Last August I spent a week on the coast of Maine with nothing but a duffel bag, a pair of hiking boots, and six books I’d been meaning to read for months. I came back having read four of them, which is roughly double my usual weekly rate. Something about being away from home, away from the routines and obligations that structure normal life, made me read differently. Faster, yes, but also more attentively, with fewer interruptions and longer stretches of unbroken concentration. I’ve been thinking about that experience ever since, because I think what we read on vacation tells us something real about ourselves as readers.

This is not a list of beach reads. I find that category reductive and slightly insulting, both to beaches and to readers. The assumption behind “beach read” is that vacation reading should be light, disposable, and undemanding. Easy books for easy times. I disagree with this pretty strongly, and I think the data backs me up.

What People Actually Read on Vacation

When publishers and booksellers talk about “summer reading” or “vacation picks,” they tend to push a specific kind of book: thrillers, romances, lighter literary fiction, memoir. The implicit message is that your brain needs a break along with your body. And for some readers, that’s true. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with spending a week at the lake working through three Harlan Coben novels. If that’s what recharges you, do it without apology.

But in my experience, many readers do the opposite on vacation. They read the hard stuff. The 700-page novel they’ve been intimidated by. The dense nonfiction title that requires sustained concentration. The challenging literary work that keeps getting bumped to the bottom of the stack because daily life doesn’t provide enough uninterrupted reading time. Vacation provides that time, and readers use it.

I finally read Roberto Bolano’s 2666 on a two-week trip to Portugal. That book is 900 pages of dense, sometimes brutal, sometimes bewildering prose that demands complete surrender. I never would have finished it at home, where I read in 30-minute snatches before bed. In Portugal, with nothing to do but read, walk, eat, and sleep, I gave it five or six hours a day. It was one of the most immersive reading experiences of my life, and it required the specific conditions that vacation provides: extended time, minimal distraction, and freedom from the guilt of neglecting other tasks.

A friend of mine used her honeymoon to read the complete works of Joan Didion. Her husband read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (the abridged version, but still). Neither of these qualifies as “beach reading” by any conventional definition, but both were exactly what these readers needed vacation to accomplish.

The Freedom Effect

I think the reason vacation reading feels different has less to do with the physical setting and more to do with psychological freedom. At home, reading competes with a hundred other demands on your time. Even when you’re physically sitting with a book, part of your brain is thinking about the emails you haven’t answered, the dishes in the sink, the meeting tomorrow morning. This divided attention is so constant that most of us don’t even notice it anymore. We think we’re reading, but we’re really reading at 60 percent capacity while the other 40 percent monitors our obligations.

Vacation strips away those competing demands. You’re not checking your work email (or if you are, you shouldn’t be). The dishes aren’t your problem. Tomorrow’s meeting doesn’t exist. For maybe the first time in months, you can give a book your full attention. And full attention makes everything better. The prose sounds different when you’re not skimming. The characters develop more richly when you’re not distracted. The ideas in nonfiction penetrate more deeply when you have the mental space to sit with them.

This is why I push back against the “beach read” concept. If vacation is one of the few times you have genuine freedom to concentrate, why would you waste it on a book that doesn’t require concentration? Read the book that needs your best attention, because vacation might be the only time you can give it.

Place Shapes Reading

There’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called “context-dependent memory,” which means that we remember things better when the context in which we recall them matches the context in which we learned them. This applies to reading in an interesting way. I remember books I read on vacation with unusual vividness, and I think it’s because the physical setting creates a rich sensory context that gets encoded alongside the text.

I can tell you exactly where I was sitting when I read certain passages of 2666. A cafe in Lisbon with terrible coffee and a ceiling fan that wobbled alarmingly. The courtyard of a pension in the Algarve where I read through an entire afternoon while the sun moved across the flagstones. These physical memories are intertwined with the literary memories in a way that doesn’t happen when I read the same book in the same armchair every night.

I’ve started thinking of this as a feature rather than a coincidence. If you want to remember a book, read it somewhere memorable. The novelty of the environment, the sights and sounds and smells that are different from your everyday life, creates a stronger imprint. Your brain encodes the book more deeply because the entire experience is unusual.

Some readers take this further and deliberately match their reading to their destination. Reading Italian literature in Italy. Reading maritime fiction on a sailboat. Reading about the Dust Bowl while driving through Oklahoma. I’ve done this a few times and can confirm it creates an unusually powerful reading experience. The book and the place illuminate each other in ways you can’t manufacture at home.

The Packing Question

How many books you bring on vacation is a personality test. I’m serious about this. I’ve observed three distinct types over the years, and they correlate pretty strongly with broader personality traits.

Type one brings exactly the right number of books, calculated based on trip length and reading speed. These are the same people who pack one outfit per day and never have leftover luggage space. They’re planners. They trust their own predictions. If they bring four books for a seven-day trip, they will read four books in seven days, because that’s what they decided would happen.

Type two brings far too many books. This is my type. I bring twice as many as I could possibly read, because the thought of finishing everything and having nothing left gives me genuine anxiety. I’d rather carry an extra five pounds than risk an evening without options. These are the people who always have a backup plan. They’re prepared for contingencies that will never arise, and they’re okay with that.

Type three brings nothing and buys books at their destination. These are the spontaneous readers, the ones who’d rather discover something unexpected at a local bookshop than read from a pre-selected list. I admire this approach even though I could never do it myself. The idea of arriving somewhere without a book in progress makes my palms sweat.

E-readers have somewhat collapsed these categories, of course. A Kindle weighs the same whether it holds 1 book or 1,000, which eliminates the weight calculation entirely. But I notice that even Kindle readers tend to fall into these types. Some load exactly what they plan to read. Some load their entire library “just in case.” Some buy new titles on arrival based on mood. The technology changes, but the personality endures.

Vacation Reading as Self-Knowledge

Pay attention to what you reach for when all constraints are removed. When you don’t have to read for work, for school, for a book club, for social currency, when you’re reading purely for yourself with no audience and no obligation, what do you choose? That choice tells you something that your usual reading habits might obscure.

I discovered on that Maine trip that what I actually want to read, when freed from every external pressure, is long-form narrative nonfiction. Not the literary fiction I usually reach for at home. Not the industry titles I read for professional reasons. Given complete freedom, I gravitated toward deeply reported stories about unusual subjects: a book about the history of color pigments, another about the mapping of the ocean floor, a third about the psychology of extreme environments. These aren’t the books I tell people I’m reading. They’re the books I read when nobody’s watching.

I think this gap between our public and private reading preferences is more common than people admit. We all perform our taste to some degree. We read certain books because they’ll make good Instagram posts, because our friends are reading them, because we feel we should. Vacation reading, done honestly, strips away that performance and reveals the reader underneath.

If you find that your vacation reading is dramatically different from your everyday reading, it might be worth asking why. Are you reading what you actually want to read during the rest of the year? Or are you reading what you think you should? I’m not advocating for a life of pure indulgence. Reading challenging, uncomfortable, even unpleasant books has genuine value. But if the books that bring you the most joy are the ones you only allow yourself on vacation, something might be off about your regular reading diet.

The Shared Reading Vacation

Traveling with another reader creates its own dynamic. My partner and I have a ritual where we bring separate books but debrief every evening over dinner. “What happened in yours today?” becomes a recurring conversation that’s genuinely interesting, because you’re each getting a serialized summary of a different story. Sometimes one person’s book sounds so good that the other immediately adds it to their list. Sometimes you end up trading mid-trip.

I’ve heard of friend groups that do reading vacations, where everyone brings a different book and the group spends the evenings discussing what they read that day. It’s like a book club compressed into a week, but more intimate because you’re also sharing meals and hikes and long conversations that inevitably circle back to the books.

There’s also the simpler pleasure of reading in the same room as someone else. Not talking, not interacting, just two people absorbed in their own books in comfortable silence. I find this deeply comforting. It’s a form of togetherness that doesn’t require conversation, and vacation provides more of it than normal life.

Coming Home

The hardest part of vacation reading is the reentry. You come home and the magic evaporates. The 30-minute reading window before bed replaces the five-hour afternoon session. The book you were devouring at two chapters a day slows to ten pages a night. The concentration, that glorious full-attention reading, gets shattered by notifications and obligations and the general noise of daily life.

I’ve tried various strategies to maintain the vacation reading pace at home, and most of them fail. Setting aside dedicated reading hours. Turning off my phone for “reading blocks.” Going to a coffee shop to simulate the cafe-reading experience. These help a little but don’t replicate the fundamental freedom that makes vacation reading different. The problem isn’t discipline. The problem is that home has too many legitimate claims on your attention.

What I’ve settled on is a kind of acceptance. Vacation reading is different because vacation is different. The intensity of that experience is partly a product of its scarcity. If you could read six hours a day every day, it might eventually feel ordinary. The fact that it happens only a few times a year makes it special. The ordinary rhythm of reading, the nightly ritual with its interruptions and its slow progress, has its own value: consistency, routine, the comfort of a daily practice even when it’s imperfect.

But I do carry one thing home from every reading vacation: the reminder of what concentrated reading feels like. For a week or two after returning, I’m more protective of my reading time. I put the phone in another room. I start my reading earlier in the evening. I choose books more carefully, knowing that the daily reading window is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on something I’m not genuinely interested in. That heightened intentionality fades eventually, as routines always reassert themselves. But for a little while, the vacation reading mindset persists.

If you’re planning a trip and wondering what to bring, I’d suggest picking one book that you’ve been wanting to read but haven’t had the time for. Something that requires sustained attention. Something that might be too demanding for your normal reading conditions. Give it the gift of your full, undistracted focus for a few days. You might be surprised by how differently you experience it.

A few of our titles, like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are exactly the kind of books that reward the long, uninterrupted reading sessions that vacation provides. Pack one on your next trip and see what happens.

I once wrote a blurb so bad that the author emailed me to ask, politely, if I could try again. I don’t blame her. The blurb was two sentences long, vaguely praised the prose, and said nothing that would make anyone want to read the book. It was the literary equivalent of “nice weather we’re having.” I rewrote it, and the new version was better, but the experience stuck with me because it exposed something I hadn’t thought about carefully enough: writing a blurb is genuinely difficult, and most people, including many published authors, are terrible at it.

A blurb is that short quotation on the back cover or inside the front cover of a book, usually from another author, a reviewer, or a publication. You’ve seen thousands of them. “A masterful debut.” “I couldn’t put it down.” “The best novel I’ve read this year.” They’re everywhere, and because they’re everywhere, most readers have developed a kind of blurb blindness. We see them without reading them. They’re wallpaper.

And yet, blurbs still sell books. Publishers wouldn’t spend the considerable effort of soliciting, selecting, and positioning them if they didn’t. The question is: what separates a blurb that actually influences a buying decision from one that gets ignored? I’ve been on both sides of this (asking for blurbs and writing them), and I think I’ve figured out some principles that work.

Why Blurbs Still Matter

In a world of online reviews, BookTok recommendations, and algorithmic discovery, you might think blurbs would be obsolete. They’re not, and the reason is trust mechanics. A blurb from a known author is a form of social proof that operates differently from a Goodreads review or a TikTok recommendation. When Stephen King says a book is good, that carries weight not because King is an authority on literary quality but because he’s a successful author with something to lose. He’s putting his name on your book. If the book is terrible, his recommendation looks foolish. That risk creates credibility.

Blurbs also function as signals in a noisy marketplace. A reader scanning the back of a book in a bookstore has maybe ten seconds to make a decision. In those ten seconds, a blurb from a familiar name can be the tipping point. Not the only factor, but the factor that converts “maybe” into “I’ll try it.” I’ve seen this happen in real time at bookstore events. Someone picks up a book, turns it over, sees a name they recognize, and heads to the register. It’s not rational and it’s not thoughtful, but it’s effective.

For small publishers like ours, blurbs are particularly valuable because we don’t have the marketing budgets to generate awareness through advertising alone. A strong blurb from a respected author is essentially free advertising, carried by the book itself, visible to every person who picks it up. The return on investment, given that the only cost is the time spent asking, is enormous.

The Anatomy of a Bad Blurb

Most blurbs are bad. I say this with affection for the people who write them, because I’ve written plenty of bad ones myself. But understanding why most blurbs fail is the first step toward writing one that succeeds.

The most common failure is vagueness. “A beautiful and moving novel.” “A tour de force.” “Extraordinary.” These phrases could describe any book ever written. They tell the reader nothing specific about what makes this particular book worth their time. When I see a blurb like this, I assume the blurber either didn’t read the book or read it and couldn’t think of anything specific to say. Neither inspires confidence.

The second most common failure is the comparison blurb that overreaches. “The next Toni Morrison.” “Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy at his best.” These comparisons set expectations that almost no book can meet. If I buy a novel because someone told me it was the next Morrison, I’m going to be disappointed, because there’s only one Morrison. The comparison blurb is trying to borrow prestige from a greater writer, and it usually backfires by making the actual book feel inadequate.

A subtler failure is the blurb that reviews the author rather than the book. “One of the most talented writers of her generation.” “A major American voice.” These may be true, but they don’t help me decide whether to read this specific book. I need to know something about the book itself, not the author’s general reputation.

Then there’s the blurb that gives away too much. I’ve seen blurbs that essentially summarize the plot, including twists that would be better discovered by the reader. This is a kindness that goes wrong: the blurber is so enthusiastic about the book’s surprises that they accidentally spoil them. A blurb should create intrigue, not satisfy it.

What Makes a Great Blurb

The best blurb I’ve ever read is also one of the shortest. It’s from the back of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: “A series of visions, each one so dazzling and distinct it could be a series of paintings.” I don’t remember who wrote it, but I remember the blurb itself, which is the point. It doesn’t say the book is good. It describes the experience of reading the book using a specific, visual comparison. After reading that blurb, you have a sense of what the book feels like, and that feeling, more than any quality judgment, is what makes you want to read it.

The principle here is specificity. A great blurb identifies something concrete and distinctive about the book and communicates it in a way that creates desire. Not “this book is great” but “here’s what this book does that other books don’t.” The reader should finish the blurb knowing something they didn’t know before, whether it’s the book’s emotional register, its structural approach, its voice, or its thematic concerns.

Consider this blurb structure: identify the experience the book offers, then make it sound irresistible. “This novel reads like a conversation you didn’t want to end.” “Every chapter opens a trapdoor into somewhere unexpected.” “The sentences in this book are so precise they feel like they were cut from glass.” Each of these tells you something specific about the reading experience. You can decide, based on the description, whether that experience appeals to you. That’s what a blurb should do: help the right readers find the book and let the wrong readers move on.

The Art of the Ask

Getting a good blurb starts with asking the right person. The biggest name is not always the best choice. You want someone whose endorsement will be meaningful to your target audience, someone whose own work shares enough DNA with the book being blurbed that their recommendation carries specific credibility. A blurb from a romance novelist on a literary fiction title might have a famous name attached but sends a confusing signal to readers of either genre.

The ask itself matters more than most people realize. When I request a blurb, I try to do several things. I send the manuscript well in advance, usually three to four months before the blurb is needed. I include a brief description of the book and why I think the blurber would connect with it specifically. I mention any connection between the blurber’s work and the manuscript, not as flattery but as genuine context. And I explicitly say that there’s no obligation and no hard feelings if they can’t do it.

That last point is important. Blurb requests put the recipient in an awkward position. If they read the book and don’t like it, they either have to write something dishonest or compose an uncomfortable rejection. Making the escape hatch obvious and judgment-free increases the chances that people will say yes, because they know they can say no without drama.

Timing is also a factor. Authors are more likely to provide blurbs when they’re between projects, not when they’re on deadline. Publishing has a rhythm, and learning that rhythm helps. The months immediately after an author’s own book launches are often good times to ask, because they’re in promotional mode and their name is fresh in readers’ minds.

How to Write One When Asked

If someone asks you for a blurb, congratulations: another writer respects your opinion enough to put your name on their book. That’s flattering. Now comes the hard part: writing something useful in 50 words or fewer.

My process starts with reading the book (this should be obvious, but I’m told that not all blurbers do this, which is both unsurprising and depressing). While reading, I keep a mental note of moments that feel distinctive, things this book does that other books in the same space don’t. These distinctive qualities are the raw material for the blurb.

After finishing, I try to answer one question: what would I tell a friend about this book in one breath? Not a considered critical assessment. Not a summary. Just the immediate, honest reaction I’d give someone I trust. “It’s about a family falling apart, but it’s somehow funny.” “The ending wrecked me. I sat on the couch for twenty minutes afterward just staring at the wall.” “The research is incredible. You’ll learn more about octopuses than you thought possible, and you’ll love every minute of it.”

That conversational reaction is the seed of a good blurb. From there, I polish the language to make it more vivid and quotable while preserving the spontaneity of the original reaction. The worst thing you can do is over-revise a blurb until it sounds like a book review. Blurbs should feel like enthusiasm, not analysis. They should read like someone grabbing your arm and saying “you have to read this.”

Length matters. Shorter is almost always better. Two sentences is ideal. Three is acceptable. Four is pushing it. Anything longer than that, and the blurb starts competing with the cover copy for the reader’s attention, which creates clutter rather than clarity. The back cover of a book is prime real estate. Every word needs to earn its place.

The Ethics of Blurbing

There’s an ethical dimension to blurbs that the industry doesn’t talk about enough. The system is based on personal relationships, which means it’s biased toward authors who are well-connected. Debut authors with no established relationships struggle to get blurbs. Authors who are introverted or who live outside of major publishing centers (New York, London, a handful of other cities) are at a disadvantage. The blurb economy rewards social capital as much as literary quality, and that’s a problem.

There’s also the question of honesty. We all know that blurbers don’t always love the books they blurb. Sometimes they’re doing a favor for a friend, an editor, or a publisher. Sometimes they read the first fifty pages and wrote something generically positive. Sometimes they’re trading blurbs (I’ll blurb yours if you blurb mine), which is a kind of mutual endorsement pact that has nothing to do with the quality of either book.

I try to be straightforward about this, both when asking for and providing blurbs. I won’t blurb a book I didn’t read. I won’t blurb a book I don’t genuinely recommend. And when I ask for blurbs, I accept that “no” might mean “I read it and it wasn’t for me,” and I respect that. The system works only to the extent that the endorsements are credible, and credibility requires a degree of selectivity. An author who blurbs everything is like a restaurant reviewer who gives every restaurant five stars: eventually, nobody trusts their judgment.

Blurbs in the Digital Age

The format of blurbs is evolving as the primary point of book discovery shifts from physical stores to online platforms. On a physical book, the blurb lives on the back cover or the inside front cover, where it’s encountered during the browsing process. Online, the blurb has to compete with all the other information on a product page: the description, the reviews, the also-boughts, the ratings.

Amazon product pages do include editorial reviews and blurbs, but they’re below the fold on most screens, which means many buyers never see them. This has led some publishers to embed blurbs in the book description itself, leading with a strong endorsement before the plot summary. It’s a practical adaptation, though it can feel a little desperate when done clumsily.

Social media has created a new kind of informal blurb: the tweet or Instagram post from a famous reader. These aren’t solicited in the traditional way, and they carry a different kind of credibility because they feel spontaneous rather than obligatory. When a prominent author tweets “Just finished [book title] and I’m shaken. Read this immediately,” that has the same effect as a traditional blurb but reaches a wider audience. Some publishers have started incorporating these social media endorsements into their marketing materials, blurring the line between formal blurbs and organic recommendations.

For small publishers, this evolution is mostly positive. You don’t need to know Stephen King personally to benefit from a well-known reader discovering your book and posting about it. The democratization of endorsement, where anyone with a platform can function as a blurber, levels a playing field that was previously tilted heavily toward publishers with the best rolodexes.

Practical Tips for Publishers and Authors

I’ve been soliciting blurbs for ScrollWorks titles for several years now, and here’s what I’ve learned from the process. Start early. The number one reason blurb requests fail is that they arrive too late. Asking an author to read a 300-page manuscript and write a thoughtful blurb in two weeks is asking for either a rushed blurb or a polite refusal. Three to four months is the minimum comfortable lead time.

Ask more people than you need. Assume a 30 to 40 percent response rate at best. If you need three blurbs for the cover, ask eight to ten people. Some won’t respond at all. Some will say they’re too busy. Some will read the book and decide they can’t honestly endorse it. The ones who do come through will be the right ones, and you’ll have options.

Be specific about what you need. “Would you be willing to provide a blurb?” is too vague. Tell them the maximum length, the format, the deadline, and where the blurb will appear. Give them a finished or near-finished manuscript, not an early draft (nobody wants to blurb a book that might change significantly before publication). And if the blurb they provide isn’t quite right, it’s acceptable to ask for minor revisions, though you should never alter someone’s words without permission.

Finally, always say thank you. A handwritten note. A copy of the finished book. A genuine expression of gratitude. The blurb economy runs on goodwill, and people who feel appreciated are more likely to say yes the next time you ask. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many publishers treat blurbers as a resource to be extracted rather than a relationship to be maintained.

If you’re curious about how blurbs come together in practice, take a look at any of our titles, like Echoes of Iron or Still Waters. Every endorsement on those covers represents a real relationship and a genuine recommendation. That’s how we think it should be done.

A writer I work with recently showed me her royalty statement from a major publisher. She’d spent three years writing the book. It had been well reviewed, reasonably well promoted, and had sold about 12,000 copies in hardcover, which is respectable for literary fiction. Her total royalty earnings after the advance earned out: $4,200. For three years of work. That comes to roughly $1,400 a year, or about $27 a week. She could earn more working a single shift at a fast-food restaurant.

This is not an unusual story. It’s not even a particularly bad one. Most books don’t earn out their advances, which means most authors never see royalties beyond the initial payment. And those advances, especially for debut and mid-list authors, have been stagnant or declining for years. The median advance for a traditionally published book is somewhere in the range of $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the genre and the publisher. For a book that took two to three years to write, that works out to less than minimum wage by any calculation.

I’m going to spend this essay explaining why the economics of author compensation are broken, what we’re doing differently at ScrollWorks Media, and why I believe that paying writers properly isn’t just ethical, it’s good business.

How the Standard Model Works

The traditional publishing compensation model has remained essentially unchanged for decades. An author signs a contract granting the publisher the right to publish their book. In exchange, they receive an advance against royalties, which is a prepayment against future earnings. Royalties are typically set at specific percentages of the book’s price: commonly 10% of the hardcover list price, 7.5% for trade paperbacks, and 25% of net receipts for e-books.

The advance is supposed to represent the publisher’s estimate of what the book will earn in royalties. Once the book has earned enough in royalties to “earn out” the advance, the author starts receiving additional royalty payments. In practice, according to various industry surveys, roughly 60 to 70 percent of books never earn out their advances, which means the advance is the only money the author ever sees.

On the surface, this seems reasonable. The publisher is taking a financial risk by paying the author upfront, and the royalty structure means the author shares in the upside if the book does well. But look more closely and the problems become apparent.

First, the royalty percentages haven’t meaningfully increased in decades, even as book prices have risen and publishers have found new ways to monetize content (audio rights, digital rights, subsidiary rights). An author today receives roughly the same percentage of each sale as an author in the 1980s, despite fundamental changes in the publishing landscape.

Second, the advance model creates a perverse incentive structure. Publishers have every reason to keep advances low, because a book that never earns out its advance is effectively getting free content beyond the advance amount. If a publisher pays a $5,000 advance and the book earns $20,000 in royalties, the publisher keeps the difference until royalty payments are issued, and the timing of those payments (typically twice a year, with significant delays) means the publisher is sitting on the author’s money for months.

Third, and most importantly, the entire model treats the author’s time as essentially free. A $10,000 advance for a book that took three years to write values the author’s labor at about $3,300 per year. That’s not a living wage. It’s not even close. And yet the publishing industry depends entirely on the labor of these writers, who are expected to produce the content that generates billions of dollars in annual revenue while earning less than a barista.

The Myth of the Starving Artist

There’s a persistent cultural narrative that writing should be its own reward. That real writers write for love, not money. That asking to be paid fairly is somehow crass or mercenary, a betrayal of the artistic calling. I find this narrative convenient for everyone except the writers themselves.

We don’t expect musicians to perform for free (though many are asked to). We don’t expect architects to design buildings without compensation. We don’t expect doctors to heal people out of sheer passion without a paycheck. But there remains a widespread assumption that writing is a hobby that occasionally becomes a career, and that writers should be grateful for the opportunity to be published at all. This is, to be direct about it, exploitative nonsense.

The practical consequence of this attitude is that professional writing is increasingly available only to people who have other sources of income. Writers with trust funds, working spouses, academic positions, or freelance side hustles can afford to write books for $5,000. Writers who depend on their writing income for rent and groceries cannot. The result is a narrowing of who gets to be a published author, which narrows the range of voices and perspectives in published literature. When only the financially comfortable can afford to write, the books we publish reflect a limited slice of human experience.

I’ve watched talented writers abandon fiction because they couldn’t justify the economics. Three years of work for $7,000 while raising two kids is not a viable plan. These are writers whose books deserved to exist, whose voices the literary world needs, but who made the rational decision that their time was better spent doing something that actually paid their bills. Every one of those departures is a loss for readers.

What We Do Differently

When I started ScrollWorks Media, I made a decision that some people in the industry thought was naive: we would pay writers more than the industry standard and structure our contracts to align the publisher’s interests with the author’s interests more equitably.

Our royalty rates are higher than the traditional model. I’m not going to share specific numbers publicly because they vary by project, but our rates are structured so that authors receive a meaningfully larger share of each book sold. The logic is simple: the author created the thing we’re selling. They should get the largest share of the revenue it generates. The fact that this is considered radical tells you something about how skewed the industry standard has become.

We also pay royalties quarterly rather than semi-annually, with shorter delay periods. The standard practice of holding royalties for six months or more before issuing payments is, frankly, difficult to justify in an era of real-time sales reporting. We know exactly how many copies we’ve sold at any given moment. There’s no legitimate reason to sit on that money for half a year.

Our contracts are shorter and clearer than the industry average. The typical Big Five publishing contract is 20 to 30 pages of dense legal language that requires an agent and a lawyer to parse. Ours are designed to be readable by a normal human. We spell out exactly what rights we’re acquiring, for how long, and under what conditions they revert to the author. Rights reversion, the process by which an author regains control of their work, is automatic in our contracts after a defined period. At many large publishers, getting your rights back requires navigating a bureaucratic process that can take years.

The Business Case

Some people hear our approach and assume we’re running a charity. We’re not. Paying writers properly is a business strategy with concrete benefits.

First, it helps us attract and retain talented authors. The publishing grapevine is real, and authors talk to each other about their experiences with different publishers. Word has gotten around that we treat our authors well, and that reputation brings us manuscripts from writers who might otherwise have gone to larger houses. Several of our authors have told us they chose us over publishers offering larger advances because they preferred our contract terms and our approach to the author-publisher relationship.

Second, authors who feel valued are more engaged in the publishing process. They’re more enthusiastic about promotion. They’re more willing to do events, interviews, and social media outreach. They’re more collaborative during the editing process. An author who feels exploited is an author who does the minimum required by contract. An author who feels like a partner does far more than the minimum, and that extra effort benefits both parties.

Third, higher royalty rates actually incentivize us to sell more books. Under the traditional model, where the publisher keeps most of the revenue, there’s a temptation to coast after the advance has been recouped. Under our model, where the author gets a bigger share, we have to sell more copies to make the same profit. That keeps us hungry. It keeps us marketing, promoting, and finding new readers months and years after publication, rather than moving on to the next title.

What Needs to Change Industry-Wide

Our approach works for a small publisher with a selective list. I’m not going to pretend that the same model can be directly applied to a Big Five house publishing thousands of titles a year. The economics are different at scale. But I do think there are changes the broader industry could make that would improve author compensation without destroying publisher profitability.

E-book royalty rates need to increase. The standard 25% of net for e-books was set when digital publishing was new and publishers were uncertain about the economics. That uncertainty is long gone. E-books have minimal production costs (no printing, no warehousing, no shipping, no returns), and the current royalty rate doesn’t reflect that cost savings. Authors are effectively subsidizing publishers’ transition to digital by accepting rates that are lower than the economic fundamentals justify. The Authors Guild has been arguing for 50% of net on e-books for years. I think they’re right.

Advance transparency would help too. Right now, advances are negotiated individually with very little publicly available data about what constitutes a fair offer. This information asymmetry disadvantages authors (especially unagented and debut authors) who don’t know what comparable books received. Organizations like the Authors Guild and Codex (a group that tracks publishing deal data) are working to increase transparency, but there’s a long way to go.

Royalty accounting needs modernization. The semi-annual royalty statement, arriving months after the sales it covers, is an artifact of a pre-digital era when sales data was genuinely difficult to compile. Today, publishers know their sales figures in real time. There’s no technical reason why authors can’t have access to a dashboard showing their sales and accrued royalties at any time. Some publishers have started offering this, but it should be the industry standard.

And rights reversion should be streamlined. When a publisher is no longer actively selling a book, the rights should return to the author automatically, without the author having to navigate a complex process to request them. Too many books are held captive by publishers who aren’t doing anything with them, preventing authors from seeking new publishers, publishing independently, or making their work available in other ways.

The Reader’s Role

Readers can influence this, and I think many readers want to. When you buy a book from a publisher that pays its authors fairly, you’re supporting a model of publishing that treats creative work as valuable labor. When you buy directly from a small publisher’s website, the author usually receives a significantly larger share of the sale than when you buy from Amazon. When you attend author events, recommend books to friends, and leave thoughtful reviews, you’re increasing the audience for a book, which increases the author’s income.

I’m not asking anyone to make purchasing decisions based entirely on author compensation. Buy the books you want to read from wherever is most convenient. But if you have the choice between two equally convenient options, and one of them puts more money in the author’s pocket, choosing that option is a small act with real consequences.

Libraries are worth mentioning here too. Some authors worry that library lending reduces their sales, but the opposite is usually true. Libraries expose readers to authors they’d never have tried otherwise, and library patrons are among the heaviest book buyers. Plus, authors and publishers receive compensation for library purchases. Advocating for strong library funding is one of the most effective things a reader can do to support writers.

Why This Matters Beyond Economics

I keep coming back to a question that’s bigger than royalty rates and contract terms: what kind of literary culture do we want? One where only the independently wealthy can afford to write books? One where talented writers abandon their work because they can’t pay rent? One where the people who create the content that powers a multi-billion-dollar industry earn less than the people who stack that content on shelves?

Or one where writing is recognized as skilled, valuable labor and compensated accordingly? Where a mid-career novelist can make a middle-class living from their books? Where a debut author’s advance is enough to buy them the time to write their second book without taking a second job?

I don’t think this is a utopian vision. The publishing industry generates enough revenue to pay its creators better than it does. The money exists. The question is how it’s distributed, and right now, the distribution heavily favors everyone except the people who write the books.

At ScrollWorks, we’re trying to prove that a different model works, that you can pay writers fairly and still run a sustainable publishing business. We’re small, and our influence on the broader industry is limited. But every successful small publisher that treats its authors well makes it a little harder for the big houses to argue that the status quo is the only way. That’s worth doing, regardless of scale.

If you want to support this philosophy with your next purchase, browse our catalog. Every sale goes directly toward building a better model for the people who write the books you love.

I want to tell you about a study that changed the way I think about fiction. In 2013, psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano published a paper in Science magazine showing that reading literary fiction temporarily improved performance on tests measuring empathy, specifically the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions. Not self-help books. Not nonfiction about emotional intelligence. Fiction. Made-up stories about made-up people improved real-world emotional perception.

The study was controversial when it was published, and it remains controversial, partly because replication attempts have produced mixed results and partly because the distinction the researchers drew between “literary” and “popular” fiction irritated a lot of people. I have my own problems with the study’s methodology. But the core finding, that engaging with fictional minds can improve our ability to understand real ones, has been supported by enough subsequent research that I think we can take it seriously.

This matters to me personally because I run a publishing house. I spend my professional life trying to get people to read fiction. If fiction actually makes people better at understanding each other, that’s not just a nice side benefit. It’s a reason to consider fiction reading as something more than entertainment. And the science, while still developing, points in an interesting direction.

What We Mean by Empathy

Before getting into the research, it’s worth being precise about what we’re talking about. Empathy isn’t a single thing. Psychologists generally distinguish between at least two types. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person is thinking or feeling. It’s a mental skill, the capacity to model someone else’s interior state. Affective empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling, to share their emotional experience. You can have one without the other. A con artist might have excellent cognitive empathy (they understand your emotions perfectly) and terrible affective empathy (they don’t care about your emotions at all).

Most of the fiction-empathy research focuses on cognitive empathy, specifically a sub-skill called “theory of mind,” which is the ability to attribute mental states to others and understand that those mental states may differ from your own. Theory of mind is what lets you understand that your friend is smiling politely at a joke she doesn’t find funny, or that your colleague is asking a question he already knows the answer to in order to make a point. It’s the ability to read below the surface of human behavior.

This is relevant because fiction, particularly good fiction, is essentially a theory-of-mind exercise. When you read a novel, you’re constantly inferring the mental states of characters based on their actions, dialogue, and the narrator’s descriptions. You’re asking yourself: why did she say that? What is he really thinking? What does this character want, and does it differ from what they claim to want? These are the same questions you ask in real social interactions, but fiction gives you a safe, low-stakes environment to practice them.

The Kidd and Castano Study

The original 2013 study worked like this. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a short piece of literary fiction, a short piece of popular fiction, a piece of nonfiction, or nothing. After reading (or not reading), they took the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, a well-established measure of theory of mind that asks participants to identify emotions from photographs of people’s eyes. The results showed that participants who read literary fiction performed significantly better on the test than the other groups.

The researchers argued that literary fiction was more effective than popular fiction because it tends to feature more psychologically complex characters whose motivations aren’t spelled out explicitly. In genre fiction, they suggested, characters tend to be more clearly defined, with motivations that are stated or easily inferred. Literary fiction forces the reader to do more interpretive work, to puzzle out what characters are thinking and feeling from subtle cues, which exercises the same cognitive muscles used in real-world social perception.

This distinction between literary and popular fiction generated a lot of pushback, and rightly so. The categories are fuzzy. Is Ursula K. Le Guin literary fiction or genre fiction? Is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go literary or science fiction? The researchers used the somewhat crude metric of whether the text had won or been nominated for a literary prize, which is at best a rough proxy for psychological complexity. I think the more useful takeaway is not that literary fiction is empathy-building while genre fiction isn’t, but that psychologically complex fiction, wherever you find it, engages theory of mind more intensely than psychologically simple fiction.

What Subsequent Research Has Shown

The 2013 study generated a wave of follow-up research, and the picture that’s emerged is more nuanced than the original headlines suggested. Some replication attempts found similar effects. Others didn’t. A 2016 meta-analysis by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, looked across multiple studies and found a small but consistent positive relationship between reading fiction and social cognitive abilities. The effect wasn’t huge, but it was there, and it was statistically significant across the body of research.

One important finding from the subsequent research is that the empathy effect seems to be cumulative. A single short story might produce a temporary blip in theory-of-mind performance, but sustained fiction reading over time appears to produce more lasting effects. A study by Raymond Mar and colleagues found that lifetime fiction reading (measured by an author-recognition test) was a significant predictor of empathy and social cognition, even after controlling for personality traits, intelligence, and nonfiction reading. People who read a lot of fiction, over years and decades, tend to be better at reading other people.

This makes intuitive sense. You wouldn’t expect a single session of physical exercise to permanently improve your fitness. But years of regular exercise obviously do. If fiction reading exercises theory of mind, it stands to reason that the benefits accumulate with sustained practice. A lifetime reader of complex fiction has, in effect, spent thousands of hours practicing the skill of understanding other minds.

The Neuroscience Angle

Brain imaging studies have added another layer to this research. When people read fiction, their brains don’t just process language. They simulate the experiences described in the text. If a character in a novel picks up a cup of coffee, the motor regions of the reader’s brain show activation patterns similar to those involved in actually picking up a cup. If a character feels afraid, the reader’s amygdala, the brain region associated with fear processing, shows increased activity.

This phenomenon, sometimes called “neural simulation” or “embodied cognition,” means that reading fiction is not a purely intellectual exercise. It’s a form of vicarious experience. Your brain, at a neurological level, is partially living through the events of the story. When you read about a character’s grief, your brain processes that grief in ways that overlap with how it processes real grief. Not identically, of course, but with enough overlap that the experience can affect your emotional understanding.

Researchers at Emory University published a study in 2013 (coincidentally the same year as the Kidd and Castano paper) showing that reading a novel produced measurable changes in brain connectivity that persisted for days after the reading was finished. Specifically, activity increased in regions associated with language processing and in the central sulcus, a region involved in processing sensation and movement. The researchers described this as the brain’s “shadow activity,” a residual simulation of the physical and sensory experiences described in the novel.

What this suggests is that fiction reading isn’t just training your ability to understand other people’s thoughts. It’s training your ability to share their physical and sensory experiences. This bridges the gap between cognitive and affective empathy: you’re not just figuring out what someone else is feeling, you’re partially feeling it yourself, through the medium of neural simulation.

Why Fiction and Not Nonfiction

A reasonable question is: if the goal is to understand other people, why not just read nonfiction about psychology or human behavior? Why would made-up stories be more effective than factual accounts?

I think the answer lies in the nature of fictional access. In real life and in most nonfiction, you can only observe other people’s behavior and infer their inner states. You can never truly know what someone else is thinking. Fiction breaks this limitation. A novel can take you inside another person’s mind in a way that no real-world interaction can. You can experience a character’s thoughts, fears, contradictions, and self-deceptions from the inside, with a level of access that would be impossible even with your closest friend.

This access is what makes fiction uniquely suited to empathy training. When you read a first-person narration by a character whose worldview is profoundly different from your own, you’re not just learning about that worldview intellectually. You’re inhabiting it. For the duration of the reading, you’re seeing through someone else’s eyes, processing their experiences with their values and their history. That’s a different kind of understanding than what you get from reading an anthropological study of the same community.

Nonfiction can inform. Fiction can transform. Both are valuable, but they work through different mechanisms. A nonfiction book about life in a refugee camp can give you facts, statistics, and reported accounts. A novel set in a refugee camp can give you the interior experience of a specific person living that life, with all its texture, contradiction, and emotional complexity. The facts inform your understanding. The fiction shapes your capacity for understanding.

The Limits of the Research

I want to be honest about the limitations, because overstating the case helps nobody. The fiction-empathy research is suggestive, not definitive. The effects measured in individual studies are often small. Replication has been inconsistent. The causal direction is debated: does reading fiction make you more empathetic, or are empathetic people simply drawn to fiction? (The answer is probably both, which makes isolating the causal effect difficult.)

There are also questions about which aspects of fiction drive the effect. Is it the psychological complexity of the characters? The narrative perspective (first person vs. third person)? The emotional intensity of the subject matter? The length of the text? Different studies have focused on different variables, and there’s no consensus on which specific features of fiction are most responsible for the empathy effect.

And the practical significance of the measured effects is debatable. If reading a short story temporarily improves your performance on a lab test of emotion recognition by a few percentage points, does that translate into being a better partner, parent, colleague, or citizen? Maybe. But the connection between a lab measure and real-world social behavior is not straightforward. The leap from “slightly better at identifying emotions in photographs of eyes” to “more compassionate human being” requires more evidence than we currently have.

That said, the convergence of behavioral studies, neuroscience, and correlational research paints a picture that’s hard to dismiss entirely. Something is happening when people read fiction, something that relates to how they understand and relate to other people. The exact mechanism and the practical magnitude are still being worked out, but the basic finding, that fiction engages and exercises our capacity for social understanding, seems robust.

What This Means for Readers

I don’t think anyone should read fiction primarily to become more empathetic. That’s a terrible reason to read, like eating chocolate primarily for the antioxidants. Read fiction because it’s pleasurable, because it’s interesting, because it takes you somewhere you’ve never been and introduces you to people you’d never meet otherwise. If it also exercises your empathy muscles, consider that a bonus.

But I do think the research gives us a reason to take fiction reading seriously as a social practice, not just a private hobby. A society of fiction readers might be a more understanding society, not because individual readers have been converted by specific books, but because the cumulative practice of imagining other minds makes people slightly more attuned to the minds around them.

This has implications for education, where fiction reading has been declining in favor of informational texts. It has implications for policy, where arts and humanities funding is often justified on economic grounds (the creative economy, cultural tourism) rather than on the harder-to-measure grounds of social cohesion. And it has implications for how we think about leisure time, because an evening spent reading a novel is not just relaxation. It’s a form of social and emotional exercise that may make us marginally better at being human.

What This Means for Writers

If fiction’s empathy effect is driven by psychological complexity, then writers who create multi-dimensional, contradictory, fully realized characters are doing something socially valuable. A character whose motivations are obvious requires no theory of mind to understand. A character whose motivations are opaque, who says one thing and means another, who has desires they won’t admit to themselves, requires the reader to engage in genuine cognitive work. That work is the exercise.

This doesn’t mean every novel needs to be a dense psychological study. A well-drawn character in any genre can engage the reader’s empathic capacities. A science fiction novel with characters who have genuinely alien motivations. A mystery where the detective’s emotional life is as complex as the crime. A romance where the obstacles to connection are internal and psychological rather than external and circumstantial. Any fiction that treats its characters as full human beings, rather than as functions of the plot, is doing this work.

At ScrollWorks, this is something we actively look for in the manuscripts we acquire. I want characters that resist easy understanding. Characters that surprise me. Characters whose actions make me stop and think about why a person might do that. That quality, the demand that the reader engage imaginatively with another mind, is part of what makes fiction valuable. It’s also, I believe, part of what makes it enjoyable. The pleasure of fiction is largely the pleasure of understanding, or trying to understand, someone who isn’t you.

If the science is even partially right, then every time you open a novel, you’re not just entertaining yourself. You’re practicing one of the most important skills a person can have: the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. That practice might not save the world. But a world where more people practiced it would, I suspect, be a meaningfully better one.

If you’re looking for fiction that demands this kind of engaged, empathic reading, I’d point you toward Still Waters and The Last Archive, both of which center on characters whose inner lives resist easy summary. They’re the kind of books this research makes me believe in more than ever.

I remember the first time someone told me hardcovers were dying. It was 2009, maybe 2010. The Kindle had just started gaining serious traction, and every publishing conference I attended had at least one panel with a title like “The Future of the Physical Book.” The consensus seemed clear: hardcovers were a luxury from a fading era, destined to become collector’s items at best. Within a decade, we’d all be reading on screens.

Well, here we are. And I’m staring at a stack of new hardcover releases on my desk, each one thicker and more beautifully produced than what we were putting out fifteen years ago. The numbers tell a story that nobody at those conferences predicted. Hardcover sales in 2022 are stronger than they were in 2012. In some categories, they’re stronger than they were in 2005. What happened?

To understand the resurgence, you have to first understand the dip. Between roughly 2008 and 2014, hardcover sales did decline. E-readers were new and exciting. Amazon was pricing ebooks at $9.99, often below cost, creating the impression that digital reading was not only convenient but financially smart. Publishers panicked. Some of them slashed hardcover print runs. Others started releasing paperback originals for books that would have historically gotten a hardcover first edition. The logic was straightforward: if nobody wants to pay $27 for a physical book when they can get the same text for ten dollars on their Kindle, stop making the expensive version.

That logic turned out to be wrong, but it wasn’t stupid. It was based on a reasonable reading of the data at the time. What it missed, though, was something that seems obvious in hindsight. E-books didn’t replace physical books. They replaced mass-market paperbacks. The cheap, impulse-buy, read-it-once-and-leave-it-on-the-plane format. That’s the format that lost the most ground to digital. Hardcovers, on the other hand, occupy a different psychological space. Nobody buys a hardcover for convenience. You buy a hardcover because you want to own something.

I think the first sign that hardcovers were coming back was the rise of what I’d call “book as object” culture on social media. Around 2015 and 2016, Instagram accounts dedicated to showing off bookshelves started gaining massive followings. BookTube was growing. People were posting photos of their reading stacks, their shelfies, their hauls from independent bookstores. And in those photos, hardcovers dominated. Not because they’re better for reading, necessarily, but because they photograph better. They look more substantial. They have visible spines with embossed titles. They communicate something about the person displaying them.

This might sound cynical, like I’m saying people buy hardcovers for show. I don’t think that’s quite right. What I think happened is that social media reminded people of something they’d always felt but hadn’t articulated: physical books are meaningful objects. They’re not just delivery mechanisms for text. The weight of a hardcover in your hands, the sound it makes when you set it on a table, the way it looks on a shelf years after you’ve read it. These things matter. They mattered before Instagram, but Instagram gave people a reason to notice and talk about them.

There’s also a generational element that I find fascinating. Gen Z, the generation that supposedly lives entirely online, has driven a remarkable amount of physical book buying. The numbers from the Association of American Publishers show that the biggest growth in hardcover sales over the past five years has been in young adult and literary fiction, both categories with heavy Gen Z readership. These are people who grew up with smartphones and tablets. They don’t need physical books. They choose them. And when they choose them, they tend to choose hardcovers over paperbacks at higher rates than previous generations did at the same age.

I’ve talked to some of these younger readers at events, and their reasoning is consistent. They spend all day looking at screens. When they read for pleasure, they want something that feels different from scrolling through their phone. A paperback is fine for that, but a hardcover is better. It’s heavier. It forces you to sit still. It doesn’t fit in your back pocket, so you have to make a deliberate choice to sit down and read. For a generation overwhelmed by digital stimulation, that deliberateness is the point.

Publishers have noticed, and they’ve responded by investing more in hardcover production quality. Twenty years ago, a standard hardcover was a cloth-covered board with a dust jacket, and that was about it. The interiors were usually identical to the paperback that would follow a year later. Today, publishers are treating hardcovers as premium products with genuine differentiation. Sprayed edges have become almost standard for big releases. Foil stamping, debossing, custom endpapers, French flaps, stenciled page edges. I’ve seen hardcovers with hand-marbled covers, with ribbon bookmarks in multiple colors, with illustrations printed on transparent overlays. The gap between a hardcover and its eventual paperback edition has widened from “same book, better cover” to “genuinely different product.”

At ScrollWorks, we’ve leaned into this hard. When we published The Last Archive, we spent more on the physical design of the hardcover than we’d budgeted for the entire production of some titles just five years earlier. The cover uses a combination of spot UV and soft-touch lamination that you can feel with your fingertips. The endpapers reproduce archival documents that are referenced in the text. The chapter openers have custom illustrations. None of this changes the words on the page, but it changes the experience of reading them. And our readers noticed. The hardcover outsold the ebook four to one in the first month.

I should be honest about the economics, though, because the picture isn’t entirely rosy. Hardcover production costs have gone up significantly. Paper prices have increased. Specialty printing techniques like edge spraying require either specialized equipment or hand finishing, both of which are expensive. Shipping costs for heavier books eat into margins. A hardcover that retails for $28 might cost $5 or $6 to manufacture, compared to $1.50 for the same text in paperback. If your print run is small, those per-unit costs go even higher. For a mid-size publisher like us, every hardcover release involves a real financial bet.

The bet keeps paying off, though. And I think the reason is that the market has bifurcated in a way that actually benefits hardcovers. On one end, you have readers who just want the text. They buy ebooks or wait for the paperback. They’re price-sensitive and format-indifferent. On the other end, you have readers who want the full experience. They want the object. They want to open a book and feel like someone cared about every detail. They’re willing to pay $28 or $32 or even $40 for that experience. And because publishers are now delivering genuinely premium products at the hardcover tier, those readers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.

There’s almost no middle ground anymore, and that’s interesting. The trade paperback, the $16 format that used to be the workhorse of literary fiction, has become a harder sell. It’s too expensive for readers who just want the text (they’ll get the ebook for $12 or less), and it’s not special enough for readers who want the object (they’ll pay the extra $12 for the hardcover). I wouldn’t say the trade paperback is dying, but its role has shifted. It’s become the format you buy when the hardcover is sold out, or when you want a replacement copy for a book you already read in another format.

Special editions have pushed this even further. The collector’s market for books has exploded. Companies like Folio Society have been doing premium editions for decades, but now mainstream publishers are getting in on the act. Signed editions. Numbered editions. Exclusive covers for specific retailers. Barnes and Noble has built a genuinely profitable business around their exclusive hardcover editions with unique cover designs. Waterstones in the UK does the same thing. These editions sell out, sometimes in hours. They sell on the secondary market for multiples of their retail price. The existence of this market tells you something about how readers think about hardcovers: they’re not just books, they’re things worth collecting.

I’ve watched this trend with a mix of excitement and wariness. Excitement because it’s great for a publisher when readers are willing to pay premium prices. Wariness because I sometimes wonder if the emphasis on physical production is overshadowing the text itself. When a book’s main selling point is its sprayed edges or its exclusive cover art, are we still in the book business, or are we in the merchandise business? I don’t have a clean answer to that. Both, probably.

What I can say is that the quality of writing hasn’t suffered. If anything, the hardcover resurgence has given publishers more confidence to invest in literary fiction and serious nonfiction, the kinds of books that benefit most from the hardcover treatment. When you know your audience will pay $30 for a beautifully produced book, you can afford to take risks on manuscripts that might not have survived a purely commercial calculus. At ScrollWorks, our hardcover program has allowed us to publish books like Still Waters and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, titles that needed the right presentation to find their audience. Both found it.

The indie bookstore revival has played a role here too. Independent bookstores have increased in number by about 40% since their nadir in 2009. These stores are curated spaces. Their owners and staff choose what to display face-out, what to put on the recommendation table, what to feature in the front window. And hardcovers dominate those display spaces because they’re more visually striking. A hardcover face-out on a recommendation table can sell five copies where a spine-out paperback on a crowded shelf sells one. The physical retail environment naturally favors the hardcover format, and as indie bookstores have grown, so has their influence on what readers buy.

There’s also the gift factor, which publishers have talked about forever but which I think has genuinely intensified. Books are the second most popular gift category in the United States after gift cards. And when you’re buying a book as a gift, you buy the hardcover. Always. Nobody wraps a paperback. Nobody puts a Kindle download under the Christmas tree. The hardcover is the gift format by default, and as the broader culture has moved toward “experiences over things” while still wanting something physical to give, books have benefited. A beautiful hardcover occupies a sweet spot: it’s a physical object, but it’s also an experience. It says something about the giver’s taste and their understanding of the recipient.

I want to talk about durability too, because it’s an underrated factor. I have paperbacks from twenty years ago that are falling apart. The spines are cracked, the pages are yellowed, the covers are creased and torn. I have hardcovers from forty years ago that look almost new. If you’re building a personal library, if you want books you can pass down to your children, hardcovers are the practical choice. More readers seem to be thinking this way now. Maybe it’s a reaction to the disposability of digital media, where your ebook library can vanish if a company goes out of business or changes its terms of service. A hardcover on your shelf is yours. It doesn’t require a subscription. It doesn’t need to be updated. It won’t be made unavailable due to a licensing dispute.

The audiobook question comes up a lot in these discussions, and I think it’s relevant. Audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in publishing. They’ve been growing at double-digit rates for a decade. Some people see this as a threat to print, but I see it as complementary, especially for hardcovers. Many of the most dedicated audiobook listeners are also avid print buyers. They listen to the audio version during their commute and then buy the hardcover for their shelf. It sounds redundant, but it’s common. The audio provides the convenience; the hardcover provides the permanence. One reader told me she thinks of her audiobook subscription as a “try before you buy” service. She listens to a book, and if she loves it, she buys the hardcover.

Looking at specific genres, the hardcover resurgence is uneven but widespread. Literary fiction has always been hardcover-first, and that hasn’t changed. Fantasy and science fiction have seen enormous growth in hardcover sales, driven partly by collector culture and partly by the sheer length of many fantasy novels (a 600-page fantasy novel in paperback is unwieldy; in hardcover, it feels like an artifact). Romance is the outlier. Romance readers still overwhelmingly prefer ebooks and paperbacks. The genre moves too fast and readers consume too many titles for hardcovers to make sense in most cases. But even in romance, special hardcover editions of breakout hits have found a market.

Nonfiction has its own interesting dynamics. Prescriptive nonfiction, the “how to” and self-help category, has moved heavily toward ebooks and audio. But narrative nonfiction, the kind of long-form, research-driven writing that ScrollWorks specializes in, has seen hardcover growth. I think it’s because narrative nonfiction readers are often building subject-specific libraries. If you’re interested in World War II history or climate science or the history of technology, you want those books on your shelf. You want to be able to pull them down and reference them. You want visitors to see them and know what you’re interested in. Our title Echoes of Iron sells better in hardcover than in any other format, and I attribute that partly to its subject matter being the kind of thing readers want to display.

There are challenges ahead. Print-on-demand technology is improving rapidly, which could eventually close the quality gap between POD paperbacks and offset-printed hardcovers. If a reader can get a high-quality paperback printed and shipped within 48 hours for $14, the value proposition of a $28 hardcover gets harder to maintain. Supply chain volatility is a concern too. We saw during the pandemic how quickly paper shortages and shipping delays could disrupt hardcover production. A publisher that commits to a large hardcover print run is taking on inventory risk that doesn’t exist with digital formats.

But I’m optimistic. The hardcover resurgence isn’t built on nostalgia alone. It’s built on a genuine consumer preference for physical objects of quality in a world that’s increasingly digital and ephemeral. It’s built on publishers rising to meet that preference with products that justify their price. And it’s built on a reading culture that values books not just as texts but as things, as objects that carry meaning beyond their content. That’s not going away. If anything, as more of our lives move online, the appeal of holding something real in your hands will only grow.

I think about those conference panels from 2009 sometimes. The people who predicted the death of hardcovers weren’t wrong about the technology. E-readers did get better. Ebooks did get cheaper. Digital reading did become mainstream. What they were wrong about was human nature. People don’t just want text. They want objects that mean something. They want shelves full of books that tell the story of who they are and what they’ve read. The hardcover, it turns out, isn’t a relic. It’s a format that’s finally being appreciated for what it always was.

I read a novel in Finnish translation last year that stopped me cold in the middle of a sentence. The original was Japanese, a mid-century work I’d read in English years before and found competent but unremarkable. The Finnish translator had done something I still can’t fully explain. The rhythm of the prose had changed. Not just the words, but the spaces between them, the way one sentence leaned into the next, the way paragraphs breathed. I set the book down and thought: this is better than the original. And then I thought: what does “better than the original” even mean when we’re talking about translation?

That question has haunted me for months. It gets at the heart of what literary translation is and what we should expect from it. Most readers, myself included for many years, think of translation as a kind of sophisticated code-switching. You take the meaning in one language and reproduce it in another. Accuracy is the goal. Fidelity is the standard. A great translation is one where you forget you’re reading a translation at all.

I’ve come to believe that framework is almost entirely wrong.

A literary translation isn’t a reproduction. It’s a performance. Think of it like music. When a pianist plays a Chopin nocturne, nobody expects them to play it exactly the way Chopin would have played it. We expect them to interpret it. To bring their own understanding, their own sensibility, their own technical gifts to the material. Two pianists can play the same piece and produce utterly different experiences, and both can be magnificent. The score is the starting point, not the destination. Great literary translation works the same way. The source text is the score. The translator is the performer.

This analogy isn’t original to me. Gregory Rabassa, who translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar into English, talked about translation as performance decades ago. But I think the publishing industry has been slow to internalize it. We still evaluate translations primarily on accuracy. Reviews of translated works almost always include some version of “the translation reads smoothly” or “the translator captures the author’s voice.” These are fine observations as far as they go, but they treat the translator as invisible, as a pane of glass through which you view the original. The best translators I’ve worked with are nothing like glass. They’re more like stained glass: they transform the light that passes through them.

Let me get specific. When we were working on the English edition of a Central European novel a few years ago (I won’t name it because the rights situation is complicated), we had two sample translations to choose from. Both were technically accurate. Both came from translators with excellent credentials and long track records. The difference between them was in the sentences. Translator A had produced prose that was correct, fluent, and somewhat flat. You could read it without stumbling, but it didn’t make you feel anything. Translator B had produced prose that was stranger, less immediately smooth, but alive in a way that Translator A’s version wasn’t. Translator B had made choices. Where the original used a common metaphor, Translator B had found an unexpected English equivalent that wasn’t quite the same thing but hit harder. Where the original had long, subordinate-clause-heavy sentences, Translator B hadn’t simply reproduced that structure in English (which would have read as clumsy) but had found a different way to create the same sense of accumulation and density.

We went with Translator B. It was the right choice. The reviews praised the novel’s prose style, which was really the translator’s prose style, shaped by and in conversation with the original author’s intentions.

This raises an uncomfortable question. If the translator is making creative choices, if they’re interpreting rather than reproducing, how do we judge their work? If accuracy isn’t the primary standard, what is? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think there are several qualities that separate great literary translation from competent literary translation.

The first is voice. Every author has a voice, a characteristic way of putting sentences together that’s as distinctive as a fingerprint. When you translate that voice into another language, you can’t simply mirror it. English doesn’t work like Japanese. French doesn’t work like Arabic. The syntactic structures, the available vocabulary, the cultural connotations of individual words are all different. A great translator creates a voice in the target language that feels like it could belong to the original author, even though the original author would never have written those exact sentences. It’s a kind of controlled ventriloquism. The translator speaks in someone else’s character, using their own language and their own craft.

I think of Ann Goldstein’s translations of Elena Ferrante. Goldstein writes English prose that is clear, direct, and emotionally precise. It reads nothing like Italian. It’s not trying to. But it captures something about the way Ferrante thinks, the way her sentences build emotional pressure through accumulation and repetition. You feel Ferrante’s intelligence and intensity in Goldstein’s English, even though the two languages create that feeling through completely different means. That’s voice translation at its best.

The second quality is attention to register. Register is the level of formality or informality in language, and it shifts constantly within a text. A character might speak in slang, think in elevated prose, and write letters in bureaucratic jargon. Each of those registers carries meaning. In the original language, those shifts are obvious to a native reader. In translation, they can easily get flattened into a single, undifferentiated “translated” voice. Great translators preserve the shifts. They find English (or French, or German, or whatever the target language is) equivalents that carry the same social and emotional signals as the original registers. This is extraordinarily difficult work. It requires deep knowledge of both languages at a level that goes way beyond vocabulary and grammar, into the sociology of how people actually speak and write.

The third quality is rhythm. Prose has rhythm the same way poetry does, just less obviously. The length of sentences, the placement of stressed syllables, the way commas and periods create pauses. In the original language, these rhythms are part of the reading experience. They speed you up or slow you down. They create tension or release. When you translate, you can’t preserve the original rhythms because different languages have different rhythmic structures. English tends toward shorter sentences and front-loaded emphasis. German allows for longer sentences with the verb kicked to the end. Japanese piles up subordinate phrases before arriving at the main clause. A translator who simply reproduces the original sentence structures in English will produce prose that sounds wrong, even if every word is correct. A great translator finds new rhythms in the target language that produce the same emotional effect.

This is something I didn’t appreciate until I started working with translators professionally. I used to think that the hardest part of translation was handling wordplay, idioms, and culture-specific references. And those things are hard, certainly. How do you translate a pun that only works in French? How do you handle a reference to a TV show that nobody in the target culture has seen? But these are surface-level problems with surface-level solutions (footnotes, creative substitution, strategic omission). The deeper challenge is capturing the music of the prose. I’ve seen translators agonize for hours over a single paragraph, not because they couldn’t understand it, but because they couldn’t make it sing in English.

The fourth quality, and this one is controversial, is willingness to depart from the source. Strict fidelity to the original is not always a virtue. Sometimes the original text uses a technique that doesn’t work in the target language. Sometimes a metaphor that’s fresh and surprising in Spanish is a dead cliche in English. Sometimes the original has weaknesses that a good translator can quietly fix. I know that last point will make some purists angry, but I’ve seen it done, and done well. A translator who spots a clunky transition in the original and smooths it out in translation isn’t betraying the author. They’re serving the author’s intentions better than the author served them in that particular passage.

The Italian phrase “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor) gets quoted in every conversation about translation, usually to warn against taking too many liberties. I think the phrase is more interesting than its usual usage suggests. All translation is betrayal, because all translation involves loss. The question isn’t whether the translator betrays the original, but which betrayals are productive and which are destructive. A translator who flattens a complex voice into bland fluency is betraying the original just as much as one who takes wild creative liberties. Maybe more so, because the bland version doesn’t even acknowledge that something has been lost.

At ScrollWorks, we publish a modest number of translated works each year, and the translation process is the most labor-intensive part of our editorial workflow. We start by having two people read the source text independently: one who reads in the original language and one who reads an existing translation (if available) or a rough literal translation. Both write reports on what makes the book work, what its voice sounds like, what its rhythmic patterns are, what might be difficult to render in English. Then we commission sample translations from two or three translators, usually 15 to 20 pages each. We read those samples not for accuracy (we assume competent translators will be accurate) but for life. Does the English version feel alive? Does it have its own energy? Does it make you want to keep reading?

The selection process is subjective, and I’m comfortable with that. If translation is performance, then choosing a translator is like casting a role. You’re not looking for the most technically skilled performer. You’re looking for the performer whose sensibility matches the material. I’ve turned down translators with decades more experience than the person we ultimately hired because the less experienced translator simply heard the original text more clearly. Experience matters, but connection to the material matters more.

Once we’ve selected a translator, the editorial process is collaborative in a way that monolingual editing isn’t. Our editor works with the translator through multiple drafts, reading the translation alongside the original (or alongside a literal crib, for languages our editors don’t read). The conversations are about feel as much as meaning. “This paragraph moves too fast in the English.” “This character’s dialogue sounds too formal; in the original, she speaks like a teenager.” “This image is beautiful in the source, but in English it sounds like a cough medicine commercial.” These are real notes from real editorial sessions. They’re the kind of notes that only make sense when you treat translation as a creative act rather than a mechanical one.

I want to mention compensation because it’s part of the picture. Literary translators are chronically underpaid. The standard rate for literary translation in the English-speaking world is somewhere between eight and twelve cents per word, depending on the language and the publisher. For a 300-page novel, that works out to roughly $6,000 to $9,000. A good literary translator might spend six months to a year on a book. Do the math. These are highly skilled professionals, usually with graduate degrees and deep expertise in multiple languages and literatures, earning less than minimum wage for their work. And yet the quality of literary translation in English is remarkably high. That’s a tribute to the translators who do this work because they love it, often subsidizing their translation income with teaching, freelance editing, or other work.

We’ve tried to do better at ScrollWorks. We pay above the standard rates, and we offer royalty participation so that translators benefit from a book’s success. We also credit translators prominently on covers and in marketing materials. “Translated by” should appear on the front cover, in my opinion. The translator is a co-creator of the English edition, and readers deserve to know who they are. I’ve bought books specifically because of the translator. When I see that Jhumpa Lahiri has translated something from Italian, or that Margaret Jull Costa has translated something from Portuguese, that name on the cover tells me something meaningful about what the reading experience will be like.

The technology question is impossible to ignore. Machine translation has improved dramatically. Google Translate in 2022 produces output that would have been unimaginable ten years ago. DeepL is even better for many language pairs. And there are more specialized AI translation tools emerging every year. Can machines produce literary translation? Not yet. Not even close. Machine translation can handle the code-switching part, the conversion of meaning from one language to another. What it cannot do is perform. It cannot hear the music of the source text and compose new music in the target language. It cannot make the creative choices that give translated prose its life. I’m sure machine translation will continue to improve, and I’m sure it will become useful as a first-draft tool for translators, the way a pianist might use a recording as a starting point for their own interpretation. But I don’t think it will replace human literary translation in my lifetime, for the same reason that synthesizers haven’t replaced orchestras.

One thing I wish more readers understood is that a book in translation is, in a very real sense, two books. It’s the book the original author wrote, and it’s the book the translator wrote. They overlap but they’re not identical. When you read Dostoevsky in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, you’re reading a different book than if you read Dostoevsky in the Constance Garnett translation. Not a little different. Substantially different. The same events happen. The same characters appear. But the texture of the experience, the way the prose feels in your mind as you read it, changes radically depending on the translator. This is not a flaw in the system. It’s the system working as it should. Multiple translations of the same work give readers multiple paths into that work, and each path reveals different things.

I sometimes wonder if the ideal reader of translated literature is someone who reads the same book in two or three different translations. That’s impractical, obviously. Most people don’t have time to read a book once, let alone three times. But for the books that matter most to you, it’s an exercise worth trying. Read a chapter of Proust in the older Scott Moncrieff translation and then in the newer Lydia Davis translation. The differences are illuminating, not because one is right and the other wrong, but because they show you how much of what you experience as “the book” is actually the translator’s interpretation of the book.

This is what I keep coming back to. A great literary translation is not the one that’s most accurate. It’s not the one that tracks most closely to the source. It’s the one that creates a living, breathing work of literature in the target language, one that honors the original by being something worthy in its own right. It’s the translation that stops you cold in the middle of a sentence, that makes you set the book down and think. Not “that was well translated” but “that was well written.” Because in the end, that’s what a great translator is: a writer. A writer working within constraints that most writers never face, making art from someone else’s blueprint, finding their own voice inside another person’s vision. When it works, when the translator and the author and the target language all come together, the result is something close to magic. Two minds, two languages, one experience that belongs fully to both.

There’s a photograph from 1926 that I keep pinned above my desk. It shows a group of women seated around a table in a Paris apartment. The light is coming from a tall window on the left. The women are holding books. Several of them are mid-conversation, their faces animated with the particular intensity that comes from arguing about ideas. They were members of Sylvia Beach’s lending library circle, loosely organized, fiercely opinionated, and responsible for championing writers that no mainstream publisher would touch. One of those writers was James Joyce. Without that group of readers, readers who met regularly to discuss and advocate for literature they believed in, Ulysses might never have found its publisher.

I bring this up because book clubs get a bad reputation in the publishing industry, and it drives me a little bit crazy. The stereotype is a group of middle-aged women drinking wine and barely discussing the book. I’ve heard editors, agents, and fellow publishers dismiss book clubs as irrelevant to serious literary culture. This attitude is shortsighted at best. At worst, it’s a misreading of how books actually find their audiences and how the publishing industry’s direction has been shaped by organized groups of readers throughout its history.

Let me start with the most obvious example. Oprah’s Book Club, launched in 1996, didn’t just change publishing. It rearranged the furniture. Before Oprah, literary fiction was a prestige category with modest sales. Serious novels won prizes and sold 10,000 copies. Oprah’s selections routinely sold over a million. More importantly, she chose books that the industry hadn’t expected to become bestsellers. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon had been in print for nearly twenty years when Oprah selected it. Within weeks, it was the number one bestseller in the country. Wally Lamb, Andre Dubus III, Bernhard Schlink. These were writers the industry respected but hadn’t invested in at scale. Oprah made them into household names, and in doing so, she proved something the industry should have already known: ordinary readers are hungry for literary fiction. They just need someone to invite them in.

The publishing industry’s response to Oprah was revealing. At first, there was snobbery. Literary types dismissed her selections as middlebrow. Jonathan Franzen’s public ambivalence about being chosen for the club in 2001 became a notorious episode in the culture wars between “literary” and “popular” fiction. Looking back, the snobbery was ridiculous. Oprah’s Book Club did more for literary fiction sales in five years than the entire literary awards ecosystem had done in fifty. But the fact that the industry was initially uncomfortable with a non-literary-establishment figure having that much influence tells you something about how the industry thought about readers, and specifically about organized groups of readers. Readers were supposed to be passive. They bought what publishers and critics told them to buy. They weren’t supposed to form their own communities and make their own decisions about what mattered.

But they always had. Long before Oprah, book clubs were shaping what Americans read. The Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926 (the same year as that photograph on my wall, coincidentally), was the first major effort to organize readers at scale. Its model was simple: a panel of judges selected one book per month, and subscribers received it automatically unless they opted out. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, the Book-of-the-Month Club had over half a million members. That’s half a million guaranteed sales for any book the club selected. Publishers designed their lists around it. Editors acquired books with one eye on the manuscript and the other on whether the Book-of-the-Month Club judges would like it. The club’s preferences shaped what got published, which shaped what got written, which shaped what American literature looked like for decades.

The club had biases, of course. Its judges favored realistic fiction, American and British settings, and traditional narrative structures. Experimental work rarely made the cut. This frustrated writers and critics who wanted American literature to be more adventurous, and their frustration wasn’t wrong. But the Book-of-the-Month Club also did something valuable: it created a national conversation about books. Hundreds of thousands of people were reading the same book at the same time, discussing it with friends and neighbors and colleagues. In an era before television dominated American entertainment, these shared reading experiences were a form of cultural glue. They gave people something to talk about. They made reading feel like participation in something larger than an individual act.

On the other side of the Atlantic, book clubs had an even more explicitly political dimension. The Left Book Club, founded in 1936 by publisher Victor Gollancz, combined reading with political organizing. Members received a monthly selection focused on socialism, anti-fascism, and social justice. The club had 57,000 members at its peak, organized into over 1,500 local discussion groups across Britain. These weren’t just reading groups. They were organizing cells. Members discussed the books, yes, but they also planned political actions, raised money for causes, and built networks that fed into the broader British left. George Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier through the Left Book Club, and the book’s impact was amplified enormously by the club’s distribution network and discussion infrastructure.

The Left Book Club demonstrates something important about what book clubs can do that individual reading cannot. Individual reading changes individual minds. Book clubs change the social context in which those minds operate. When you read a book alone, your response is private. When you read a book as part of a group, your response becomes social. You articulate your reactions, defend your interpretations, hear perspectives you wouldn’t have considered. The book becomes a site of conversation, and the conversation can lead to action. This is why book clubs have been important to every major social movement in modern history. The abolitionist movement had its reading circles. The suffrage movement had its literary societies. The civil rights movement had its book clubs. Reading together has always been a first step toward acting together.

I want to jump forward to the early 2000s, because something interesting happened to book clubs when the internet arrived. Online book clubs should have been a natural evolution. People could discuss books across geographic boundaries, join multiple clubs simultaneously, and access a wider range of titles than any local group could manage. And online book clubs did emerge, on platforms like Goodreads, LibraryThing, and dozens of smaller forums. But they didn’t replace physical book clubs. Instead, both formats grew. The American Library Association estimated in 2019 that there were over five million active book club members in the United States, and that number has likely grown since. Physical, in-person book clubs are as popular as they’ve been at any point in American history.

Why? I think it’s because the social function of a book club can’t be fully replicated online. An online discussion is convenient, but it lacks the ambient social qualities of sitting in someone’s living room with a glass of wine and a dog trying to sit on your lap while you argue about whether the narrator is reliable. The book is often a pretext for the gathering as much as it’s the purpose. People join book clubs because they want to read more, yes, but also because they want regular, structured social interaction with people who share at least one of their interests. In an era of increasing social isolation, book clubs offer something genuinely valuable: a reason to show up somewhere on a regular basis and talk to people.

For publishers, book clubs have become a significant sales channel. When a book gets picked up by book clubs, even small local ones, the effect is measurable. A single book club of twelve people represents twelve guaranteed sales. Multiply that by thousands of clubs choosing the same book, and you’re talking about real numbers. Publishers have responded by creating “book club editions” with discussion guides in the back, organizing author appearances at book club meetings (virtual appearances have made this much easier), and targeting book club influencers with advance copies. Some publishers have dedicated staff whose job is book club outreach. I know because I’ve hired one.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve had two books become genuine book club hits. Still Waters was the first. We didn’t plan for it. The book was a quiet literary novel that we expected to sell modestly to a core audience of literary fiction readers. But something about it resonated with book clubs. I think it was the themes: family obligation, the cost of secrets, the way the past refuses to stay buried. These are topics that generate discussion. People disagree about the protagonist’s choices. They bring their own family experiences to the conversation. They argue about the ending. A book that generates good arguments is a book that works for book clubs, and word spread from one club to another until we were getting orders in quantities that didn’t match any of our other marketing efforts. Our best-selling month for Still Waters wasn’t the launch month. It was eight months later, when the book club wave was at its peak.

That experience taught me something about how books travel through book club networks. It’s slow. It’s organic. It depends on personal recommendations from club members who belong to multiple clubs, or who recommend books to friends in other cities. It’s almost entirely outside the publisher’s control. We can send advance copies to book club leaders. We can make discussion guides available. We can offer author visits. But we can’t manufacture the word-of-mouth that makes a book a book club phenomenon. That comes from the readers themselves, from their genuine enthusiasm, from their desire to share something they loved with people they trust.

Reese Witherspoon’s book club, which launched in 2017, is the most interesting recent development in this space. Witherspoon built on the Oprah model but adapted it for social media. Her picks are announced on Instagram, discussed across multiple platforms, and branded with recognizable stickers that appear on bookstore shelves. The commercial impact has been enormous. A Reese’s Book Club pick can sell 100,000 additional copies. But what I find more interesting than the sales numbers is the way Witherspoon has influenced what gets published. Her preferences are specific: she favors stories with strong female protagonists, Southern settings, themes of resilience and reinvention. And because publishers know her preferences, they acquire books that fit them. Acquisitions editors have told me openly that they think about “Reese potential” when evaluating manuscripts. That’s a book club shaping the pipeline, not just the sales chart.

Whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. I think it’s mostly good, because the books Witherspoon champions tend to be well-written and commercially undervalued. They’re the kinds of books that would have struggled to find a large audience without institutional support. But there’s a risk that the influence becomes too concentrated. When a handful of celebrity book clubs drive a disproportionate share of book sales, publishers start optimizing for those clubs rather than for the broader market. The range of books that get published narrows. Voices that don’t fit the mold get overlooked. I’ve seen this happen, and it concerns me.

The antidote is the grassroots book club, the local group that reads whatever it wants without reference to celebrity picks or bestseller lists. These clubs are where the most adventurous reading happens. I’ve met book club members who’ve read authors I’d never heard of, who’ve discovered books from small presses in other countries, who’ve gone deep into a single genre or a single region’s literature in ways that no commercial book club would ever attempt. These groups are the connective tissue of literary culture. They’re the reason that a book published by a tiny press in, say, New Zealand can end up being discussed in a living room in Portland, Oregon, six months later.

The pandemic changed book clubs, mostly for the better. Zoom book clubs became mainstream out of necessity, and they’ve persisted because they solve real logistical problems. People with young children can attend without finding a babysitter. People with disabilities can participate from home. People in rural areas can join clubs based in cities hundreds of miles away. The hybrid model, where some members attend in person and others join by video, has become common and seems likely to stick around. I know several clubs that have added members in other states because of pandemic-era adaptations. The geographic constraint that used to limit book clubs to a single neighborhood or city has been loosened, and the result is clubs that are more diverse in every sense: geographically, demographically, and in their reading tastes.

There’s one more historical example I want to mention, because it’s close to my heart. In the 1980s, a group of independent bookstore owners in Northern California formed an informal network to share recommendations. They’d read advance copies, discuss them by phone (this was before email was widespread), and agree on which titles to push in their stores. They called themselves the Pacific Rim Booksellers Group, and their recommendations carried weight with publishers because they represented real stores with real customers. When the group collectively got behind a book, it meant prominent display in a dozen stores, hand-selling by knowledgeable staff, and word-of-mouth that radiated outward from the Bay Area to the rest of the West Coast.

This group was, in effect, a book club for booksellers. And its influence was out of proportion to its size. Several books that became major literary successes in the late 1980s and 1990s got their start through this network. The booksellers’ enthusiasm was the spark that lit the fire. Without it, those books might have sold respectably and quietly gone out of print. With it, they found an audience that grew and grew until the rest of the industry noticed.

I think about that group when I think about what book clubs do at their best. They amplify. They take a single reader’s enthusiasm and multiply it through conversation, recommendation, and community. They turn private experiences into shared ones. They create audiences for books that the market alone wouldn’t support. And they do all of this without any formal power, without any institutional authority, without any commercial incentive. They do it because people who love books want to talk about them with other people who love books. That impulse is as old as literature itself, and it’s more powerful than any marketing campaign, any celebrity endorsement, any algorithmic recommendation engine.

The next time someone dismisses book clubs as frivolous, I’ll point them to Sylvia Beach’s lending library. Or the Left Book Club. Or Oprah’s million-copy sellers. Or the quiet, steady work of thousands of local groups that keep books alive long after their publication dates have passed. Book clubs didn’t just change publishing. They are publishing, in the most fundamental sense. They’re the place where books stop being products and start being experiences. And that, more than anything else, is what keeps this industry alive.

I want to tell you a story about a book that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a novel, originally published in Spanish by a small press in Buenos Aires in 2003. The author was a retired schoolteacher. The print run was 500 copies. The book got a few positive reviews in Argentine literary magazines, sold most of its print run over about three years, and then quietly went out of print. The author died in 2011. By then, you couldn’t find a copy for less than forty dollars online. Today, you’d be lucky to find one at all.

I know about this book because a translator I work with brought it to my attention. She’d picked up a copy at a used bookstore in Montevideo and thought it was extraordinary. She translated three chapters as a sample and sent them to me. They were extraordinary. The prose was precise and strange, the characters fully alive, the structure inventive without being gimmicky. I wanted to publish it. But the rights were tangled. The author’s estate was managed by a nephew who lived in Seville and didn’t respond to emails. The original publisher had gone out of business. The legal work required to secure translation rights would have cost more than we’d earn from the book in its first two years.

We published it anyway, eventually, after eighteen months of negotiation. It sold about 2,000 copies. And I tell this story because it illustrates something that the “free ebooks” conversation consistently ignores. The real cost of free ebooks isn’t piracy. It isn’t Amazon’s market power. It isn’t the devaluation of individual titles. The real cost is all the books that never get made because the economics don’t support them.

Let me back up. When people talk about free ebooks, they usually mean one of three things. First: piracy, the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted ebooks through file-sharing sites, Telegram channels, and dedicated piracy platforms. Second: the perception that ebooks should be free or nearly free, driven partly by Amazon’s early $9.99 pricing, partly by the existence of free books in the public domain, and partly by the general internet-era expectation that digital content should cost nothing. Third: the actual free ebooks that publishers and authors give away as marketing tools, through services like BookBub, permafree first-in-series strategies, and Kindle Unlimited’s subscription model, which isn’t technically free but feels free to the reader.

I have thoughts about all three, but I want to focus on the second, the perception problem, because I think it does the most damage.

The perception that ebooks should be cheap or free is based on a misunderstanding of what makes a book expensive to produce. People look at a physical book and see paper, printing, binding, shipping. They look at an ebook and see… nothing. No physical materials. No manufacturing. No shipping. Just a file. And since the file costs almost nothing to distribute, they reason, it should cost almost nothing to buy.

This reasoning misses about 80% of the cost of producing a book. The physical manufacturing of a trade paperback, including printing, binding, and the cost of the paper itself, typically accounts for about 10 to 15% of the retail price. For a $16 paperback, that’s maybe $1.50 to $2.50 in manufacturing costs. The rest of the retail price covers the author’s advance and royalties, editorial work (developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading), cover design and interior layout, marketing and publicity, overhead (rent, salaries, insurance, all the things that keep a publishing company functioning), and distribution and retail margins. None of those costs go away when you produce an ebook instead of a physical book. The author still needs to be paid. The editor still needs to edit. The designer still needs to design. The marketing still needs to happen. The company still needs to exist.

There are some savings, yes. You don’t pay for paper, printing, or warehousing. You don’t pay for returns (the physical book industry’s bizarre practice of allowing bookstores to return unsold books for full credit, which costs publishers billions every year). But those savings are partially offset by ebook-specific costs: digital conversion, DRM implementation, platform fees (Amazon takes 30% of ebook revenue for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and 65% for books priced outside that window), and ongoing digital distribution management. When you add it all up, the savings from eliminating the physical product amount to maybe 20 to 25% of the total cost. That’s meaningful, and it’s why ebooks are typically priced lower than hardcovers. But it doesn’t justify the expectation that ebooks should be $2 or free.

The author’s share is the part that concerns me most. The standard ebook royalty for a traditionally published author is 25% of net revenue. “Net revenue” means the amount the publisher receives after the retailer takes its cut. So for a $12.99 ebook sold through Amazon, the math works like this: Amazon takes 30%, leaving $9.09 for the publisher. The author gets 25% of that $9.09, which is $2.27. Out of that $2.27, the author’s agent takes 15%, leaving the author with $1.93. For a book that took two years to write.

Now drop the price to $4.99. Amazon still takes 30%, leaving $3.49. The author’s 25% is $0.87. After the agent’s cut, the author takes home $0.74. Per copy. For a book that took two years to write. To earn the median American household income from ebooks at that price, an author would need to sell roughly 75,000 copies per year. The vast majority of books, even reasonably successful ones, sell nowhere near that many copies in any format. The median traditionally published book sells about 3,000 copies across all formats in its first year.

This is why most authors can’t support themselves through writing. And this is where the cost of cheap ebooks becomes tangible. When ebook prices drop, author incomes drop. When author incomes drop, fewer people can afford to write full-time. When fewer people write full-time, the books that get written are increasingly produced by people who have other sources of income: trust funds, working spouses, academic positions, or day jobs that leave them with limited time and energy for writing. The diversity of voices in published literature narrows. The people who can afford to write tend to be people with financial privilege, and their work tends to reflect the experiences and perspectives that come with that privilege.

I’ve watched this happen in real time over the past decade. The mid-list, the category of books that sell respectably but not spectacularly, has been hollowed out. Publishers concentrate their resources on potential blockbusters and let mid-list titles fend for themselves. Authors who would have built sustainable careers publishing one book every two or three years now find that each book earns less than the last, until eventually the economics force them to stop writing or to shift to a more commercially viable genre. I’ve lost authors this way. Good authors. Authors whose books mattered to their readers, even if those readers numbered in the thousands rather than the millions. The books those authors would have written will never exist. That’s a cost, even if it doesn’t show up on any balance sheet.

Piracy compounds the problem, but I don’t think it’s the main driver. The publishing industry’s own estimates of revenue lost to piracy vary wildly and are probably inflated. Most people who download pirated books wouldn’t have bought them at full price. Some piracy probably even drives sales, as readers discover authors through pirated copies and then buy subsequent books legitimately. I don’t condone piracy, and I do think it hurts individual authors in specific ways (particularly authors of niche nonfiction, where the entire addressable market might be 5,000 people, and losing even a few hundred sales to piracy represents a significant percentage of total revenue). But piracy is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the broad cultural devaluation of written work.

This devaluation didn’t happen by accident. Amazon deliberately conditioned readers to expect low ebook prices. The company’s $9.99 pricing for new releases in 2007 and 2008 was a loss leader strategy, selling ebooks below cost to drive Kindle adoption. It worked. Kindle became dominant, and readers internalized $9.99 as the “right” price for a new ebook. When publishers pushed back and secured agency pricing (which allowed them to set their own ebook prices, typically $12.99 to $14.99 for new releases), readers were furious. Amazon encouraged the fury by posting notices on affected book pages that said, essentially, “this publisher is charging you more than we’d like.” The damage was done. A generation of readers had learned to think of $12.99 as overpriced for a digital file.

The Kindle Unlimited subscription model takes the devaluation further. For $9.99 per month, readers get unlimited access to a library of over two million ebooks. That’s a spectacular deal for readers. It’s a much harder deal for authors, who are paid from a shared pool based on pages read. The per-page rate fluctuates but typically works out to about half a cent per page. For a 300-page novel, that’s about $1.50 per read-through, if the reader finishes the book. Many don’t. The system incentivizes long books (more pages, more revenue) and frequent releases (stay visible in the algorithm). It’s well-suited to high-volume genre fiction. It’s terrible for the kind of literary fiction and serious nonfiction that takes years to research and write.

I want to be fair to Amazon here. They didn’t create the expectation that digital content should be free. That expectation existed long before the Kindle. The music industry went through the same thing with Napster, iTunes, and Spotify. The news industry went through it with free online articles. The pattern is familiar: a new distribution technology makes copying trivially easy, prices collapse, creators struggle to earn a living, and the industry eventually settles into a new equilibrium that works better for consumers and platforms than for the people who make the things being consumed. Publishing is following the same trajectory, and Amazon is facilitating it, but the underlying forces are structural.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve made some deliberate choices in response to all this. We price our ebooks at $11.99 to $13.99, which is at or near the hardcover discount price. We’ve gotten pushback from readers who think that’s too high for a digital file. I understand their perspective, but I’m not going to apologize for it. Our ebook prices reflect the real cost of producing the book: the author’s years of work, the editor’s months of engagement, the designer’s skill, the marketing team’s effort. If we priced our ebooks at $4.99, we’d either have to cut author advances (hurting writers), cut editorial investment (hurting quality), or accept losses that would eventually put us out of business (hurting everyone). None of those options serve readers in the long run.

We also don’t participate in Kindle Unlimited. The per-page payment model doesn’t work for our books, which tend to be densely written and moderately length. And we’re uncomfortable with the exclusivity requirements. Amazon’s KDP Select program, which is the gateway to Kindle Unlimited, requires that the ebook be exclusive to Amazon for 90-day periods. We believe our books should be available on every platform: Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Google Play, and independent bookstore platforms like Libro.fm’s ebook partner. Exclusivity with any single retailer concentrates too much power and limits readers’ choices.

I know this stance costs us some sales. Books in Kindle Unlimited get visibility boosts in Amazon’s algorithms that non-KU books don’t. Some readers only read through their KU subscription and won’t buy individual ebooks at any price. We’re leaving money on the table. But I think the long-term health of the book industry depends on publishers maintaining diverse distribution channels and resisting the gravitational pull of any single platform, however dominant it may be today.

The free ebook conversation also needs to account for libraries, which are the original “free books” institution and which are under increasing pressure in the digital era. Libraries license ebooks from publishers, typically at prices significantly higher than consumer prices (often two to three times the retail price) and with restrictions on how many times a single license can be lent (often 26 loans before the license must be repurchased). Publishers justify these terms by arguing that ebook lending, unlike physical book lending, involves no degradation. A physical library book wears out. An ebook doesn’t. Without loan limits, a single ebook purchase could serve an infinite number of patrons.

There’s logic to that argument, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Libraries are public goods. They provide access to books for people who can’t afford to buy them. Making ebook access difficult or expensive for libraries hurts the people who most need free access to books. I don’t have a solution that’s fair to everyone. Authors need to be paid. Publishers need to cover their costs. Libraries need affordable access. Readers need options. The current system is a series of imperfect compromises, and I suspect it will remain that way.

What I keep coming back to is that book I described at the beginning. The Argentine novel that almost didn’t get translated because the economics were too fragile. Every link in the chain that brought that book to English-language readers depended on someone being willing to invest without a guaranteed return. The original publisher took a chance on an unknown author. The translator spent weeks on a sample she wasn’t being paid for. I committed to a project that I knew would lose money in its first year. We did it because we believed the book mattered. But “believing the book matters” is only sustainable if the broader economics of publishing allow for risk-taking. When ebook prices collapse, when author incomes shrink, when publishers tighten their budgets, the books that get cut first are exactly these books: the ones that matter but don’t have obvious commercial potential.

Free ebooks aren’t free. Someone always pays. And when readers demand cheaper and cheaper digital books, the people who pay are the authors who can’t afford to keep writing, the editors who get laid off when margins shrink, the translators whose rates stagnate, the small publishers who close their doors, and ultimately the readers themselves, who end up with fewer and less interesting books to choose from. The cover price of an ebook isn’t just what you pay for a file. It’s what you pay to keep the ecosystem functioning that produces the books you want to read. I think that’s worth more than $4.99.

We signed a first-time novelist last year whose manuscript arrived in the slush pile on a Tuesday and was in contract by Friday. That almost never happens. Our average time from manuscript submission to offer is about four months, and most submissions never reach the offer stage at all. But this one was different. I read the first thirty pages during my lunch break, cancelled my afternoon meetings, read the rest by dinner, and called our acquisitions team from my car on the way home. By Friday, we had an offer on the table.

That’s the dramatic version of the story. The real version is more instructive, because it reveals what “building a relationship with an author” actually means at a publisher like ScrollWorks, and why it matters so much more than the initial acquisition.

Publishing culture talks a lot about “discovering” authors, as if the publisher is an explorer and the author is an uncharted island. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that framing. It puts the publisher at the center of the story, when really the author is the one who did the work. We didn’t discover anyone. A writer spent three years of her life producing a manuscript. We were lucky enough to read it and smart enough to recognize what it was. Discovery is the wrong word. Recognition is better. And recognition is just the beginning of a relationship that, if it works well, lasts decades.

Let me describe how that relationship typically develops at ScrollWorks, because I think our approach is different from the industry norm in ways that matter.

The first stage is editorial. After we sign an author, their manuscript enters our editorial process, which is intense and collaborative. We assign a developmental editor who reads the manuscript at least three times before writing a single editorial note. The first read is for pleasure. The second is for structure. The third is for language. Only after those three reads does the editor produce a comprehensive editorial letter, usually 10 to 20 pages long, addressing everything from the book’s overall architecture to specific line-level concerns. This letter isn’t a list of commands. It’s a conversation starter. The editor is saying, “Here’s what I see in your book. Here’s what I think is working. Here’s where I think the book isn’t yet doing what you want it to do. Let’s talk.”

That “let’s talk” part is where the relationship begins to form. Some authors want detailed guidance. Others bristle at even the gentlest suggestions. Some are open to restructuring entire sections of their book. Others will defend every comma with their lives. A good editor learns quickly which kind of writer they’re working with and adapts accordingly. This isn’t about being accommodating to the point of uselessness. It’s about finding the editorial approach that helps this particular writer produce the best version of this particular book.

I’ve watched editors at other publishers push writers into shapes that don’t fit them, insisting on structural changes that serve the editor’s vision rather than the author’s. I’ve watched the opposite too: editors who are so hands-off that the writer never gets the feedback they need to reach the next level. Both failures stem from the same root cause, which is treating the editorial relationship as transactional rather than personal. If you think of editing as “fixing the manuscript,” you’ll either fix too much or too little. If you think of it as “helping the writer realize their vision,” you’ll ask the right questions.

The editorial phase typically takes six to twelve months, depending on the book. For The Last Archive, it took nearly fourteen months, because the manuscript required significant restructuring and the author, understandably, needed time to process and implement major changes. For Echoes of Iron, the editorial phase was closer to seven months, because the manuscript arrived in strong shape and the changes were more about refinement than reconstruction. In both cases, the editor and the author emerged from the process with a relationship built on trust, mutual respect, and a shared understanding of what the book was trying to be.

That trust matters enormously when you move into the second stage: production and design. Authors care about what their books look like. They should. A book’s cover is the first thing a reader sees, and it communicates something about the work before a single word is read. At ScrollWorks, we involve our authors in the cover design process from the beginning. Our designer produces three to five initial concepts, and we present them to the author along with the reasoning behind each one. What is the cover trying to communicate? What genre signals is it sending? How will it look as a thumbnail on a screen? How will it look on a bookshelf? The author’s input is genuine, not performative. We’ve killed covers that the design team loved because the author felt they misrepresented the book. We’ve gone back to the drawing board multiple times. The process takes longer this way, but the result is a cover that both the publisher and the author feel good about.

I know this isn’t universal. Many authors at larger publishers have told me they had no meaningful input on their covers. They saw the design after it was finalized, and their options were to accept it or accept it. That approach is efficient, and sometimes the publisher’s design instincts are better than the author’s. But it also sends a message about the relationship: the publisher makes the decisions, and the author provides the content. At ScrollWorks, we’re trying to build a different kind of relationship, one where the author is a partner in every stage of the book’s journey from manuscript to finished product.

The third stage is marketing and publicity. This is where publisher-author relationships most commonly break down, and I understand why. Authors have unrealistic expectations about marketing (they want their book on the front table of every bookstore, a multi-city tour, and a feature in the New York Times). Publishers have limited budgets and have to make hard choices about where to allocate resources. The result is that many authors feel unsupported, while many publishers feel that authors don’t appreciate the marketing work that does happen.

We try to short-circuit this problem through transparency. Before a book launches, we sit down with the author (or get on a call, for authors who don’t live nearby) and walk them through our marketing plan in detail. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what we can’t do. Here’s why. Here’s what we think will be effective. Here’s what we’d like the author to do. These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable. An author might have their heart set on a review in a major publication, and we have to explain that we’ve pitched the book to that publication and they passed. An author might expect a print advertising budget, and we have to explain that we’ve found digital advertising to be more cost-effective for our kinds of books. But honesty up front prevents resentment later. Our authors know what to expect, and they know that our marketing plans are based on experience and data, not indifference.

The marketing stage is also where we ask the most of our authors in terms of their personal involvement. I believe strongly that the most effective book marketing, especially for a mid-size publisher without a massive advertising budget, is author-driven. The author’s personality, their story, their genuine connection with readers. That’s what sells books at our scale. So we work with our authors to develop their public presence in whatever way feels authentic to them. Some authors thrive on social media. Others are natural public speakers. Others are introverts who would rather write guest essays than appear on podcasts. We don’t push anyone to do things that feel wrong. We find the intersection between what the author is comfortable with and what will be effective, and we build the plan around that.

One thing we do that I’m particularly proud of is what we call the “long game” meeting. About six months after a book’s publication, after the launch buzz has faded and the first royalty statement has arrived, we meet with the author again. Not to discuss the next book (though that often comes up naturally) but to talk about the long-term trajectory of their career. Where do they want to be in five years? What kind of books do they want to write next? Are they building an audience? Is there a community of readers forming around their work? What can we do to support them between books? These conversations are the most important ones we have, because they demonstrate that we’re invested in the author as a person with a career, not just as the producer of a single product.

I’ll give you a concrete example. One of our nonfiction authors published a book that sold decently but not spectacularly. By most industry standards, it was a moderate success. The author was discouraged. She’d hoped for more and was questioning whether to write another book. In our long-game meeting, we talked about what had worked, what hadn’t, and what we could learn. We identified a specific audience, teachers of a particular subject, who had responded enthusiastically to the book. We worked with the author to develop a presence in that community: speaking at conferences, contributing to professional journals, building an email list. Over the next two years, backlist sales of the first book tripled. When she published her second book, it had a ready-made audience that the first book hadn’t had. The second book sold three times as many copies in its first year as the first book had. That’s the long game.

The relationship between publisher and author is, at its best, a creative partnership. I know that sounds like a corporate platitude, but I mean it literally. The publisher brings skills and resources that the author doesn’t have: editorial expertise, design capability, distribution networks, marketing infrastructure, industry relationships. The author brings the thing without which none of that matters: the work itself. Neither party can succeed without the other. When both parties recognize this and invest accordingly, the result is a relationship that produces better books and sustains careers.

I should acknowledge that we don’t always get this right. We’ve lost authors to larger publishers who offered more money. We’ve had relationships break down over creative disagreements. We’ve made marketing promises we couldn’t keep. Publishing is a business, and business relationships are inherently complicated by competing interests. The author wants the highest advance and the most marketing support. The publisher wants to manage financial risk and allocate resources efficiently. Those interests don’t always align, and when they don’t, the relationship gets strained.

The advance question is particularly fraught. At ScrollWorks, our advances are modest by industry standards. We can’t compete with the big five publishers for a hotly contested manuscript. What we can offer is attention. We can offer an editorial process that’s thorough and personalized. We can offer a design process that values the author’s input. We can offer a marketing plan that’s tailored to the book rather than templated. We can offer the long-game meeting and the career-level investment that comes with it. For some authors, that’s worth more than a larger advance from a publisher where their book will be one of two hundred titles per year and their editor will be juggling twenty projects simultaneously.

For other authors, the money matters more, and I respect that. Writing is work. Work should be compensated. I’d love to pay higher advances, and we raise them incrementally as our revenue grows. But I’d rather offer a smaller advance and invest the difference in editorial quality and marketing than offer a large advance and cut corners elsewhere. The advance is one payment. The quality of the publisher-author relationship lasts for the life of the book and, ideally, the life of the career.

Multi-book relationships are where all of this pays off most visibly. When we publish an author’s second or third book, the institutional knowledge we’ve accumulated makes everything more efficient. We know the author’s writing process. We know their editorial preferences. We know their audience. We know what marketing tactics work for them. The second book benefits from everything we learned publishing the first. The third book benefits from everything we learned publishing the first two. There’s a compound effect. Each book in the relationship is better than it would have been if published by a different house, because each book builds on the accumulated understanding of the author and their work.

I think about the great editor-author relationships in publishing history. Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robert Gottlieb and Joseph Heller. Toni Morrison and her editor at Knopf, Erroll McDonald. These relationships produced some of the best books of the twentieth century, and they were built on exactly the qualities I’ve been describing: trust, honesty, creative collaboration, and a long-term commitment to the author’s vision. Those relationships didn’t happen overnight. They were built book by book, draft by draft, conversation by conversation. They required patience and investment from both sides. The contemporary publishing industry, with its emphasis on speed, scale, and quarterly results, makes these kinds of relationships harder to build. But not impossible. Not if you’re willing to do the work.

At ScrollWorks, we publish about twelve to fifteen books per year. That’s tiny compared to the big five publishers, who each put out thousands of titles annually. But our size is an advantage for author relationships. Our editors work on four to six books per year, which gives them time to engage deeply with each project. Our marketing team knows every title on the list personally, not as a line item on a spreadsheet. Our publisher (that’s me) reads every manuscript we acquire. I can tell you the name of every author on our list, what their book is about, what their writing process looks like, and what they ate for lunch the last time we met. You can’t do that at a company publishing 500 titles a year. Scale has its advantages, but intimacy isn’t one of them.

The authors who are happiest with us are the ones who value that intimacy. They want to know their editor personally. They want to be involved in decisions about their book. They want a publisher who will take their call on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re stuck on chapter twelve and need to talk through it. They want the long-game meeting. They want a partner, not a vendor. We built ScrollWorks to be that partner. It’s the reason we exist, and it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. The books are wonderful. The business is interesting. But the relationships are the thing that makes all of it worth doing.

If I asked you to name the most important page in a book, you’d probably say the first page. Maybe the last. A case could be made for the title page. But I’d argue the most important page in any book, the one that does more work per square inch than any other, is the table of contents.

I know. It’s not sexy. The table of contents sits there at the front of the book, after the title page and before the introduction, like a piece of furniture nobody thinks about until they need it. Most readers skip it entirely. Fiction readers almost always skip it, because chapter numbers alone don’t tell you anything interesting. Nonfiction readers glance at it, maybe, to get a sense of the book’s structure, but they rarely study it.

But here’s the thing. The table of contents isn’t just a navigational aid. It’s the architecture of the book made visible. It’s the author’s argument in miniature. It’s the first and best map of what you’re about to experience. And for publishers, editors, booksellers, reviewers, and acquisitive readers standing in a bookstore trying to decide whether to buy, it’s the single most efficient way to evaluate a book’s quality, ambition, and coherence. I’ve bought books based on their tables of contents alone. I’ve rejected manuscripts based on them. I think the table of contents is the most underrated element in book design, and I think both writers and publishers should spend far more time on it than they typically do.

Let me explain why, starting with nonfiction.

A nonfiction book lives or dies on its structure. The information might be brilliant, the prose might be beautiful, but if the structure is wrong, the book fails. And the table of contents is where you can see the structure. When I pick up a nonfiction book in a store, the first thing I do, before reading the jacket copy, before reading the first paragraph, is flip to the table of contents. I’m looking for several things.

First, I’m looking at the number of chapters. This tells me about the book’s scope and the author’s approach to pacing. A nonfiction book with six chapters is making broad arguments. Each chapter covers a lot of ground. The book is probably synthetic, pulling together ideas from multiple sources into a few large themes. A nonfiction book with twenty-five chapters is working differently. It’s building its argument incrementally, with each chapter adding a specific piece. The reading experience will be more varied, with more natural stopping points. Neither approach is better, but they create fundamentally different books, and I want to know which kind I’m getting.

Second, I’m looking at the chapter titles. This is where most tables of contents either succeed or fail. A good chapter title does three things simultaneously. It tells you what the chapter is about. It creates interest. And it contributes to the table of contents as a readable sequence. That last part is the hardest to pull off. Individual chapter titles can be clever and engaging, but if they don’t work together as a series, the table of contents feels like a random list rather than a roadmap.

Consider a hypothetical history book about the development of the railroad. Here’s a table of contents with functional but uninspired chapter titles: Chapter 1: The First Railroads. Chapter 2: The Expansion Era. Chapter 3: Economic Impact. Chapter 4: Social Changes. Chapter 5: Environmental Consequences. Chapter 6: The Modern Legacy. You know what each chapter is about, but the table of contents has no energy. It reads like a term paper outline. There’s no sense of narrative momentum, no reason to start reading.

Now imagine the same book with different titles: Chapter 1: Iron and Ambition. Chapter 2: One Thousand Miles of Nothing. Chapter 3: The Price of a Ticket. Chapter 4: Everyone Moved. Chapter 5: What the Tracks Left Behind. Chapter 6: Steel Ghosts. Same book. Same structure. But the table of contents now tells a story. You can feel the arc. You want to know what “One Thousand Miles of Nothing” is about. You want to understand why “Everyone Moved.” The table of contents has become an argument for reading the book.

I’ve spent hours in editorial meetings discussing chapter titles. It might seem like a disproportionate investment of time, but I don’t think it is. The table of contents is one of the first things reviewers see. It’s one of the first things booksellers see when they’re deciding whether to handsell a title. It’s what readers see when they use Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. In all of these contexts, the table of contents is doing sales work. It’s either making people want to read the book or giving them permission to pass.

At ScrollWorks, the table of contents is a formal stage of our editorial process. After the developmental edit but before the line edit, we hold a meeting that we call the “architecture review.” The editor and the author go through the table of contents together, asking two questions about each chapter. Does the chapter title accurately represent the chapter’s content? And does the sequence of titles tell a coherent story when read on its own? If the answer to either question is no, we revise. Sometimes revising the table of contents reveals structural problems in the book itself. If we can’t make the sequence of titles tell a coherent story, it might be because the underlying argument isn’t coherent. The table of contents becomes a diagnostic tool. It shows you where the book’s logic breaks down.

Our book Echoes of Iron went through three complete table of contents revisions during the editorial process. The original structure followed a chronological approach, which made sense given the subject matter but produced a table of contents that read like a timeline. Dates and events, no story. The second revision organized the material thematically, which created more interesting chapter titles but lost the sense of forward motion that the subject demanded. The final version combined both approaches: a chronological spine with thematic chapter titles that gave each section its own identity while maintaining the overall narrative arc. The table of contents for that book is one of the best I’ve published, and I believe it contributed materially to the book’s commercial success. Reviewers quoted the chapter titles. Booksellers told me it was the table of contents that convinced them to order extra copies.

Fiction is a different case, but the table of contents still matters more than most novelists realize. Many novels don’t have a table of contents at all, just numbered chapters. Others use named chapters but don’t include a table of contents page, which means readers only see the chapter titles when they arrive at each new section. I think this is a missed opportunity.

A novel with named chapters and a well-designed table of contents gives the reader a preview of the book’s rhythm. Long chapter titles alternate with short ones. Titles that suggest action alternate with titles that suggest reflection. The progression of titles hints at the emotional arc without giving away the plot. George R.R. Martin’s chapter titles in A Song of Ice and Fire are just character names, but the sequence tells you who the point-of-view characters are and how the narrative weaves between them. You can see the structure of the book at a glance. Donna Tartt’s chapter titles in The Secret History are dates, which creates a sense of documentary precision that reinforces the novel’s tone. Even minimalist approaches to chapter titling can be effective if they’re chosen with intention.

The worst thing a novel can do with its chapter titles is be randomly clever. Chapter 1: “Matches.” Chapter 2: “The Color of Tuesday.” Chapter 3: “Grandma’s Refrigerator.” Chapter 4: “Something about Pigeons.” I’ve seen this kind of whimsical naming, and it almost always signals a writer who thinks chapter titles are decorative rather than structural. Good chapter titles in fiction, just like in nonfiction, should work as a sequence. They don’t need to tell the whole story, but they should contribute to the reader’s sense that the book has been thoughtfully constructed.

I want to talk about the physical design of the table of contents, because this is an area where publishers have gotten simultaneously better and worse. Better, because digital tools make it easier to design beautiful, complex tables of contents with typographic sophistication. Worse, because many publishers have standardized their tables of contents into generic templates that give every book the same look regardless of its content or character.

A well-designed table of contents should reflect the book’s personality. A playful memoir might have a table of contents with hand-lettered chapter titles and whimsical illustrations. A serious work of history might have a clean, classical layout with small-cap chapter titles and generous spacing. A thriller might have a table of contents that’s deliberately sparse, with short, punchy titles and lots of white space. The design choices communicate tone before the reader has processed a single word. At ScrollWorks, our interior designers treat the table of contents as one of the three most important pages in the book, along with the title page and the chapter openers. They get the most design attention and the most revision cycles.

Part numbers and section breaks add another layer of complexity. Many nonfiction books are divided into parts (Part I, Part II, etc.), with each part containing several chapters. This structure creates a hierarchy that the table of contents needs to represent clearly. The part titles sit above the chapter titles, creating a two-level architecture. Good part titles function like chapter titles but at a higher level of abstraction. They describe the book’s largest structural movements. If the chapter titles are the rooms, the part titles are the floors of the building.

I’ve seen authors struggle with part titles because they try to make them too specific. A part title should be broad enough to encompass several chapters but specific enough to be meaningful. “Part I: Beginnings” is too vague. “Part I: The Philadelphia Meetings of 1787 and Their Immediate Consequences” is too specific, that’s a chapter title, not a part title. Something like “Part I: Before the Constitution” hits the right level. It tells you where you are in the narrative without duplicating the work of the chapter titles beneath it.

Ebook tables of contents deserve special mention because they serve a fundamentally different function than print tables of contents. In a print book, the table of contents provides page numbers. In an ebook, it provides hyperlinks. You don’t scan a list of page numbers and flip to the one you want. You tap a chapter title and jump directly there. This means ebook tables of contents need to be even more carefully designed than print ones, because they’re genuinely interactive navigation tools. A reader who finishes a chapter and wants to jump to a specific later chapter will use the table of contents rather than paging forward. Every chapter title in an ebook is a link, and every link needs to be clear enough to function as navigation.

Amazon’s Kindle platform requires a navigational table of contents for all ebooks, separate from any printed table of contents included in the book’s interior. This is a minimum requirement, not a standard of quality. Many publishers produce ebook tables of contents that are bare-bones, just chapter numbers and auto-generated titles. We treat the ebook table of contents with the same attention we give the print version, because Kindle readers use it constantly. When a reader opens your book on their Kindle and looks at the table of contents, they’re making a judgment about the book’s quality, even if they don’t realize it. A thoughtful, well-formatted table of contents signals a publisher that cares about details. A sloppy one signals the opposite.

There’s a craft to subtitles in tables of contents, too. Some nonfiction books include brief descriptive subtitles under each chapter title. When done well, these subtitles transform the table of contents into a mini-narrative. The chapter title hooks your interest; the subtitle tells you just enough to understand what the chapter covers without spoiling it. When done badly, subtitles make the table of contents feel cluttered and over-explained. I generally advise authors to include subtitles only if each one adds genuine information that the chapter title alone doesn’t convey. If the subtitle just rephrases the title, cut it.

I realize I’m making a very long argument about something that most people consider trivial. But that’s precisely my point. The table of contents is treated as trivial, and it shouldn’t be. It’s the only page in the book that shows you the whole book at once. It’s the architect’s drawing, the map before the journey, the promise of what’s to come. When it’s done well, it sets expectations, builds anticipation, and provides a framework that makes the reading experience more coherent and satisfying. When it’s done poorly, or not done at all, readers lose something they don’t even know they’re missing: the sense that the book they’re holding has been built with care and intention from the largest structural decisions down to the smallest details.

The next time you pick up a book, turn to the table of contents before you read anything else. Study it. Does it tell a story? Do the chapter titles work as a sequence? Can you feel the book’s rhythm and trajectory? If you can, the author and the publisher have done their jobs well. You’re holding a book that’s been thought about, argued about, and refined at every level. And that thoughtfulness, the attention to the architecture before the decoration, is the foundation on which every good book is built.