published by a recognized press. Some have relaxed these requirements, but the bias persists. This means that the award system still functions as a validation mechanism for traditional publishing, which is convenient for traditional publishers and frustrating for everyone else. I’d like to see this change, but I’m not holding my breath. The prize committees and the publishing industry are deeply intertwined, and there’s little incentive for either to open the gates wider.

What do literary awards actually tell readers? I think they tell you that a book was good enough to survive a process of competitive evaluation by a small group of informed readers. That’s not nothing. It’s a signal, and for readers who are overwhelmed by the volume of new books published each year, it’s a useful one. But it’s not a guarantee of quality, and it’s certainly not a ranking. The winner of the Booker Prize is not objectively “better” than the shortlisted books or the longlisted books or the hundreds of books that were never submitted. It’s the book that a particular group of judges, in a particular year, under particular pressures, chose. Change the judges and you change the winner. This is true of every prize in every field.

I’ve come to think of literary awards the way I think of restaurant reviews: useful as a starting point but unreliable as a definitive judgment. A Michelin-starred restaurant is probably good, but it might not be to your taste. A Booker Prize winner is probably worth reading, but it might not be the book that changes your life. The books that have meant the most to me personally include zero prize winners. They’re books I stumbled onto through recommendations, bookstore browsing, or pure accident. The awards ecosystem is one way into good books, but it’s not the only way, and over-relying on it can narrow your reading in ways you don’t intend.

The future of literary awards is uncertain. The financial pressures on publishing are intensifying, which means the commercial importance of prizes is growing at the same time that public trust in institutional gatekeepers is declining. There’s a tension between the prize’s role as a commercial marketing tool and its stated mission as a cultural institution. You can’t serve both masters perfectly. A prize that always chooses commercially successful books will be accused of populism. A prize that always chooses obscure literary fiction will be accused of elitism. Most prizes oscillate between these poles, satisfying neither camp fully.

Social media and book-focused platforms like Bookstagram, BookTok, and Goodreads have created alternative influence channels that sometimes rival the awards in their commercial impact. A BookTok viral moment can sell more copies than a Pulitzer nomination. This parallel system of literary discovery is messy, algorithm-driven, and aesthetically different from the awards ecosystem, but it’s reaching readers that the traditional prize circuit never did. Young readers in particular are more likely to discover books through TikTok than through the National Book Award longlist. The awards committees know this, and some have responded by trying to make their selections more accessible and their announcements more social-media-friendly. Whether this represents adaptation or dilution depends on your perspective.

There’s also the question of genre. Most major literary prizes explicitly or implicitly exclude genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. The assumption baked into this exclusion is that literary fiction is more worthy of recognition than genre fiction, which is a value judgment that I find increasingly hard to defend. The best science fiction published in a given year is often more intellectually ambitious than the literary fiction on the Booker longlist. The best mystery novels are often more tightly crafted. The best romance novels often have more emotional honesty. Restricting “serious” prizes to literary fiction impoverishes the conversation about what writing can do, and it means that a huge portion of what people actually read is excluded from institutional recognition.

Genre has its own awards, of course. The Hugo and Nebula for science fiction. The Edgar for mystery. The RITA (now renamed) for romance. But these awards operate within their communities and rarely break through to mainstream literary consciousness. The divide between “literary” and “genre” awards reinforces the broader cultural hierarchy that privileges one kind of storytelling over another, a hierarchy that most readers instinctively reject. Readers don’t care about categories. They care about good books.

I still follow the major literary prizes, and I still read the shortlisted books. But I no longer mistake the shortlist for a definitive statement about what’s best. It’s a starting point, a conversation opener. The real work of finding the books that matter to you, the books that will sit on your shelf for decades and change how you see the world, that work is yours to do. No committee can do it for you, however well-intentioned they are. The prizes light up certain books and leave others in shadow. Your job as a reader is to look in the shadows too.

My grandmother read westerns. Paperback Louis L’Amour novels with cracked spines and sun-faded covers, stacked on the table beside her recliner in a house that smelled like coffee and wool. She read one every few days, sometimes recycling through the same ones she’d read before, and she never once, in all the years I knew her, expressed interest in reading anything else. My mother read mysteries. Agatha Christie, then Patricia Cornwell, then eventually every Scandinavian crime novelist who got translated into English. My father read exactly two kinds of books: military history and Tom Clancy. He kept them in his office on a shelf that sagged visibly in the middle.

When I was a teenager, I thought all of this was faintly embarrassing. I was reading Kafka and Hemingway by then, assigned in school and sought out on my own, and I had the standard young person’s conviction that my taste was better than my family’s. I never said this out loud, but I thought it. The literary fiction I was reading was serious. Their genre fiction was entertainment. Looking back, I was an insufferable snob, and I was also wrong about nearly everything.

The question of how to share books across generations, how to bridge the gaps in taste, experience, and expectation that separate family members, is one I’ve been thinking about since I started working in publishing. It’s a personal question as much as a professional one. I’ve spent years trying to get my parents to read the books I love, and they’ve spent years politely declining. Meanwhile, some of the most meaningful reading experiences I’ve had as an adult have come from finally picking up the kinds of books they always read. The bridge I was trying to build was there all along. I just had to walk across it from the other direction.

Let me start with the practical challenge. Family members often have wildly different reading levels, preferences, and relationships with books. Your twelve-year-old who devours graphic novels is not the same reader as your seventy-year-old parent who reads one literary novel a month. Your spouse who listens to audiobooks during their commute is not the same reader as your sibling who hasn’t finished a book since college. Recommending books across these differences requires empathy, flexibility, and a willingness to set aside your own preferences.

The most common mistake I see is recommending books you love instead of books the other person might love. These are not the same thing. I adore Cormac McCarthy, but I would never recommend “Blood Meridian” to my mother, who reads for comfort and pleasure and has no interest in literary violence. Giving someone a book they’ll hate isn’t generous. It’s selfish. You’re not sharing a book; you’re asserting your taste. Real sharing means understanding what the other person enjoys and finding something that works for them, even if it’s not what you’d choose for yourself.

Here’s my framework for recommending books across generational lines. First, ask what they’ve loved recently. Not what they’re reading now, but what they’ve genuinely loved. The answer will tell you more about their taste than any genre label. If your father says he loved a particular thriller, ask him what he loved about it. Was it the pacing? The setting? The main character? The answer lets you recommend something adjacent. If he loved the setting (say, Cold War Berlin), you can suggest another book set in that world, even one from a different genre. If he loved the pacing, you can suggest another fast-moving book. You’re matching on the quality they value, not on the surface category.

Second, find books that work on multiple levels. Some books are genuinely cross-generational because they operate differently for different readers. “The Hobbit” is the classic example. A ten-year-old reads it as an adventure story. A forty-year-old reads it as a meditation on comfort versus purpose. A seventy-year-old reads it as a story about a late-in-life journey. The text is the same, but the reading experience changes with the reader. Books like this are gold for family sharing because everyone can enjoy them, even if they’re enjoying different things.

Third, consider format. This is where a lot of family book-sharing fails. Your teenager might prefer audiobooks. Your parent might prefer large-print editions. Your sibling might only read on their phone. Recommending a book without considering how the person will actually consume it is setting them up for friction. I’ve had great success giving audiobooks to family members who “don’t have time to read.” They have time to listen. They just didn’t think of listening as reading. (It is.)

The generational divide in reading taste is real, but I think it’s narrower than people assume. My parents and I disagree about plenty, but we’ve found surprising common ground in certain authors. We all love John le Carre. We all love Erik Larson’s narrative nonfiction. We all love anything by Bill Bryson. These are authors who write well enough to satisfy a literary reader and accessibly enough to satisfy a genre reader. They exist in a middle ground that gets overlooked by the literary establishment and the genre community alike, and they’re perfect for cross-generational sharing.

Family book clubs are something I recommend enthusiastically, with caveats. The idea is simple: family members read the same book and discuss it, either in person or over the phone. The reality is complicated. Family dynamics don’t pause for book discussion. If your brother always dominates conversations, he’ll dominate the book club. If your mother takes any criticism of her reading taste personally, suggesting changes to her choices will go badly. The book club needs ground rules, and the most important one is: no judgment about what someone did or didn’t enjoy. The point is sharing the experience, not winning an argument.

I’ve been in a family book club, informal as these things go, for about three years now. It’s me, my mother, my sister, and my aunt. We take turns picking books. The picks have ranged from literary fiction (my choices, predictably) to cozy mysteries (my aunt’s) to memoirs (my mother’s) to young adult novels (my sister’s, which she reads with her kids). What I’ve found is that reading outside my comfort zone for family discussion has been one of the best things to happen to my reading life. I’ve discovered entire subgenres I’d dismissed. I’ve had conversations about books that revealed things about my family members I never knew. My aunt’s reaction to a particular memoir sparked a conversation about her own childhood that we’d never had in thirty years of family gatherings. Books created a safe space for that conversation in a way that direct questions never could have.

Reading with children deserves special attention, because the habits formed in childhood determine adult reading behavior more than any other factor. Research on reading development consistently shows that children who are read to regularly by parents become readers themselves. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how long this effect lasts. Being read to as a preschooler correlates with reading habits decades later. The investment you make in reading to a four-year-old pays dividends when they’re forty.

But reading with children, as opposed to reading to them, requires a different approach as they grow older. A five-year-old is happy to be read to. A twelve-year-old wants to choose their own books and would rather die than have a parent read aloud to them. The transition from reading-to to reading-alongside is tricky. One approach that works well is parallel reading: you and your child each read your own books in the same room, at the same time. No discussion required. Just the shared experience of reading as a normal family activity. This normalizes reading in a way that exhortations to “put down your phone and pick up a book” never will. Children learn from what they see, not from what they’re told.

For teenagers specifically, I’d urge parents to resist the temptation to direct their reading. If your teenager wants to read manga, let them read manga. If they want to read dystopian young adult fiction, let them read it. If they want to read horror, romance, or comic books, support that. Any reading is better than no reading, and the path from genre fiction to literary fiction (if that path is even necessary, which I’d argue it isn’t) usually runs through enthusiasm rather than obligation. A teenager who loves reading because they discovered a series that speaks to them is more likely to become a lifelong reader than a teenager who was force-fed “The Great Gatsby” and came to associate books with homework.

I think often about the reading relationship I had with my grandmother. She never pushed her westerns on me, and I never pushed my literary fiction on her. But we talked about reading constantly. She’d tell me about the L’Amour novel she was rereading, describing the open plains and the characters with a warmth that made me understand why she loved them. I’d tell her about whatever I was reading for school, and she’d listen with genuine interest, asking questions that showed she was paying attention even if the books weren’t her style. We never shared a single book. We shared the love of reading. Looking back, that mattered more.

The specific books are almost beside the point. What I’m really talking about is creating a culture of reading within a family, which is different from curating a family reading list. A culture of reading means books are visible in the home. It means conversations about what you’re reading happen naturally, not as assignments. It means going to bookstores together is a family activity. It means giving books as gifts, not because you think the person needs to read more, but because you know they’ll enjoy this particular book. It means respecting each other’s taste, even when you don’t share it.

I’ve noticed that the families who read together tend to communicate better in general. I can’t prove causation, but the correlation is strong in my experience. Reading gives you a shared vocabulary for discussing emotions, conflicts, and ideas that might be difficult to discuss directly. It’s easier to talk about a character’s grief than your own. It’s easier to explore a moral dilemma in fiction than in real life. Books provide distance from difficult subjects, and sometimes that distance is exactly what a family needs to approach something they’ve been avoiding.

One thing that works surprisingly well across generations is re-reading. If your parent or grandparent has a favorite book, ask them about it. Not “what’s it about” but “why do you love it?” Then read it yourself. You’ll be reading the same words they read, but you’ll experience them differently because you’re a different person in a different time. When you discuss the book afterward, those differences become the conversation. My mother re-reads “Pride and Prejudice” every few years, and when I finally read it in my thirties (having dismissed it as a teenager), we had one of the best literary conversations of our lives. She saw the comedy and the social commentary. I was struck by Austen’s ruthlessness about economic reality. We were reading the same book from completely different angles, and the collision of our perspectives was more interesting than either would have been alone.

Gifting books well is an underrated skill. Most people give books as gifts the same way they recommend them: based on their own taste rather than the recipient’s. I’ve received dozens of books as gifts over the years, and the ones that meant the most were chosen by people who clearly thought about what I would enjoy, not what they thought I should enjoy. A great book gift says “I see you.” A bad book gift says “I wish you were more like me.” If you don’t know what to give, a gift card to an independent bookstore is almost always welcome. It lets the person choose their own adventure while still communicating that you support their reading habit.

If you want to start sharing books with your family and you don’t know where to begin, start small. Don’t announce a family book club with meetings and schedules. Just mention what you’re reading at dinner. Ask what they’re reading. If someone mentions a book that sounds interesting, pick it up. If you finish a book you think a family member would enjoy (based on their taste, not yours), pass it along with a sticky note that says “thought you might like this.” No pressure. No assignment. Just an invitation. The best reading relationships, like the best relationships of any kind, grow from small gestures repeated over time. Your grandmother’s stack of L’Amour novels might seem like a world away from your Booker Prize shortlist. But the impulse behind both, the desire to sit down with a story and let it carry you somewhere, is exactly the same. Start there.

We get asked about literary agents constantly. Authors email us, pitch us at events, and corner us at bookfairs to ask: what do you look for in an agent? The question usually means something slightly different than what it says on the surface. They’re really asking: what kind of agent will you work with, and what kind of agent should I try to get? I appreciate the question, and I have opinions.

Before I get into specifics, I should explain why literary agents matter to a small press like ScrollWorks. Some people assume that small presses only publish unagented work, that agents are strictly the province of the Big Five. That’s not true. We acquire books from agents regularly. Not as often as the large publishers, because agents naturally target the publishers who can pay the biggest advances, but often enough that our relationships with agents are an important part of how we find books. A good agent sends us manuscripts they think are a fit for our list, and over time, we’ve built relationships with agents whose taste aligns with ours. When certain agents send us something, we read it immediately because we trust their judgment.

So what do we look for? The first thing, and I think the most important, is taste. A good literary agent has a coherent, identifiable aesthetic. You can look at their client list and see a through line. Not identical books, but books that share a sensibility. Maybe the agent gravitates toward voice-driven literary fiction. Maybe they specialize in narrative nonfiction with a social justice angle. Maybe they represent a mix of commercial and literary work that all shares a certain intelligence. Whatever the specificity, the point is that the agent’s taste tells you something about how they read and what they value. An agent whose client list looks random, a thriller here, a self-help book there, a poetry collection somewhere else, with no apparent connecting thread, makes me nervous. It suggests they’re acquiring opportunistically rather than building a coherent portfolio.

This matters to us as publishers because an agent’s taste is a filter. When an agent with great taste sends us a manuscript, we know it’s already passed through a high bar. The agent has read it, loved it, and chosen to invest their time and reputation in it. That recommendation carries weight. It means we can prioritize that submission over the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts that arrive in our inbox. The agent is, in effect, doing part of our acquisitions work for us, and that’s only valuable if their judgment is consistently good.

The second thing we look for is editorial skill. The best literary agents are also excellent editors. They don’t just sell manuscripts; they develop them. They work with authors on revisions before the manuscript goes on submission, sometimes through multiple rounds of editing that can take months. By the time a manuscript reaches our desk from a strong editorial agent, it’s already been significantly improved. This saves us time and resources, and it means the book we’re considering is closer to its final form. We can evaluate it more accurately, which makes our acquisition decisions better.

Not all agents are editorial. Some are primarily dealmakers: they find promising manuscripts, send them out quickly, and negotiate the best terms. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, and some very successful agents operate this way. But from our perspective, we prefer working with agents who’ve already put editorial work into the manuscript. It signals that the agent is invested in the book’s quality, not just its saleability. And it tends to produce manuscripts that are further along in development, which matters when you’re a small press without an army of in-house editors.

The third thing is professionalism, and by this I mean a specific set of behaviors that make the business side of publishing work smoothly. A professional agent responds to emails within a reasonable timeframe. They provide clean, properly formatted manuscripts with clear metadata (title, word count, genre, comp titles). They give realistic timelines for responses. They don’t play games with exclusivity or try to create artificial urgency. They negotiate firmly but fairly, understanding that the publisher needs to make money too. They honor agreements and don’t try to renegotiate after the deal is done.

I’m listing these things because you’d be surprised how many agents fall short on basic professionalism. I’ve dealt with agents who take months to respond to offers, agents who misrepresent manuscripts (overstating the word count, exaggerating the author’s platform, or describing the book in terms that don’t match its contents), and agents who make demands that are wildly inappropriate for a deal of the given size. Every publisher has stories like these, and they erode trust quickly. An agent who is difficult to work with once is an agent we think twice about working with again.

The fourth quality, and perhaps the most underrated, is what I’d call author advocacy. A good agent genuinely cares about their clients’ careers, not just the current deal, but the trajectory. They think about where this author should be in five years, ten years. They advise on everything from which projects to pursue next to how to manage social media presence to whether a particular speaking engagement is worth the travel. This kind of holistic career management is rare, and it’s what separates a good agent from a great one.

We can see the difference in how authors behave during the publishing process. An author with a strong, engaged agent tends to be more confident, more organized, and more realistic about expectations. They ask better questions. They push back when they should and defer when they should. They’ve been prepared by their agent for the realities of publishing, which means there are fewer surprises and fewer conflicts. An author whose agent is disengaged, on the other hand, often seems adrift. They don’t know what to expect, they don’t know what questions to ask, and they sometimes make demands that suggest nobody has explained how the process works.

I want to talk about what we don’t look for in agents, because there are common assumptions that I think are misleading. We don’t particularly care how big the agency is. A solo agent with 15 clients can be more effective than a large agency with 300. Size doesn’t correlate with quality. Some of the best agents we work with are one-person operations running out of their apartments. They’re responsive, their taste is impeccable, and they fight hard for their authors. Meanwhile, some large, prestigious agencies have agents who are coasting on the agency’s reputation without doing the work.

We also don’t prioritize agents based on their social media presence or industry profile. Some excellent agents are practically invisible online. They don’t tweet, they don’t do interviews, they don’t appear on panels. They just do the work, quietly and effectively. An agent’s value is measured by how well they serve their clients, not by how many followers they have. The industry sometimes confuses visibility with quality, and that confusion can lead authors astray.

For authors seeking agents, here’s what I’d recommend based on everything I’ve observed from the publisher’s side. First, research the agent’s client list. Are the authors on that list writing the kind of work you write? Are their books published by houses you’d want to be published by? This is the single most important piece of due diligence you can do. An agent who represents literary fiction and you write commercial thrillers is a mismatch, no matter how prestigious they are.

Second, talk to the agent’s existing clients if you can. Ask them what the agent is like to work with. Is the agent communicative? Do they give editorial feedback? How long did the submission process take? Were there surprises? Most authors will be honest if you ask directly, and their answers will tell you more than the agent’s website or their Publisher’s Marketplace profile.

Third, pay attention to the business terms. Most agents charge a 15 percent commission on domestic sales and 20 percent on foreign sales. These are standard. If an agent charges reading fees, upfront costs, or commissions higher than these, walk away. Legitimate agents make money when you make money. They don’t charge for the privilege of reading your manuscript.

Fourth, trust your instincts during the initial conversation. When an agent offers representation, you’ll typically have a phone call where you discuss the manuscript, the agent’s vision for it, and the submission strategy. This call is, in some ways, a first date. Do you like talking to this person? Do they seem genuinely enthusiastic about your work, or are they going through the motions? Do they ask smart questions about your manuscript, or do they seem to have only a surface-level understanding? Do they talk about your career or just this one book? The answers matter. You’re choosing a business partner who will represent you for years, potentially decades. Chemistry isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing.

Fifth, be wary of agents who promise specific outcomes. No agent can guarantee a sale. No agent can guarantee a particular advance amount. No agent can guarantee that your book will be published by a specific house. An agent who makes promises like these is either naive or dishonest, and neither quality is desirable in someone managing your career. The best agents are honest about the uncertainties of the market. They’ll tell you what they think is realistic, share their submission strategy, and be transparent about the range of possible outcomes.

From the publisher’s perspective, the ideal agent-publisher relationship is collaborative rather than adversarial. Some agents treat every negotiation as a zero-sum game, fighting for every dollar and every clause as if we’re opponents. I understand the impulse; they’re advocating for their client. But publishing works best as a partnership. The agent, the author, and the publisher all want the same thing: a successful book. When the agent trusts the publisher to do right by the author, and the publisher trusts the agent to be reasonable in their demands, the result is a smoother process and, usually, a better book. The adversarial approach can extract better deal terms in the short run but damages the relationship in the long run, and relationships are the currency of publishing.

I should note that not every author needs an agent, particularly in today’s market. If you’re self-publishing, an agent has no role to play. If you’re submitting to small presses that accept unsolicited manuscripts (we do, by the way), you can submit directly. Agents are most valuable for authors targeting the larger publishers, where having representation is essentially required, and for authors who want someone to manage the business side of their career so they can focus on writing. The agent’s value proposition is expertise and access. If you don’t need either of those things, you don’t need an agent.

One final thought on the agent question. The publishing industry is changing quickly, and the role of the literary agent is changing with it. Some agents now help clients with self-publishing strategies, managing the production and marketing of books that bypass traditional publishers entirely. Others have expanded into film and television rights management, recognizing that the screen adaptation market is often more lucrative than book sales. A few have started their own imprints or consulting firms. The agent’s job in 2023 looks very different from what it looked like in 2003, and it will look different again in 2033. The best agents are the ones who adapt to these changes while keeping their core mission intact: serving the author’s interests across a long career.

But if you do need one, choose carefully. The wrong agent can be worse than no agent at all. A bad agent will misrepresent your work, alienate the editors who might have loved it, negotiate poorly, and leave you worse off than if you’d submitted on your own. The right agent will make your career. They’ll improve your manuscript, place it with the right publisher, negotiate a fair deal, and guide your career with a long-term vision that you’ll be grateful for ten books from now. The gap between a bad agent and a great one is the widest gap in publishing, and for authors, it’s the decision that matters most. More than the publisher. More than the cover. More than the marketing plan. Get the agent right, and the rest tends to follow.

I walked into a bookstore in Portland last spring, one of those places where the shelves lean slightly under the weight of their inventory and the floorboards creak in a way that feels deliberate, like the building is trying to tell you something. The owner, a woman named Ruth who looked to be in her mid-sixties, was shelving a stack of poetry collections by hand. She didn’t look up when I came in, which I appreciated. There’s something deeply comforting about a shopkeeper who trusts you to find your own way.

That store, like hundreds of others scattered across the country, shouldn’t exist. At least, that’s what the prevailing wisdom told us twenty years ago. When Amazon began selling books at steep discounts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the obituaries for independent bookstores were already being written. The American Booksellers Association reported that membership dropped from around 4,000 stores in the early 1990s to roughly 1,400 by 2009. The numbers were grim. The trend line was a cliff.

And yet here I was, standing in a thriving independent bookstore in 2023, watching a customer buy three hardcovers at full price without flinching. Something happened between the supposed death of the indie bookstore and this moment. That story, the one about survival and reinvention, is more interesting than the doom narrative ever was.

The Near-Death Experience

To understand how independent bookstores survived, you need to understand how close they came to not surviving. The early Amazon era wasn’t just about price competition, though that was bad enough. It was about convenience. Suddenly you could order any book from your couch at 11 PM and have it arrive in two days. For a certain type of reader, the kind who knew exactly what they wanted and just needed the transaction completed, this was irresistible.

Borders went bankrupt in 2011, which rattled even the biggest optimists. If a chain with 600 stores couldn’t survive, what hope did a single-location shop have? Barnes & Noble spent years looking like it might follow the same path, closing locations and struggling with its identity. The message seemed clear: physical bookstores were a relic.

But here’s what the doomsayers missed. Borders didn’t fail because people stopped wanting bookstores. Borders failed because it was a mediocre bookstore that also happened to be a terrible technology company. It had outsourced its online sales to Amazon in 2001, essentially handing its digital future to its biggest competitor. The chain’s stores were generic, interchangeable, designed more for efficiency than experience. When the financial pressure came, there was nothing holding customers to Borders specifically. No loyalty. No reason to make the trip.

Independent bookstores, the ones that survived, had something different. They had identity.

The Curation Advantage

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, particularly as we publish our own titles here at ScrollWorks Media. When I visit an independent bookstore, I’m not looking for a specific ISBN. I’m looking for a surprise. I want someone who reads 200 books a year to tell me which five I absolutely need to read next. Amazon’s algorithm can try to do this, but it’s working from purchase data and browsing history. A good bookseller is working from taste, intuition, and the look on your face when you describe what you’re in the mood for.

This is what I’d call the curation advantage, and it turned out to be the single most important differentiator for indie stores. When everything is available everywhere (and it is; Amazon has essentially infinite selection), the ability to narrow that selection down becomes the valuable skill. Think about it this way: Netflix has thousands of movies, but most people I know still ask friends for recommendations. Having too many choices isn’t a feature. It’s a problem. Independent booksellers solve that problem every single day.

Powell’s in Portland does this at scale, with staff picks covering every section and handwritten shelf-talkers that sometimes read like miniature essays. But the same principle works at a 500-square-foot shop in a small town. The owner knows the community. She knows that Mrs. Henderson wants historical fiction but nothing too violent, and that the teenager who comes in after school every Thursday is working through all the Ursula K. Le Guin he can find. That knowledge is worth more than any recommendation algorithm.

The Community Pivot

Sometime around 2012 or 2013, I started noticing a shift in how independent bookstores talked about themselves. They stopped competing on selection and price (a battle they could never win) and started competing on experience and community. This wasn’t just marketing. It was a fundamental reimagining of what a bookstore is for.

Author events became more ambitious. Book clubs multiplied. Some stores started hosting children’s story hours, writing workshops, poetry slams, and even live music. The bookstore stopped being purely a retail transaction and became a gathering place, a social hub that happened to sell books. This was smart, because Amazon can ship you a book but it cannot host your neighborhood’s monthly fiction discussion group.

I remember attending a launch event at a small store in Austin around 2015. The place was packed, maybe 80 people in a room designed for 40. The author read from her novel, answered questions, signed books, and then everyone stuck around for wine and conversation. I bought three books that night, none of which I’d come in planning to buy. That experience, the discovery, the social component, the feeling of being part of something, cannot be replicated by clicking “Add to Cart.”

The numbers back this up. The ABA’s membership began climbing again around 2010 and has grown steadily since. By 2022, there were over 2,000 member stores, a significant recovery from the 2009 low. New stores were opening, often started by younger entrepreneurs who saw the bookstore less as a traditional retail play and more as a community-centered business with books at the heart of it.

The Buy-Local Movement Helped More Than Anyone Expected

It would be dishonest to talk about indie bookstore survival without acknowledging the broader buy-local movement that gained momentum in the 2010s. Consumers, particularly younger ones, started caring about where their money went. The idea that spending $25 at a local store keeps more of that money circulating in the local economy than spending $25 on Amazon resonated with people. Organizations like the Institute for Local Self-Reliance published research showing that for every $100 spent at a local business, roughly $68 stayed in the community, compared to about $43 for a chain and even less for an online retailer.

Bookstores became symbols of this movement. They were visible, beloved, and vulnerable, which made them perfect rallying points. “Save your local bookstore” became a bumper sticker, a social media cause, and eventually a genuine consumer behavior shift. I know people who make a point of buying every book at their local indie even when it’s a few dollars more. They see it as an investment in their neighborhood, not an expense.

The IndieBound and Bookshop.org platforms amplified this effect by giving people a way to buy books online while still supporting independent stores. Bookshop.org, which launched in early 2020, was particularly well-timed. When the pandemic forced physical closures, it gave readers a guilt-free alternative to Amazon and directed a meaningful percentage of sales back to indie stores. By the end of 2020, the platform had generated over $30 million for independent bookstores. That’s not pocket change.

What Didn’t Work

Not every strategy worked, and I think it’s worth being honest about that. Some bookstores tried to compete with Amazon on price, which was essentially financial suicide. You cannot discount a product when you’re buying it in quantities of 10 or 20 and your competitor is buying it in quantities of 10,000. The math doesn’t work. Stores that tried to be everything to everyone, stocking massive inventories across every genre, often struggled because the overhead was crushing and the curation suffered.

The e-reader threat, which loomed large in 2010-2013, turned out to be less catastrophic than feared. E-book sales peaked around 2014 and then leveled off. It turned out that most readers didn’t want to go entirely digital. They wanted both. A Kindle for travel and a physical book for their nightstand. This was good news for bookstores, but the stores that had panicked and tried to become tech retailers (selling e-readers, tablets, and accessories) mostly wasted their energy.

Some stores also made the mistake of leaning too heavily into sideline merchandise, things like candles, tote bags, and journals. These products can be a nice supplement, but I’ve been in stores where the books feel like an afterthought, where the front tables are covered with literary-themed socks and pun mugs. That’s a gift shop, not a bookstore. The ones that survived long-term kept books at the center and treated everything else as secondary.

The Pandemic Plot Twist

COVID-19 should have been the killing blow. Stores closed their doors. Foot traffic vanished. Events were impossible. And yet, something remarkable happened: people read more. Stuck at home, anxious and bored, millions of Americans picked up books in quantities not seen in years. Print book sales in 2020 actually increased, rising 8.2% over 2019 according to NPD BookScan.

Independent bookstores adapted with startling speed. They set up online ordering systems overnight, sometimes literally. They offered curbside pickup, curated subscription boxes, and virtual author events that drew audiences from across the country rather than just the neighborhood. Some stores found that their virtual events actually attracted more attendees than in-person ones had, because geography was no longer a limiting factor.

The pandemic also deepened the emotional connection between communities and their bookstores. When people saw their local shop in danger, they rallied. GoFundMe campaigns for bookstores raised significant amounts. Customers pre-ordered books they didn’t need yet just to keep the cash flowing. Gift card sales spiked. It was a collective act of commitment, a community saying “we are not going to let this place disappear.”

I find this genuinely moving, and I think it reveals something important about why bookstores matter beyond their commercial function. They’re landmarks. They’re part of the identity of a neighborhood. Losing your local bookstore feels different from losing a chain restaurant or a cell phone store. It feels personal.

The BookTok Effect

Starting around 2020 and accelerating through 2021 and 2022, TikTok’s book community (known as BookTok) became a genuine force in bookselling. Young readers were filming themselves in bookstores, showing off their hauls, recommending titles, and turning certain books into viral sensations. Colleen Hoover’s backlist, for example, exploded on BookTok and drove enormous physical book sales.

What’s interesting for independent bookstores is that BookTok’s aesthetic favors the physical object. These videos are about the book as a tangible thing, the cover, the pages, the satisfaction of holding it. A Kindle download doesn’t generate the same content. This brought a wave of younger customers into physical bookstores who might otherwise have defaulted to online purchasing. Some indie stores leaned into this brilliantly, creating photogenic displays and BookTok recommendation sections that drew foot traffic from a demographic they’d struggled to reach.

I have mixed feelings about BookTok’s influence on what people read (the homogeneity of recommendations can be frustrating), but its effect on independent bookstores has been largely positive. Any force that gets more people walking through the door is a good one.

The Publisher Relationship

One thing that rarely gets discussed in these narratives is the evolving relationship between independent bookstores and publishers. For a long time, the big publishers treated indies as an afterthought, focusing their marketing and co-op dollars on chains and Amazon. That’s shifted. Publishers now recognize that independent bookstores generate disproportionate word-of-mouth for new titles. A staff pick at an influential indie can start a chain reaction of handselling that no amount of Amazon advertising can replicate.

As a small publisher, I see this from both sides. When an independent bookseller gets behind one of our titles, the effect on sales is real and measurable. It’s not just the copies that store sells. It’s the recommendations, the social media posts, the book club selections, the conversations at the register. That kind of organic, trusted promotion is incredibly valuable.

Some publishers have responded by creating specific programs for independent stores, offering better terms, exclusive editions, and advance reader copies. Penguin Random House’s Independent Bookstore Marketing program and similar initiatives from other big publishers represent a real acknowledgment that these stores matter to the ecosystem.

What the Future Looks Like

I don’t want to be naively optimistic about this. Independent bookstores face real challenges. Commercial rents continue to rise in many cities. Labor costs are increasing. The supply chain disruptions of 2021-2022 created inventory headaches that smaller stores were less equipped to handle. And Amazon isn’t going anywhere; it still controls roughly half of all book sales in the United States.

But the stores that have survived the last twenty years have proven something important: there is a market for the bookstore experience that Amazon cannot serve. The question going forward isn’t whether indie bookstores will exist. It’s what they’ll look like. I think we’ll see more hybrid models, stores that combine books with coffee shops, co-working spaces, event venues, and other community functions. We’ll see more stores with strong online presences that complement rather than compete with the physical space. And we’ll see more stores that specialize, focusing on specific genres, communities, or interests rather than trying to stock everything.

The bookstore I visited in Portland, Ruth’s place, does all of this almost intuitively. She hosts a monthly gathering for local writers. She maintains a small but well-curated online store. She specializes in literary fiction and poetry, which means her regulars trust her taste completely. The store isn’t big, it isn’t flashy, and it isn’t trying to be Amazon. It’s trying to be the best version of itself, and that turns out to be enough.

I left that day with a novel I’d never heard of, recommended by Ruth herself. “You look like you need something quiet,” she said, handing me the book. She was right. I did. And that, in a sentence, is why independent bookstores survived. They pay attention in ways that algorithms never will.

If you’re looking for your next read and want to support a small press in the process, check out our catalog. We’d love for you to discover one of our titles at your local indie bookstore.

I started keeping a reading journal in 2018, mostly on a whim. A friend had mentioned she wrote down a few lines about every book she finished, and the idea lodged in my brain like a song you can’t stop humming. I bought a plain Moleskine notebook, wrote the date and the title of whatever I was reading at the time, and scribbled a half-page of reactions. That was five years ago. I’m on my third notebook now, and the practice has changed the way I read in ways I didn’t anticipate.

This isn’t a productivity hack. I’m not going to tell you that journaling will help you retain more information or read faster or impress people at dinner parties with your encyclopedic recall. It might do some of those things, incidentally. But the real value is stranger and harder to quantify. Keeping a reading journal forces you to have a relationship with what you’ve read, and that relationship, like any other, requires attention.

The Forgetting Problem

Here is something embarrassing: before I started journaling, I could not reliably tell you what I’d read six months prior. I’d look at a book on my shelf and think, “Did I read this? I think I read this.” Sometimes the cover triggered a vague emotional memory, something like “I think this one was sad,” but the specifics were gone. Characters’ names, plot details, the particular passages that had struck me at the time: all evaporated.

This bothered me more than it probably should have. I was spending 15 to 20 hours a week reading, which is a significant time investment, and retaining almost nothing beyond a blurry impression. It felt wasteful. Not in a utilitarian, every-minute-must-be-optimized kind of way, but in the sense that I was having experiences I couldn’t revisit. Imagine going on a trip to a country you’d never been to, spending two weeks there, and then forgetting nearly everything about it within a year. You’d be frustrated. That’s what reading without any form of record-keeping felt like to me.

The science on this is pretty clear, by the way. Psychologists have known since Hermann Ebbinghaus’s work in the 1880s that memory decays rapidly without reinforcement. His “forgetting curve” shows that we lose roughly 70% of new information within 24 hours unless we actively engage with it. Writing about a book, even briefly, is a form of active engagement. It forces you to process what you’ve read rather than simply consuming it and moving on.

What I Actually Write Down

My system, if you can call it that, has evolved over time. In the beginning I tried to be thorough. I wrote summaries, character analyses, thematic observations. This lasted about three weeks before the effort started feeling like homework and I nearly quit the whole thing.

What I settled on is much simpler. For each book I record the title, author, date I finished it, and then I write whatever comes to mind. Sometimes that’s a paragraph. Sometimes it’s half a page. Occasionally, when a book really gets under my skin, it’s two or three pages. There’s no template. I don’t rate books on a scale. I don’t try to be balanced or fair. I just write honestly about what the book did to me.

This matters more than you’d think. When I go back and read my entry about, say, a novel I read in early 2019, I’m not getting a sanitized review. I’m getting the raw reaction of the person I was at that moment. “I couldn’t stand the protagonist but kept reading because I needed to know if the sister survived.” “The prose in the middle section felt lazy, like the author was tired.” “I cried on the train reading the last chapter, which was mortifying.” These are messy, personal, sometimes contradictory impressions, and they’re infinitely more useful than a star rating would be.

Some people prefer more structured approaches, and that’s fine. I know readers who track page counts, reading speed, genres, and all sorts of metadata. There are apps like Goodreads and StoryGraph that can do this automatically. My concern with over-structuring is that it turns reading into a metrics exercise. I don’t want to think about my “reading pace” while I’m immersed in a novel. I want to think about the novel.

Patterns You Can’t See in Real Time

One of the unexpected benefits of keeping a journal for several years is that patterns emerge. I can look back at my reading from 2020, for instance, and see that I gravitated almost exclusively toward nonfiction during the first six months of the pandemic. I wasn’t making a conscious choice to avoid fiction. But the journal reveals it clearly: from March to August of that year, I read almost nothing but history and science. My brain apparently needed facts more than stories during that period.

I can also see my taste changing over time. In 2018, I was reading a lot of contemporary literary fiction, the kind that gets longlisted for major prizes. By 2021, I’d shifted toward older works, mid-century novels and pre-war nonfiction. Was this a response to something? A natural evolution? I’m not sure, but without the journal I wouldn’t even know it had happened. We’re bad at perceiving gradual change in ourselves. The journal provides a record that our memories can’t.

I’ve also noticed patterns in what I respond to most strongly. I tend to write the longest entries about books with complicated, morally ambiguous characters. Short entries usually mean the book was fine but forgettable. When I skip the entry entirely (which has happened maybe four or five times), it’s always because the book annoyed me and I didn’t want to spend another minute thinking about it. Even that absence is information.

The Rereading Question

Rereading is one of those topics that divides readers pretty sharply. Some people never reread anything, there are too many new books waiting. Others have a small collection of favorites they return to every few years. I fall somewhere in between, but keeping a journal has actually increased my rereading, and here’s why.

When I flip through my old entries, I sometimes encounter a book that provoked a strong reaction at the time but that I’ve since almost completely forgotten. The entry will describe something I found compelling, a particular scene or argument, and I’ll think “I don’t remember that at all.” That’s a signal. It means the book affected me enough to write about at length, which suggests it might be worth revisiting now that I’m a few years older and reading with different eyes.

I reread Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead this way. My 2019 entry was a full page of enthusiastic, slightly confused admiration. Reading it again in 2022, I found a completely different book, or rather, the same book that I was now equipped to understand differently. The journal entry from the first reading became a fascinating comparison point. I could see exactly what I’d missed, what I’d overvalued, and what had affected me both times.

This is something that Goodreads and similar platforms can’t really give you. They can tell you when you read something and what rating you gave it. They can’t tell you what you were thinking and feeling. That texture, those specifics, only exist in the journal.

Physical vs. Digital

I journal by hand in a physical notebook, and I realize that makes me sound like someone who also churns their own butter. There are perfectly good digital alternatives. Day One, Notion, a plain text file, a dedicated note in your phone. The tool doesn’t matter nearly as much as the habit.

That said, I find that writing by hand slows me down in a way that’s useful. When I type, I tend to compose, to edit as I go, to worry about phrasing. When I write by hand, I just get the thoughts out. The result is messier and more honest. Your mileage will vary. If you hate your own handwriting or never carry a notebook, a digital system will work just as well. The point is to write something, anything, about the books you read.

One argument for digital is searchability. I can’t search my handwritten journals without physically flipping through them, which is simultaneously annoying and pleasurable. Digital journals let you find every book about a specific topic, every mention of a particular author, every time you used the word “boring.” Some people find this extremely useful, especially if they write about books professionally or want to track specific reading goals.

I’ve considered switching to digital several times and always decided against it. There’s a physical pleasure in the notebook that I’m not willing to give up. Seeing the ink change (I use different pens), noticing where my handwriting gets cramped because I was excited and writing fast, feeling the weight of a full journal. These are sensory experiences that a database can’t replicate. But I want to be clear: this is a personal preference, not a prescription.

Journaling Changes How You Read

Here’s the thing nobody warned me about. Once you start keeping a reading journal, you read differently. Not dramatically, not in a way that ruins the experience, but in a subtle shift of attention. You start noticing things you want to remember. A particular metaphor. A structural choice. A moment where the author did something unexpected. Part of your brain is always slightly aware that you’ll be writing about this later, and that awareness makes you a more attentive reader.

I used to read the way I watched television: as a passive consumer, absorbing content and letting it wash over me. Journaling turned reading into something more like a conversation. I’m engaging with the text, pushing back against it, asking questions. “Why did the author end the chapter there?” “This argument seems to ignore a major counterpoint.” “The voice in this section feels different from the rest of the book, almost like it was written at a different time.” These aren’t thoughts I would have had before, because I wasn’t in the habit of articulating my responses.

Some readers might worry that this analytical layer would diminish the emotional experience. I’ve found the opposite. When you’re paying closer attention, the emotional highs hit harder. You notice the craft behind a devastating scene, and that awareness doesn’t reduce its impact. If anything, it amplifies it. You’re appreciating the book on two levels simultaneously: as an experience and as a made thing.

The Social Dimension

My reading journal is private. I don’t share it, I don’t post excerpts online, and I’d be mortified if anyone read some of my pettier entries. But even a private journal has a social function, in the sense that it’s changed how I talk about books with other people.

Before the journal, my book recommendations were vague. “Oh, it was really good, you should read it.” Now I can be specific. “The first hundred pages are slow but stick with it because the second half is extraordinary.” “If you liked X, you’ll love this because they’re both doing interesting things with unreliable narrators.” “Don’t read the reviews beforehand; the less you know, the better the ending hits.” This specificity makes me a better recommender, and my friends have noticed. I get asked for book suggestions a lot more than I used to.

It’s also improved my contributions to the book club I attend. Instead of showing up and saying “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it,” I arrive with actual observations. I can point to specific passages, reference specific structural choices, articulate exactly what worked or didn’t. This doesn’t make me the smartest person in the room (far from it), but it does mean I’m more prepared to engage with the discussion in a meaningful way.

Getting Started Without Overthinking It

If you’ve read this far and you’re considering starting a reading journal, I have one piece of advice: make it as easy as possible. Don’t buy an expensive journal with “Reading Log” embossed on the cover. Don’t design a template with fields for genre, page count, rating, and thematic analysis. Don’t look at other people’s meticulously organized reading journals on Instagram and feel inadequate before you’ve even started.

Get a notebook, any notebook. The next time you finish a book, open to a blank page and write what comes to mind. That’s it. If you write three sentences, that’s fine. If you write three pages, that’s also fine. The only rule is that you write something. You can figure out your system later, once you’ve established the habit.

The biggest threat to a reading journal isn’t doing it wrong. It’s not doing it at all because you’re waiting to do it perfectly. I know because I spent two years thinking about keeping a reading journal before I actually started one. Two years of lost entries that I’ll never get back. Don’t make that mistake.

Start with the book you’re reading right now. When you finish it, write down what you thought. Then do the same thing with the next one. In six months, you’ll have a record of your reading life that you’ll be grateful for. In five years, you’ll have something that feels almost like a diary, a record of who you were and how you changed, told through the books that accompanied you.

For what it’s worth, one of the books I wrote my longest journal entry about last year was The Last Archive, which surprised me with its emotional depth. Whether you end up journaling about our titles or someone else’s, the practice itself is the reward.

I have a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on vinyl that I bought at a record store in Chicago in 2011. I don’t listen to it very often anymore, but I keep it because the cover is one of the most beautiful pieces of graphic design I’ve ever seen. That blue, that particular shade, somewhere between midnight and cobalt, with Davis in profile, his trumpet raised. It tells you everything about the music inside before you hear a single note. Cool, spare, precise, and completely assured.

Now think about the last book cover that made you feel something comparable. Take your time. I’ll wait.

If you’re struggling, you’re not alone. Book cover design, despite some brilliant exceptions, has fallen into a kind of visual monotony that I find increasingly difficult to ignore. Walk into any bookstore and look at the fiction table. You’ll see a lot of the same visual vocabulary: desaturated color palettes, handwritten or hand-lettered titles, figures seen from behind or in silhouette, flat illustrations with limited detail. These covers aren’t ugly. Many of them are competent and even attractive. But they rarely surprise you, and they almost never stick in your memory the way a great album cover does.

I think the book industry could learn a lot from how the music world approaches visual identity, and I want to explain why.

The Album Cover as Cultural Object

Album covers have always occupied a different cultural space than book covers. Part of this is format. A 12-inch vinyl record sleeve is a big canvas, roughly 12.375 inches square, which gives designers real room to work. But format alone doesn’t explain the difference. Album covers have historically been treated as art objects in their own right, not just packaging for the product inside.

Think about the covers that have become iconic. Peter Saville’s design for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, those white radio waves on a black background, has been reproduced on t-shirts, posters, tattoos, and laptop stickers millions of times. Most of the people wearing that image have never listened to the album. The design has transcended its original purpose and become a freestanding piece of visual culture.

Or consider Storm Thorgerson’s work for Pink Floyd. The prism from The Dark Side of the Moon is recognizable to people who were born decades after the album’s release. The inflatable pig from Animals. The burning man handshake from Wish You Were Here. These images communicate ideas and feelings with an immediacy that most book covers don’t even attempt.

Why is this? I think there are several reasons, and understanding them might help us think about what book design could do differently.

Risk Tolerance

The music industry, for all its flaws, has historically been more willing to take visual risks than the publishing industry. When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967 with its wildly colorful, cluttered, collage-style cover, it wasn’t playing it safe. When Kanye West put a censored painting by George Condo on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, it was deliberately provocative. When Billie Eilish posed in a bathtub full of black liquid for “bury a friend,” it was weird and unsettling and perfect for the music it represented.

Publishing tends to be more conservative. There are understandable commercial reasons for this. A book needs to communicate its genre quickly. Readers browsing online need to be able to identify at a glance whether a book is literary fiction, a thriller, a romance, or a self-help title. This has led to a heavy reliance on genre signifiers: dark moody covers for thrillers, whimsical illustrations for rom-coms, bold typography for nonfiction. These conventions are useful, but they’ve become so rigid that many covers feel interchangeable.

I recently saw a Twitter thread where someone collected the covers of 30 recent literary fiction titles. Laid out in a grid, they looked like one cover with 30 slight variations. Muted colors. Abstract shapes or minimal illustrations. Serif fonts. No single cover was bad, but collectively they represented a failure of imagination. They were all trying so hard not to offend that they’d forgotten to excite.

The Thumbnail Problem

One factor that deserves its own discussion is the impact of online retail on cover design. When most books were sold in physical stores, a cover needed to work at actual size, 6 by 9 inches for a typical trade paperback. Now, with a huge percentage of discovery happening on Amazon, Instagram, and Goodreads, covers need to work at thumbnail size. That’s roughly the size of a postage stamp on a phone screen.

This has pushed design toward simplicity, which isn’t inherently a problem. Some of the best album covers of all time are extremely simple. But in publishing, the response to the thumbnail problem has been to make everything bold, high-contrast, and uncluttered to the point of generic. Designers are essentially designing for the worst possible viewing conditions, and the covers that result are legible but lifeless.

Compare this to how musicians have handled the same challenge. Streaming services display album art at similarly small sizes, but you don’t see the same homogenization in music. Artists like Tyler, the Creator still commission bold, idiosyncratic artwork. Beyonce’s Renaissance cover was striking and specific. Even at thumbnail size, these images have personality. They don’t all look the same.

I think the difference comes back to risk tolerance. The music industry decided that distinctive visuals were worth the trade-off of potentially being harder to read at small sizes. Publishing, by and large, made the opposite choice. And I think publishing chose wrong.

Typography as Identity

One area where album covers consistently outperform book covers is typography. Music designers have always treated type as a visual element, not just a way to display the artist’s name and the album title. The hand-drawn lettering on Led Zeppelin’s albums, the custom typefaces of Kraftwerk, the grunge-era chaos of Nirvana’s design: each typographic choice reinforced the music’s identity.

Book covers use typography too, obviously, but they tend to treat it more conservatively. There’s an over-reliance on a few “safe” typefaces and a reluctance to let type do the heavy lifting. The most memorable book covers of recent years, things like Chip Kidd’s work or the Penguin Drop Caps series, have been the ones that treat typography as art. But these are exceptions. The default in book publishing is still to use type that’s readable and appropriate but not particularly distinctive.

I’d argue that for many books, the title itself should be the primary design element. If you have a great title (and you should, because a bad title means you have bigger problems than your cover), why not make the typography extraordinary? Why not commission a custom hand-lettered title that becomes inseparable from the book’s identity? This is standard practice in music. It should be standard in publishing.

The Importance of Cohesive Visual Identity

One thing the music industry does exceptionally well is visual coherence across an artist’s career. When Radiohead releases an album, you can usually tell it’s a Radiohead album by the visual style before you see the band’s name. Stanley Donwood’s artwork has become so intertwined with the band’s identity that you can’t think of one without the other. The same goes for Gorillaz and Jamie Hewlett’s character designs, or the distinctive visual language that accompanies each Kendrick Lamar release.

Authors rarely have this kind of visual continuity. If you put the covers of a single author’s books side by side, they often look like they were designed by different people for different publishers, which in many cases is exactly what happened. Each book gets a cover that’s designed to sell that specific book, with little thought to how it relates to the author’s broader visual identity.

There are exceptions. Haruki Murakami’s Vintage International editions have a consistent visual language, as do many of Donna Tartt’s editions. But these are the result of specific design decisions, not the industry norm. For most authors, especially mid-list and debut authors, each cover is designed in isolation.

At ScrollWorks Media, this is something I think about constantly. When we design covers for our titles, I want a reader to be able to look at two of our books side by side and sense a relationship between them. Not identical, not templated, but belonging to the same family. I think this kind of visual consistency builds publisher recognition in a way that random, disconnected covers cannot.

Color as Emotion

Album cover designers have always understood that color is emotional, not decorative. The oppressive green of Type O Negative’s World Coming Down. The blinding white of the Beatles’ self-titled album. The warm analog orange of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. In each case, the color palette is doing real emotional work, setting a mood before any music plays.

Book covers use color too, but often in more predictable ways. Thrillers tend toward dark blues and blacks. Romances lean into pinks and pastels. Literary fiction often defaults to muted, sophisticated palettes that signal “serious” without communicating much else. These genre conventions serve a sorting function, but they don’t take many chances.

I’d love to see more book covers that use color with the same emotional precision as great album art. A novel about grief doesn’t have to be gray and muted. A comedy doesn’t have to be bright and cheerful. The most interesting design happens when the visual choices complicate the reader’s expectations rather than confirming them. A horror novel with a beautiful, serene cover. A love story in stark black and white. These contrasts create intrigue, and intrigue gets people to pick up the book.

Photography vs. Illustration

Album covers have moved fluidly between photography and illustration throughout their history. There’s no bias toward one or the other; it’s purely a question of what serves the specific project. Book covers, in the current market, trend heavily toward illustration for fiction and photography for nonfiction, with exceptions in both directions. This isn’t a rule anyone wrote down, but it’s a pattern that’s become so dominant it might as well be one.

I think breaking this pattern more often would produce more interesting covers. Some of the most striking book designs I’ve seen recently have been photographic covers for fiction, using images that are ambiguous and suggestive rather than literal. And some of the best nonfiction covers have been illustrated, using visual metaphor instead of documentary photography. The willingness to cross these artificial boundaries is something album cover design has always had, and book design needs more of.

The Designer’s Role

In music, album cover designers are sometimes famous. Vaughan Oliver, whose work for 4AD Records defined an entire aesthetic. Stefan Sagmeister, whose provocative designs became cultural talking points. Hipgnosis, the design collective behind some of the most iconic rock covers of the 1970s. These designers had creative freedom and were often given as much artistic latitude as the musicians themselves.

Book cover designers are rarely given that kind of latitude. The design process in publishing typically involves multiple rounds of revision, input from editors, marketing teams, sales departments, and sometimes the author themselves. The result is often a design that’s been committee’d into inoffensive competence. Nobody hates it, but nobody loves it either. It’s a cover that passed through enough filters to have all its edges smoothed away.

There are book designers doing extraordinary work. Peter Mendelsund, whose covers for Stieg Larsson and Kafka are brilliant. Chip Kidd, who has been reinventing book design for decades. John Gall’s consistently inventive work for Vintage Books. But these designers tend to work on high-profile projects where they have more creative freedom. The vast middle of the industry, the thousands of covers designed each year for mid-list titles, rarely receives the same attention or resources.

I think small publishers actually have an advantage here. Without the layers of corporate approval that slow down the big houses, we can take design risks more easily. When we designed the cover for Echoes of Iron, we had exactly three people in the conversation: the designer, the editor, and me. That’s it. No sales committee. No market research. Just a clear creative vision and the freedom to execute it. I think the result is a cover that feels personal rather than focus-grouped.

Where Things Are Heading

I see some hopeful signs. The success of independent publishers with strong visual identities, houses like Graywolf, Tin House, and Two Dollar Radio, is proving that distinctive design can be a commercial advantage. These publishers are developing recognizable visual brands, and their covers stand out precisely because they don’t look like everything else on the shelf.

Social media has also created new incentives for distinctive cover design. A striking, unusual cover gets shared on Instagram and BookTok in ways that a safe, conventional one doesn’t. If your cover becomes a meme or a trending post, that’s marketing money can’t buy. This is shifting the calculus slightly, making risk look less risky and convention look more costly.

I also think AI-generated imagery, for all its problems, is going to force a reckoning. As generic, AI-produced cover images become cheaper and more common, the value of truly original, human-designed covers will increase. The book that clearly had a real artist behind its cover will have a distinction that AI-illustrated books won’t. This is similar to what happened with music production: as digital tools made generic beats easy to produce, the value of distinctive, human musicianship went up.

What I’d like to see, and what I’m trying to do with the books we publish here, is a publishing culture that treats the cover as an essential part of the reading experience rather than a sales tool to be optimized. The best album covers aren’t marketing. They’re art that happens to also sell records. Book covers can be both, too, if we let them.

You can see some of our approach to design across our full catalog. Every cover gets the same creative attention as the words inside it.

My favorite opening line in all of fiction is eleven words long. It comes from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” That sentence has been lodged in my brain since the first time I read it in college, and I’ve spent years trying to figure out why it works as well as it does.

The obvious answer is that it’s beautifully strange. It opens a gothic horror novel not with a dark and stormy night but with a philosophical assertion about the nature of sanity and reality. It immediately tells you that this is not going to be a conventional ghost story. The word “organism” is doing something interesting, too, reducing human beings to biological specimens, which creates a clinical distance that makes the sentence more unsettling than if Jackson had written “no person” or “nobody.”

But I think the real reason it works is that it makes a promise. It tells the reader: this book is going to interrogate the boundary between what’s real and what isn’t, and by the end, you may not be sure which side you’re on. That’s a hell of a promise to make in your first sentence, and Jackson delivers on it completely.

I’ve been collecting opening lines for years, marking them in books, writing them down, thinking about what makes some of them land with the force of a physical blow while others slide past without leaving a mark. Here are some of my favorites and my best attempts at articulating why they work.

The Promise

Every great opening line makes a promise, though the nature of that promise varies enormously. Sometimes it’s a promise of subject matter. Sometimes it’s a promise of tone. Sometimes, in the most interesting cases, it’s a promise of the kind of attention the book will demand from you.

Consider the opening of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This sentence contains at least three timelines (the present of the firing squad, the future from which the narration looks back, and the past of the childhood memory), and it casually introduces the concept of ice as something that needs to be “discovered.” The promise is clear: this book is going to play with time, it’s going to be set somewhere where ice is a novelty, and it’s going to move between the epic and the intimate with dizzying speed. All of that is present in a single sentence.

Or take Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “They shoot the white girl first.” Nine syllables. No context. No explanation. The promise here is different: something violent is happening, race is central to it, and the narrative isn’t going to hold your hand. Morrison drops you into the middle of an event and forces you to keep reading to understand what’s going on. It’s aggressive and confident, and it establishes a tone of unflinching directness that carries through the entire novel.

Compare this to an opening like “It was a dark and stormy night,” which has become a joke precisely because it promises nothing specific. Dark and stormy compared to what? Where? Why should I care? The sentence is all atmosphere and no substance. Great openings are specific. They tell you something concrete about the world you’re entering.

Voice as Seduction

Some opening lines work primarily because of voice. They establish a narrator’s personality so quickly and so compellingly that you’d follow them anywhere.

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye does this: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” The run-on structure, the casual profanity, the dismissal of conventional autobiography, the conspiratorial “if you want to know the truth” at the end: Holden Caulfield is fully alive by the time you finish this sentence. You know exactly who is talking to you, and you have a visceral reaction to him (positive or negative; the novel famously provokes both).

A more recent example is the opening of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” This is a confession disguised as a weather report. The narrator is telling you about a death with the same casual tone you’d use to discuss a change in seasons. That tonal mismatch is the entire novel in miniature: terrible things described by people who’ve convinced themselves that their education and sophistication place them above ordinary moral categories. The voice is seductive precisely because it’s so unsettling.

What these openings share is personality. They don’t sound like they could have been written by anyone. They sound like they could only have been written by this specific narrator, and that specificity is what pulls you in. A generic voice, no matter how polished, can’t create the same magnetism.

The Provocative Statement

Some of the most effective openings work by saying something that seems wrong, or at least surprising, forcing the reader to engage intellectually from the first moment.

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is presented as a universal truth, but spend thirty seconds thinking about it and you start to wonder if it’s actually true. Are happy families really all alike? The sentence invites argument, which is a brilliant strategy for an opening. You’re already engaged with the text before the story even begins, because you’re thinking about whether you agree with its premise.

George Orwell’s 1984 uses a different kind of provocation: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The first clause is perfectly ordinary. The second is impossible, or at least deeply wrong. Clocks don’t strike thirteen. That single word, “thirteen,” tells you everything: you are in a world that looks familiar but isn’t. Something fundamental has changed. The ordinariness of the first clause makes the wrongness of the second clause hit harder, because the contrast is so sharp.

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis takes provocation to its logical extreme: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” (I’m using the Stanley Corngold translation here.) There’s no buildup, no explanation, no gradual reveal. A man is now a bug. The matter-of-fact tone is the key: Kafka presents this absurd event as though it’s merely unfortunate, like waking up with a cold. That gap between the enormity of the event and the flatness of its delivery creates an irresistible tension that drives the entire story.

Simplicity and Rhythm

Not every great opening is complex. Some of the best are devastatingly simple, relying on rhythm and word choice rather than elaborate construction.

“Call me Ishmael.” Three words. Three syllables, then two. The rhythm is perfect: a strong opening beat followed by the exotic, biblical name that immediately sets a tone of mythic grandeur. And the word “call” is interesting. It’s not “my name is.” It’s “call me,” which implies that Ishmael may or may not be his real name. There’s an invitation and a slight evasion in those three words, a combination that mirrors the novel’s own mix of intimacy and vastness.

Albert Camus’s The Stranger opens with similar economy: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” (Stuart Gilbert translation.) The first sentence is a gut punch. The second sentence complicates it in a way that tells you everything about the narrator. His mother has died and he’s not sure when. Not because the information is unavailable, but because he can’t quite bring himself to care about the specifics. That indifference is the entire character, compressed into two short sentences.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice takes simplicity in a different direction: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The irony here is so dry it’s practically dehydrated. Austen is pretending to state a universal truth while actually satirizing the social obsessions of her world. The formal, elevated language of “it is a truth universally acknowledged” applied to something as mundane as the marriage market creates a comic gap that flavors everything that follows.

The Slow Burn

I want to push back slightly against the idea that every opening needs to be a thunderbolt. Some of my favorite novels open slowly, establishing mood and place rather than grabbing you by the collar. These openings work through accumulation rather than impact.

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping begins: “My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nora Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.” The opening sentence is as plain as a sentence can be. But the subsequent sentence does something sneaky: it introduces a cascade of caretakers, each departure implied by the transition to the next, creating a sense of serial abandonment that builds with each clause. By the time you reach “and when they fled,” you understand that the narrator’s life has been defined by people leaving, and the quiet precision of her account makes the emotional weight heavier, not lighter.

This is a different kind of opening than Kafka’s shock or Salinger’s verbal fireworks, but it’s just as effective. It rewards the patient reader, the one who reads the sentence twice and realizes what’s happening beneath its surface calm.

Nonfiction Openings

Nonfiction openings face a different challenge. A novel can rely on character and mystery. Nonfiction needs to convince you that the subject is worth your time, which often means finding the human story inside the abstract topic.

One of my all-time favorites comes from John McPhee’s Oranges: “The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very old. It began among the well-to-do when the early railroads made it possible to ship oranges north.” Two sentences that completely reframe something you take for granted. You’ve been drinking orange juice your whole life without thinking about it. Now you’re thinking about it. McPhee has made the ordinary strange, and that’s enough to sustain an entire book about citrus.

Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem opens its title essay with: “The center was not holding.” Five words that borrow from Yeats and apply the apocalyptic sentiment to 1960s San Francisco. It’s literary, it’s urgent, and it immediately establishes Didion’s characteristic blend of intellectual rigor and emotional unease. You trust her as a guide because the sentence is so precisely constructed.

Rebecca Solnit opens A Field Guide to Getting Lost with: “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.” This is closer to poetry than journalism, and that’s intentional. Solnit is telling you that this book is going to move between the concrete and the abstract, between observation and meditation. The sentence is beautiful enough to function as a standalone line of verse, which sets expectations for the prose style to come.

What Makes a Bad Opening

I’ve spent most of this piece praising great openings, but I think it’s equally useful to think about what makes a bad one. Not mediocre, which is just forgettable, but actively bad, the kind that makes you put a book back on the shelf.

The worst opening sin is the information dump. “Detective Mark Sullivan was forty-three years old, six feet tall, and had been on the force for eighteen years. He lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Chicago after his divorce from his wife Sarah, who had taken their daughter Emma to live in Milwaukee.” I just made that up, but I’ve read dozens of openings like it. It’s a police report, not a story. Every detail is external and factual. You know what Mark Sullivan looks like but not how he thinks or feels. There’s nothing to engage with except data.

Equally deadly is the “waking up” opening, which writing workshops have been trying to kill for decades. “Sarah’s alarm went off at 6:30 AM. She groaned, hit snooze, and stared at the ceiling.” This tells me nothing except that your character sleeps and wakes up, which is true of every human being on earth. It’s not an opening. It’s a stall.

Then there’s the weather opening, which I’ll admit is a pet peeve. “Rain hammered against the windows of the old house.” Unless the weather is genuinely relevant to the story (as it is in, say, a novel about a flood or a hurricane), starting with a weather report is an avoidance tactic. The writer hasn’t decided how to begin, so they describe the sky. It’s the literary equivalent of small talk.

The Lesson for Writers

If I had to distill everything I’ve learned from collecting opening lines into a single principle, it would be this: the best openings are specific. They don’t try to appeal to everyone. They don’t hedge. They establish a voice, a world, or a situation with enough precision that the reader can immediately decide whether they want to continue. That might seem like a risky strategy, specificity inevitably alienates some readers, but the alternative is an opening so generic that it doesn’t attract anyone in particular.

Write the opening that only your book could have. Don’t write the opening that could belong to any book in your genre. Give me a reason to keep reading that goes beyond “the writing is competent and the premise sounds interesting.” Give me a sentence that I’ll remember after I’ve forgotten the plot, the characters, and even the title. That’s what the great ones do.

I’ve been thinking about opening lines a lot as we’ve worked on recent titles at ScrollWorks. The first pages of The Cartographer’s Dilemma went through more revisions than any other section, because getting that opening right felt non-negotiable. I think it was worth every hour we spent on it.

I gave a book five stars on Goodreads last year that I now think was probably a three. I’m not sure when the inflation happened, exactly. I finished the book on a Friday night, felt a warm glow of satisfaction, and clicked five stars almost reflexively. It was good. I enjoyed it. I had no major complaints. Five stars.

But “good” and “five stars” shouldn’t mean the same thing. Five stars should mean exceptional, transformative, one of the best books you’ve read in a long time. I’ve read maybe twenty books in my entire life that genuinely deserve five stars, and I’ve given the rating to at least sixty on Goodreads. Something is wrong with this system, and I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed.

The problem with book ratings is bigger than my personal grade inflation. It touches on questions about how we evaluate art, how social pressure shapes our assessments, and whether reducing a complex reading experience to a number between one and five makes any sense at all. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I have some strong opinions.

The Scale Is Broken

Let’s start with the most obvious problem. On Goodreads, the average book rating hovers around 3.9 to 4.0 out of 5. Think about that for a second. The mathematical midpoint of a five-point scale is 2.5, but the effective midpoint on Goodreads is closer to 4. A book rated 3.5 on Goodreads is considered mediocre. A book rated 3.0 is considered bad. Anything below 3.0 might as well not exist.

This compression of the scale into its upper range makes the ratings almost useless for distinguishing between books. The difference between a 3.8 and a 4.1 could be meaningful or it could be noise, and you have no way of knowing which. Two books separated by 0.3 points might be vastly different in quality, or they might be nearly identical with the gap explained by the reading preferences of whoever rated them first.

Amazon’s rating system has the same problem, compounded by the fact that Amazon ratings include reviews from people who received free copies, people who have an axe to grind, and people who are reviewing the shipping speed rather than the book. I’ve seen one-star reviews that say “Book was fine but arrived with a dented corner.” That’s not a book review. That’s a logistics complaint. But it counts the same as a one-star review from someone who actually read the book and hated it.

The Social Pressure Problem

There’s a social dimension to ratings that doesn’t get discussed enough. When you rate a book on Goodreads, your friends can see your rating. The author can see your rating (many authors actively check). Other members of your book club can see your rating. This creates a subtle but real pressure to be generous.

I know readers who will not rate a book below three stars because they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings. I respect the impulse. Authors are real people who poured years of their lives into these books, and a visible one-star rating feels personal in a way that a negative review of a restaurant or a movie doesn’t. But when kindness inflates ratings across the board, the system loses its informational value. If everyone rates everything at least a three, then three doesn’t mean “average.” It means “I didn’t want to be mean.”

This is especially pronounced in certain reading communities. Romance readers, for example, tend to rate books very generously, partly because the community values supportiveness and partly because the genre is so diverse that “not my preferred subgenre” doesn’t feel like a fair reason to give a low rating. Mystery and thriller readers tend to be slightly more critical. Literary fiction readers are the harshest raters, which may say something about the genre’s culture of seriousness, or may just mean literary fiction fans enjoy complaining more.

The point is that ratings are contaminated by social context. The same book rated by different communities would get different numbers. The rating doesn’t measure the book’s quality in any absolute sense. It measures how a particular group of readers felt about the book within a particular social framework.

The Timing Problem

When do you rate a book? Right when you finish it? A week later? A year later? The answer matters more than you might think, because your assessment of a book changes over time, sometimes dramatically.

I’ve had the experience of finishing a thriller in a state of breathless excitement, rating it highly, and then realizing a month later that I can’t remember a single character’s name. The book was exciting in the moment but left no residue. Should the rating reflect the immediate experience or the lasting impression? There’s no right answer, but Goodreads doesn’t ask you to specify. Your breathless Friday-night five stars counts exactly the same as someone else’s considered, reflective five stars given months after reading.

The reverse happens too. Some books, particularly dense or experimental ones, don’t feel great while you’re reading them. They’re challenging, confusing, or frustrating. But they stick with you. They change the way you think about something. They’re the books you find yourself referencing in conversation months later. These books would get three stars immediately after reading and five stars a year later. The rating system has no way to capture this kind of delayed appreciation.

I think about this often with our own titles. A book like Still Waters is, by design, a slow build. The opening sections ask for patience. Readers who rate it immediately after finishing might score it differently than readers who sit with it for a week and realize how much it’s been on their mind.

The Expectation Problem

Ratings are heavily influenced by expectations, and expectations are shaped by marketing, hype, and social media buzz. A debut novel that arrives with no fanfare and turns out to be pretty good might get four stars, because readers are pleasantly surprised. The same novel, published with a massive marketing campaign and breathless advance praise comparing it to Toni Morrison, might get three stars because it didn’t live up to the hype. The book is identical. The ratings are different.

This is profoundly unfair to both books and readers. The debut gets credit not for being great but for exceeding low expectations. The hyped book gets penalized not for being bad but for failing to be as good as the marketing promised. Neither rating tells you much about the actual quality of the writing.

BookTok has amplified this dynamic considerably. When a book goes viral on TikTok, it accumulates a wave of ratings from readers who had extremely high expectations. Some of these readers would have loved the book if they’d discovered it quietly at a bookstore. But because they discovered it through a tearful TikTok video promising it would “destroy” them, anything less than emotional devastation feels like a letdown. The book gets dinged not for what it is but for what someone else claimed it would be.

What Ratings Can’t Measure

Here’s my core objection to the entire rating enterprise. A single number cannot capture the multi-dimensional experience of reading a book. A book can have beautiful prose and a weak plot. It can have compelling characters but a muddled theme. It can be technically accomplished but emotionally cold, or it can be roughly written but deeply moving. Reducing all of these dimensions to a single number forces you to perform a kind of mental averaging that loses the most interesting information.

Consider a book with extraordinary sentences but a disappointing ending. Three stars? Four? The question is almost meaningless, because the thing you most want to communicate (“read this for the prose but don’t expect the plot to land”) cannot be expressed as a number. The rating collapses a nuanced judgment into a binary: this book is above average or it isn’t.

Restaurant reviews have faced this problem for years, and the best solutions involve multiple dimensions. Zagat rates food, decor, and service separately. This isn’t perfect, but it preserves more information than a single composite score. I’ve often wished book ratings worked the same way. Rate the prose separately from the plot. Rate the characters separately from the pacing. You’d end up with a profile rather than a point, and profiles are far more useful for predicting whether a specific reader will enjoy a specific book.

Of course, nobody would fill out a five-dimensional rating for every book they read. That’s too much friction. And that’s part of the problem: the single-number system exists because it’s easy, not because it’s good. We’ve optimized for the rater’s convenience rather than the rating’s accuracy.

The Review vs. the Rating

The best Goodreads reviews I’ve read are the ones that ignore the star rating entirely. They’re written responses that describe the reading experience with specificity and honesty. “I found the first half slow but the second half made it worth the effort.” “The research is impressive but the author’s voice gets in the way.” “I don’t think this is a ‘good’ book by any conventional measure, but it did something to me that I’m still processing.”

These reviews are infinitely more useful than any star rating because they give you information you can actually act on. If a reviewer says the pacing is slow, and you know you don’t mind slow pacing, that’s useful. If they say the characters feel underdeveloped, and complex characters are your top priority, that’s useful too. A three-star rating tells you almost nothing. A thoughtful paragraph tells you whether this particular book is right for you as a particular reader.

The irony is that most people look at the number and skip the review. The aggregated rating, that single number at the top of the page, gets more attention than the thousands of nuanced reviews below it. We’ve trained ourselves to make decisions based on a metric that we all know is unreliable, because it’s faster than reading actual assessments.

The Author’s Dilemma

I have some sympathy for authors on this, having seen firsthand how ratings affect the books we publish. A bad average rating on Goodreads or Amazon can tank a book’s discoverability. Amazon’s algorithms factor in ratings when deciding which books to recommend. Libraries use Goodreads data when making acquisition decisions. Bookstores check ratings before deciding whether to stock a title. The number matters commercially even if it doesn’t matter intellectually.

This creates perverse incentives. Authors who want to protect their ratings are tempted to write safer, more broadly appealing books rather than challenging or experimental ones. A novel that takes real artistic risks is more likely to polarize readers, generating a mix of one-star and five-star ratings that averages out to a mediocre 3.2. A competent but unambitious novel that offends nobody might cruise to a comfortable 3.9. The rating system, in this way, actually discourages the kind of bold, distinctive writing that readers claim to want.

I’ve talked to authors who check their Goodreads rating daily, who spiral when a new one-star review appears, who alter their writing process based on feedback from anonymous strangers on the internet. This is unhealthy and artistically corrosive, but it’s understandable when your livelihood depends on a number that strangers control.

What Would Be Better

I don’t think we should abolish book ratings. The desire to evaluate and recommend books is natural and healthy, and some form of rating system helps readers navigate a market that publishes over a million new titles a year. But I think we need to be more honest about what ratings can and can’t do, and I think there are some improvements that would help.

First, platforms could encourage more contextual ratings. Instead of just a number, prompt the reader to specify what kind of reader they are and what they were looking for. A romance reader rating a literary novel and a literary fiction reader rating the same book are providing fundamentally different information, and the platform should acknowledge that.

Second, ratings could be time-stamped relative to the reading experience. A rating given within 24 hours of finishing a book could be labeled “immediate reaction.” A rating updated months later could be labeled “lasting impression.” Both are valid, but they measure different things, and readers should be able to filter accordingly.

Third, and most ambitiously, we could move away from composite ratings toward something more like a taste profile. Instead of asking “how good is this book on a scale of one to five,” ask “what kind of book is this?” Is it plot-driven or character-driven? Is the prose elaborate or plain? Is the pacing fast or slow? Is the tone serious or playful? These descriptive dimensions would let readers find books that match their preferences far more effectively than a single averaged number.

The StoryGraph app is moving in this direction, offering mood tags and pacing descriptions alongside traditional ratings. I think they’re on to something. The future of book recommendation isn’t a better number. It’s a richer description.

In the meantime, my advice is simple: read reviews, not ratings. Find reviewers whose taste aligns with yours and pay attention to what they say, not what number they assign. The words matter more than the stars. They always have.

And if you’re looking for your next read, skip the algorithms and browse our catalog directly. We’d rather you chose a book based on its description, its first pages, and your own gut feeling than on a number between one and five.

I spent a decade working at one of the Big Five publishers before starting ScrollWorks Media, so when people ask me how small publishers compete, I’m answering from both sides of the line. I know what the big houses can do. I also know, from direct experience, what they can’t do or won’t do, and that’s where the opportunity lives.

The honest answer is that small publishers don’t compete with the Big Five on most of the traditional metrics. We don’t compete on advances. We don’t compete on distribution reach. We don’t compete on marketing budgets or celebrity endorsements or front-table placement at Barnes & Noble. If that’s the game, we lose. We lose badly.

But here’s the thing about games: you don’t have to play someone else’s game. The small publishers that are thriving right now have figured out how to compete on different terms entirely, and some of them are beating the big houses in ways that matter more than they might appear to on a balance sheet.

The Big Five Machine

To understand small publisher strategy, you need to understand what the Big Five (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) actually are. They’re not monolithic organizations. Each one is a collection of imprints, dozens of them, each with its own editorial identity and staff. Penguin Random House alone has more than 250 imprints worldwide. That’s not a publisher. That’s a publishing ecosystem.

The advantage of this scale is obvious: money. The Big Five can pay large advances to attract the biggest authors. They can afford extensive marketing campaigns. They have sales teams embedded with every major retailer. They control the vast majority of the physical book distribution infrastructure in the United States and beyond.

The disadvantage is less obvious but equally real: inertia. Large organizations make decisions slowly. A book acquisition at a Big Five publisher goes through multiple layers of approval: editorial meetings, P&L projections, marketing assessments, sales force input. By the time everyone has signed off, months may have passed. The editorial vision that originally drove the acquisition has been filtered through so many perspectives that it’s often diluted.

More importantly, the Big Five publish an enormous volume of titles, and they can’t give every title the same level of attention. Each season, a few books get the full-court press: the big marketing budget, the author tour, the review coverage, the retail placement. The rest, the vast majority, get a basic level of support and are essentially left to find their audience on their own. If you’re a mid-list author at a big house, you might have the prestige of the publisher’s name on your spine, but you might not have much else.

The Speed Advantage

One of the most tangible advantages small publishers have is speed. At ScrollWorks, I can decide to acquire a book in a week. We can go from manuscript to published book in six to nine months when we need to. At a Big Five house, the standard timeline from acquisition to publication is 18 to 24 months, sometimes longer.

This matters more than people realize. Publishing is a business that responds to cultural moments, and cultural moments don’t wait for your production schedule. If a topic is resonating right now, the publisher that can get a book to market fastest has a significant advantage. Small publishers can be nimble in a way that large corporations structurally cannot.

I’ve seen this play out in practice. A small press I know was able to publish a timely nonfiction book within four months of acquisition because the author had a near-final manuscript and the press could move fast. A Big Five house had been considering a similar project but was still in the approval process when the small press’s book hit shelves. The small press got there first and captured the market.

Speed isn’t just about reacting to trends. It’s also about author relationships. When an author submits a manuscript to a small publisher, they typically hear back in weeks, not months. They work directly with the publisher or a senior editor, not an assistant. Decisions happen in conversations, not committee meetings. This responsiveness builds loyalty, and loyal authors tend to stay.

The Curation Identity

The small publishers I admire most have a clear, specific editorial identity. Graywolf Press publishes literary fiction and nonfiction with a focus on diverse voices. Tin House is known for inventive, risk-taking fiction. Two Dollar Radio has a punk-rock sensibility that’s immediately recognizable. Akashic Books has carved out a niche with its noir anthology series. These presses don’t try to publish everything. They publish a specific kind of book, and they do it with a consistency and conviction that their readers trust.

This kind of curatorial identity is almost impossible for a Big Five house to achieve at the corporate level. Individual imprints can have strong identities (FSG and Graywolf both have distinctive tastes, for example, though FSG is technically a Macmillan imprint), but the parent company itself is too large and diverse to stand for anything specific. When you buy a Penguin Random House book, you’re not buying it because of the publisher. You’re buying it because of the author or the cover or the recommendation.

With a small press, the publisher’s taste becomes a recommendation in itself. I know readers who will buy any book Soho Press publishes because they trust the Soho editorial sensibility. I know others who follow Milkweed Editions or Coffee House Press for the same reason. This publisher-as-brand loyalty is a genuine competitive advantage that scales inversely with size. The smaller and more focused the press, the stronger the brand.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve tried to build this from day one. We publish a small number of titles, and every one reflects a specific editorial vision. When someone picks up one of our books, I want them to have a sense of what to expect, not in terms of genre or plot but in terms of quality, care, and a certain sensibility. That consistency is something a machine publishing 10,000 titles a year cannot replicate.

Author Relationships

The most common complaint I hear from authors at Big Five houses is some version of “I feel invisible.” They have an editor, but that editor is juggling 15 to 25 books a year. They have a publicist, but that publicist is assigned to them for a few weeks around publication and then moves on to the next book. They have a marketing team, but the marketing team is focused on the lead titles, and unless you’re a lead title, you’re an afterthought.

Small publishers can offer something the big houses struggle to provide: genuine partnership. When we take on an author, that author becomes one of a small number of people we’re working with. They have direct access to the publisher. They’re involved in cover design, marketing strategy, pricing decisions, and distribution planning. They’re not a line item on a spreadsheet. They’re a collaborator.

This matters artistically, too. Editors at small presses often have more time and freedom to do deep editorial work. A Big Five editor might do one or two rounds of substantive editing before the production schedule demands the manuscript move forward. A small press editor, working with fewer titles, might do three or four rounds, spending more time on each page. The result, when it works, is a more thoroughly developed book.

I’m not going to pretend this is universally true. Some small presses are understaffed and overworked, and their editing suffers for it. But the best indie presses give their books a level of editorial attention that most Big Five editors would love to provide but simply don’t have the bandwidth for.

Direct-to-Reader Sales

The economics of publishing are rough for everyone, but they’re particularly challenging for small publishers because the traditional distribution model takes such a large cut. When a book sells through a traditional distributor and a bookstore, the publisher typically receives 40 to 50 percent of the cover price. That has to cover editing, design, printing, marketing, overhead, and the author’s royalty. The margins are thin.

One of the most significant strategic shifts among small publishers in recent years has been the move toward direct-to-reader sales. By selling books directly through their own websites, publishers can capture the full retail price minus only the cost of printing and shipping. The margin difference is enormous. A $25 book sold through a distributor might net the publisher $10 to $12. The same book sold directly might net $18 to $20.

This doesn’t replace bookstore and online retail sales, which still account for the majority of volume. But for a small publisher, even a few hundred direct sales per title can make the difference between profitability and loss. And direct sales come with another benefit: data. When you sell through Amazon, you know almost nothing about your customers. When you sell direct, you know who they are, where they live, and what they’ve bought before. That data is gold for targeted marketing.

Some small publishers have gotten creative with direct sales. Subscription models, where readers pay a monthly or annual fee to receive every title the press publishes, have been surprisingly successful. It works because the publisher’s curatorial identity is strong enough that readers trust them to select books on their behalf. You’d never subscribe to “every Penguin Random House book,” because that’s thousands of titles in genres you don’t read. But subscribing to every book from a small press that consistently publishes things you love? That’s a compelling offer.

The Prize Ecosystem

Literary prizes have become increasingly important for small publishers, and the prize ecosystem has become more hospitable to them. Twenty years ago, the major prizes were dominated by Big Five titles. That’s changed significantly. The National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Booker Prize, and numerous others have all been won by or nominated books from small and independent presses in recent years.

A single major prize nomination can transform a small publisher’s year. It generates reviews, media attention, bookstore orders, and foreign rights interest that would otherwise take years and significant money to accumulate. The economics are almost absurdly favorable: entering a book for prize consideration costs very little, and the return on a nomination or win is disproportionately large.

Smart small publishers have become very strategic about prize submissions, researching which prizes align with their titles, timing their publication schedules to fall within eligibility windows, and building relationships with the literary journalists and critics who influence prize committees. This is an area where a focused, attentive small press can compete directly with the big houses, because prizes don’t care about the size of your marketing budget. They care about the quality of the book.

Community and Digital Presence

The internet has been, on balance, a gift to small publishers. Social media allows a press with a $500 marketing budget to reach the same audience as a press with a $50,000 budget, provided the content is good enough. I’ve seen social media posts from tiny presses go viral and sell thousands of books. That kind of organic reach was impossible in the pre-internet era, when visibility required paid advertising and physical distribution that only big houses could afford.

Email newsletters have been particularly effective. A well-written, personality-driven newsletter from a small publisher creates a direct relationship with readers that no amount of advertising can replicate. When I send our newsletter, I know it’s going to people who actively chose to hear from us. They’re not being targeted by an algorithm. They’re engaged. And engaged readers buy books.

The key insight is that small publishers are better positioned for authentic digital marketing because they actually are the people behind the brand. When I write about a book we’re publishing, I’m writing as the person who acquired it, who worked with the author, who cares personally about its success. That authenticity is detectable, and readers respond to it. A social media post from a Big Five corporate account, written by a marketing coordinator following a brand guide, simply cannot achieve the same level of personal connection.

The Honest Challenges

I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture. Small publishing is hard. The challenges are real and constant. Cash flow is a perpetual concern. One book that underperforms can wipe out the profits from three that did well. Distribution remains difficult and expensive. Attracting talented staff is challenging when you can’t match Big Five salaries. And the sheer volume of books published each year means that getting noticed requires relentless effort.

The advance gap is a real competitive disadvantage in acquiring manuscripts. When an author is choosing between a $5,000 advance from a small press and a $50,000 advance from a big house, the financial reality is hard to argue with. Small presses compete on other terms, editorial attention, creative freedom, higher royalty rates, a more personal relationship, but those advantages don’t pay the rent during the year it takes to write the next book.

Returns are another headache. The consignment model that dominates book distribution means that bookstores can return unsold copies for a full refund, and small publishers absorb those returns with much less financial cushion than a large house. A single large return shipment can seriously damage a small publisher’s cash position.

And then there’s sustainability. Many small presses are passion projects that depend heavily on one or two people. If the founder burns out, gets sick, or simply can’t sustain the financial losses anymore, the press folds. The failure rate for small publishers is high, and the ones that survive often do so through a combination of skill, luck, and sheer stubbornness.

I mention all of this because I think honest discussion of the challenges makes the successes more meaningful. The small publishers that are thriving aren’t doing so because the game is easy. They’re doing so because they’ve found specific, defensible advantages and built their entire operation around exploiting them. Speed, identity, relationships, community, direct sales, prize strategy: each of these is an area where being small is an advantage, not a liability.

That’s the real lesson, I think. Small publishers don’t succeed by trying to be small versions of the Big Five. They succeed by being something the Big Five cannot be: personal, focused, nimble, and unafraid to take chances on books that don’t fit neatly into a commercial formula. The publishing ecosystem needs both. Readers need both. And right now, despite the challenges, both are finding ways to coexist.

If you want to see what that philosophy produces in practice, take a look at our catalog. Every title reflects the kind of focused, personal publishing I’ve been describing.