Every few years, someone at the office asks if we should compile a definitive list of our favorite book-to-screen adaptations. And every time, the conversation devolves into an argument that lasts the rest of the afternoon. Not because we disagree about what makes a good adaptation, but because we disagree about what an adaptation even owes to its source material. I love these arguments. They are the kind of thing that reminds me why I work with people who care about books.

So here is my personal list, which reflects my own tastes and biases and will probably annoy at least half the people reading this. I am not going to pretend this is objective. I have opinions about adaptations that border on religious conviction, and I am going to share them.

Before I get to specific titles, though, I want to lay out what I think separates a great adaptation from a merely competent one. A competent adaptation takes a book and translates it to the screen. The plot is preserved, the characters look and sound roughly as described, and the major scenes play out more or less as written. This is fine. It is respectful. It is also, in my experience, almost always disappointing, because the things that make a book great are usually not the things that translate most naturally to film or television.

A great adaptation does something different. It takes the essence of the book, the emotional and thematic core, and finds a cinematic way to express that essence. This might mean changing the plot, cutting characters, rearranging timelines, or inventing scenes that do not appear in the source material. These changes can feel like betrayals if you are attached to the book’s specific details. But if the changes serve the story’s deeper truth, the adaptation can achieve something remarkable: it can make you feel the way the book made you feel, using an entirely different set of tools.

With that framework in mind, let me start with what I consider the gold standard. The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the one with Colin Firth. I know this is a conventional choice and I do not care. It is the best literary adaptation I have ever seen, and I will explain why.

The miniseries format gave the adapters (screenwriter Andrew Davies, director Simon Langton) something that films almost never get: time. Six episodes, roughly five hours of screen time. This is still shorter than reading the novel, but it is enough time to let scenes breathe, to develop secondary characters, and to preserve the rhythm of Austen’s narrative. Most film adaptations of novels feel rushed. This one does not. It has the leisurely pacing of a long afternoon in the countryside, which is appropriate because that is essentially what the story is about.

Davies made smart decisions about what to add and what to change. He invented scenes showing Darcy’s perspective that Austen, writing from Elizabeth’s point of view, did not include. These additions feel organic rather than intrusive because they serve the story’s central dynamic. We need to understand Darcy’s inner life to appreciate the arc of the romance, and Austen accomplishes this through narration and implication. Davies accomplishes it by showing us Darcy fencing, staring out windows, and, in the famous lake scene, taking an impulsive swim. These are visual tools doing the work of literary tools, and they do it brilliantly.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I want to talk about adaptations that I think fail in instructive ways. The 2012 film version of Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright, tried something ambitious. It set much of the action on a theatrical stage, with scenes transitioning through stagecraft rather than conventional editing. The concept was clever, drawing attention to the performative nature of aristocratic Russian society. But for me, the cleverness got in the way. I was constantly aware of the formal conceit, which kept me from getting lost in the story. The adaptation was more interested in being an adaptation than in being a story, and I think that is a common trap.

Let me talk about some adaptations that I think are underrated. The 2005 film Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The source material was Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote, but the film narrowed its focus to the period when Capote was writing In Cold Blood. This is a perfect example of an adaptation that improves on its source by being more focused. Clarke’s biography covers Capote’s entire life. The film zooms in on a few years and mines them for everything they are worth. Hoffman’s performance is astonishing, capturing Capote’s charm, vanity, intelligence, and moral corruption with a precision that text alone cannot achieve.

Another underrated adaptation: the 2010 Coen Brothers film True Grit. The Coens went back to Charles Portis’s novel rather than remaking the 1969 John Wayne film, and the result is truer to the book’s voice than most people realize. Portis wrote in a formal, slightly archaic style that gives the narrative a tone somewhere between adventure story and dark comedy. The Coens captured that tone perfectly. The dialogue in the film is lifted almost verbatim from the novel in many scenes, and it works because Portis’s prose is so distinctive that it sounds right even when spoken aloud. Hailee Steinfeld’s performance as Mattie Ross is one of the best depictions of a literary character I have ever seen on screen. She sounds exactly the way Mattie sounds in my head when I read the book.

I want to spend some time on television adaptations, because I think the golden age of prestige TV has been very good for literary adaptation. The extended runtime of a television series allows for the kind of depth and complexity that feature films usually cannot accommodate. A ten-hour miniseries can do justice to a long novel in a way that a two-hour film simply cannot.

The HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is a good example. Roth’s novel is dense, politically complex, and deeply rooted in a specific time and place (Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s). A film would have had to strip it down to its plot mechanics, losing the texture and nuance that make the novel powerful. The miniseries format preserved that texture. It had time for the dinner table conversations, the neighborhood dynamics, the slow accumulation of dread as the political situation worsens. It felt like the novel, which is the highest compliment I can pay to an adaptation.

On the other hand, I think some recent TV adaptations have gone too far in the other direction, padding out relatively slim source material to fill multiple seasons. When a 200-page novel is adapted into 30 hours of television, something has to fill those hours, and that something is usually invented subplots, expanded backstories for minor characters, and scenes that exist primarily to justify the episode count. This is not adaptation; it is inflation. I would rather watch a tight, focused adaptation that leaves me wanting more than a bloated one that makes me check how many episodes are left.

Let me mention a few more favorites quickly. The 1993 film of The Age of Innocence, directed by Martin Scorsese. Yes, that Martin Scorsese. People forget that the director of Goodfellas also made one of the most elegant period dramas in cinema history. Scorsese understood that Edith Wharton’s novel is essentially about the violence of social convention, and he filmed it with the same meticulous attention to detail and underlying tension that he brings to his crime films. The result is gorgeous and devastating.

The 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, adapted from Andre Aciman’s novel. Luca Guadagnino’s film does something that I think is very difficult: it captures the feeling of a first-person interior narrative without relying on voiceover. The novel is told entirely from Elio’s perspective, and much of its power comes from his internal monologue. The film replaces that monologue with Timothee Chalamet’s extraordinarily expressive face, the sun-drenched Italian setting, and Sufjan Stevens’s music. Different tools, same emotional destination.

And I have to mention the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because it exemplifies my earlier point about great adaptations departing from their source material. Ken Kesey’s novel is narrated by Chief Bromden and is deeply concerned with his internal experience. The film shifts the focus to McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and tells the story from a more external perspective. Kesey hated this change and refused to watch the film. But I think the change was the right call for the medium. Cinema is better at showing us how characters affect each other than at showing us what is happening inside a single character’s head. By centering McMurphy’s disruptive energy and its effect on the ward, the film found a cinematic equivalent for the novel’s themes of institutional power and individual rebellion.

I realize I have been talking mostly about adaptations of literary classics and well-known novels. Let me shift to something closer to home. At ScrollWorks, we occasionally get inquiries from film and television producers interested in adapting our titles. These conversations are always exciting and almost always go nowhere, which is the standard experience for small publishers dealing with Hollywood. But they have given me some insight into how adaptation decisions get made on the other side.

What I have learned is that producers are rarely looking for the same things that readers love about a book. A reader might love a novel for its prose style, its psychological depth, or its thematic complexity. A producer is looking for a compelling protagonist, a clear narrative arc, visual potential, and ideally some built-in audience awareness. These criteria overlap sometimes, but not always. A beautifully written novel with an ambiguous ending and an unreliable narrator might be a masterpiece on the page and a nightmare to adapt.

This is why I think the most interesting adaptations often come from imperfect source material. A novel that is a little bit flawed, that has a great premise but uneven execution, can actually be a better candidate for adaptation than a perfect novel. The adapter has room to work. They can fix the structural problems while preserving the premise, which is often the thing that attracted them in the first place. A perfect novel, by contrast, presents the adapter with a dilemma: any change might make it worse, but a slavishly faithful adaptation might not work as cinema.

There is one more category of adaptation I want to mention, which is the adaptation that transcends its source material entirely. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is based on a Mario Puzo novel that is, honestly, not a great book. It is entertaining pulp fiction with some memorable characters, but the prose is flat and the structure is ungainly. The film took the raw materials of the novel, the characters, the setting, the central family drama, and elevated them into something that operates on a completely different artistic level. The novel is a good beach read. The film is one of the greatest works of American cinema. That gap between source and adaptation is enormous, and it is a reminder that adaptation is itself a creative act, not just a translation exercise. I will end with a thought about why literary adaptations matter to us as a publisher. Every time a book is adapted for screen, it brings new readers to the source material. Some of those readers discover the author’s other work. Some of them discover the publisher and explore our catalog. The adaptation ecosystem, messy and imperfect as it is, is one of the most powerful reader-discovery mechanisms in existence. When someone watches a film they love and then picks up the novel, they are doing something wonderful: they are discovering that the story has more depth than any single telling can capture. They are learning that a book is not just a story; it is an experience that no other medium can fully replicate.

That is why we will keep acquiring titles with strong narrative voices, complex characters, and stories that resonate emotionally. Titles like The Last Archive and Echoes of Iron are the kinds of books I dream about seeing adapted someday. Whether that happens or not, they are doing what books do best: telling stories that stay with you long after the last page. And if Hollywood comes calling, we will be ready to have that conversation.

I have a confession. I do not trust narrators. Not in fiction, and frankly not in real life either. When someone tells me a story, I am always listening for the gaps, the omissions, the places where the storyteller is shaping the narrative to serve their own interests. This is probably a professional hazard of working in publishing, where every manuscript I read is, at some level, an act of persuasion. But it also makes me a particularly enthusiastic reader of fiction that uses unreliable narrators, because those books take the thing I am already doing, questioning the storyteller, and make it part of the experience.

The unreliable narrator is one of the oldest techniques in fiction, and it has never gone out of style. From Cervantes to Charlotte Bronte to Nabokov to Gillian Flynn, writers have been giving us narrators whose version of events cannot be fully trusted. The technique keeps coming back because it taps into something fundamental about how we process stories, and I think it is worth exploring why.

Let me start by being specific about what I mean by “unreliable narrator,” because the term covers a lot of ground. At its broadest, an unreliable narrator is any first-person narrator whose account of events is inaccurate, incomplete, or deliberately deceptive. But within that broad definition, there are meaningfully different types of unreliability, and they create different reading experiences.

The first type is what I think of as the naive narrator. This is a narrator who is unreliable not because they are lying but because they lack the understanding, experience, or intelligence to accurately interpret what they are witnessing. Huckleberry Finn is the classic example. Huck describes events and behaviors without fully understanding their moral significance. He sees slavery and racism as normal features of his world, and the gap between what Huck reports and what the reader understands creates irony that is both funny and devastating. The reader has to do active work, filling in the meaning that the narrator cannot see.

This type of unreliable narrator is particularly effective in stories about childhood or adolescence, where the narrator’s limited perspective mirrors the actual cognitive limitations of young people. Emma Donoghue’s Room uses a five-year-old narrator to describe a situation of horrific captivity, and the child’s innocent interpretation of his imprisonment is far more disturbing than a straightforward adult account would be. The unreliability here is not a trick. It is a lens that intensifies the reader’s emotional response by forcing them to see the truth that the narrator cannot.

The second type is the self-deceiving narrator. This narrator is not deliberately lying to the reader; they are lying to themselves. They have constructed a version of their own story that protects their ego, justifies their actions, or avoids a painful truth. The reader’s job is to see through the self-deception and reconstruct what actually happened.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is perhaps the finest example of this type. Stevens, the butler, narrates his story in prose that is meticulous, measured, and deeply repressed. He describes decades of service with a careful formality that the attentive reader gradually recognizes as a defense mechanism. Stevens cannot admit, even to himself, that he was in love with the housekeeper Miss Kenton, or that his unwavering loyalty to his employer was misplaced. The entire novel is an exercise in reading between the lines of a narrator who cannot read between the lines of his own life.

What makes self-deceiving narrators so powerful is that they mirror something true about human psychology. We all construct self-serving narratives about our own lives. We all have blind spots, rationalizations, and convenient omissions. When we read a self-deceiving narrator, we are watching someone do what we all do, just more transparently. The best books in this mode make us uncomfortable because they force us to wonder: where am I deceiving myself?

The third type is the deliberately deceptive narrator. This narrator is actively lying to the reader, withholding information or presenting false information in order to manipulate the reader’s understanding of events. This is the type most commonly associated with the term “unreliable narrator” in popular usage, probably because it is the type most commonly found in thrillers and mysteries, which are the genres where the technique gets the most attention.

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the most famous early example. When the narrator’s deception is revealed, the reader experiences a retrospective reinterpretation of everything that came before. Every scene, every description, every seemingly innocent observation takes on a new meaning. This is the “twist” version of unreliable narration, and when it is done well, it can be electrifying.

When it is done badly, though, it feels like a cheat. The line between a clever deception and an unfair one is thin. For the twist to work, the reader needs to feel, in retrospect, that the clues were there all along. If the narrator withheld information that the reader had no way of inferring, the revelation feels arbitrary rather than earned. The reader thinks, “Well, of course I did not see that coming. You lied to me.” And they are right to feel cheated.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a modern example that I think handles this well. Both narrators are unreliable in different ways, and the novel is structured so that each unreliability is revealed gradually rather than in a single twist. The reader is constantly recalibrating their understanding, which keeps the reading experience dynamic. You are never on stable ground, and that instability is the point. The novel is about the unreliability of the stories we tell about our relationships, and the narrative structure enacts that theme.

There is a fourth type of unreliable narrator that I find particularly interesting, which is the narrator whose unreliability comes from mental illness, altered consciousness, or some other form of cognitive disruption. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (narrated by a man experiencing hallucinations), and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (narrated by a drug addict) all use narrators whose perception of reality is compromised in ways that make the narrative itself unstable.

These narrators raise an interesting philosophical question: is a narrator “unreliable” if they are reporting their experience accurately, even though their experience does not correspond to external reality? If a narrator is hallucinating and describes the hallucination faithfully, are they lying? I think the answer is no, but the effect on the reader is similar to more conventional unreliability. The reader has to sort out what is real from what is perceived, and that sorting process becomes a central part of the reading experience.

Now, why does this technique endure? Why do writers keep coming back to unreliable narrators, and why do readers keep finding them compelling? I have a few theories.

First, unreliable narration creates active readers. When you trust a narrator, reading is relatively passive. You receive the information, process it, and move on. When you distrust a narrator, you become a detective. You scrutinize every sentence, looking for inconsistencies, omissions, and tells. You are constantly forming hypotheses about what really happened and testing them against new information. This is cognitively engaging in a way that straightforward narration is not, and I think many readers find that engagement pleasurable. It is the same pleasure you get from a good puzzle: the satisfaction of figuring something out through your own effort.

Second, unreliable narration reflects the way we actually experience the world. In real life, nobody has access to objective truth. Every account of every event is filtered through the perspective, biases, and limitations of the person telling it. Reliable narration, where a narrator gives you the straight facts, is actually the artificial convention. Unreliable narration is closer to how human communication actually works. I think readers respond to this, even if they are not consciously aware of it. There is something that feels honest about a dishonest narrator.

Third, unreliable narration enables stories about self-knowledge. The most moving unreliable narrator stories are ultimately about characters confronting the gap between who they think they are and who they actually are. Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (yes, I think Nick is unreliable, and I will argue about this with anyone who wants to). These characters are all, in different ways, using their narratives to avoid facing something about themselves. The story is about whether they succeed in that avoidance or whether the truth breaks through.

I think about Nick Carraway more than any other unreliable narrator, because his unreliability is so subtle that many readers miss it entirely. Nick presents himself as the honest observer, the calm center of the story, the one person who sees things clearly. But read the novel carefully and you will notice that Nick is deeply invested in Gatsby’s mythology. He romanticizes Gatsby, minimizes his criminality, and structures the entire narrative to cast Gatsby as a tragic hero rather than a deluded criminal. Nick is not lying, exactly. He is curating. And that kind of curation, where the narrator sincerely believes in the version of events they are presenting while the careful reader can see the gaps, is the most sophisticated form of unreliable narration I know. This connects to something I care about deeply as a publisher, which is the idea that fiction can tell truths that non-fiction cannot. A non-fiction book about self-deception can describe the phenomenon, cite the research, and give you strategies for recognizing it in your own life. A novel with an unreliable narrator can make you experience self-deception from the inside. You can feel yourself being taken in by a narrator’s version of events, and then feel the disorientation of realizing you were wrong. That experiential knowledge is different from intellectual knowledge, and it is something that only fiction can provide.

At ScrollWorks, we have published several novels that use some form of unreliable narration. The Last Archive plays with the question of whether its narrator is remembering events accurately or reconstructing them to serve a particular emotional need. Still Waters features a narrator whose calm, measured tone gradually reveals itself to be a form of avoidance. These books do not use unreliable narration as a gimmick or a twist. They use it as a tool for exploring how people construct meaning from their own experiences, and how those constructions can be both necessary and limiting.

I want to end by pushing back against a criticism of unreliable narration that I hear occasionally, which is that it is manipulative. The argument goes something like this: the writer is deliberately misleading the reader, which is a form of bad faith. The reader agreed to read a story, not to be tricked.

I disagree with this criticism for several reasons. First, all fiction is, at some level, an act of manipulation. The writer is controlling what you know, when you know it, and how you feel about it. Every plot twist, every delayed revelation, every carefully timed emotional beat is a form of manipulation. Unreliable narration is just more transparent about it. Second, the best unreliable narrator fiction is not trying to trick you; it is trying to engage you. The unreliability is not an obstacle between you and the story. It is the story. The experience of reading an unreliable narrator, of questioning, inferring, and gradually piecing together the truth, is the experience the writer intends you to have.

And third, I think there is something deeply respectful about a book that assumes its readers are smart enough to read between the lines. An unreliable narrator demands more from the reader than a reliable one. It says: I trust you to figure this out. I trust you to notice what I am not saying. I trust you to be an active participant in this story rather than a passive recipient. That trust between writer and reader, expressed through the apparent distrust of the narrator, is one of fiction’s great paradoxes. And it is one of the reasons I will never tire of books that ask me to question the voice in my ear.

If you are drawn to this kind of reading experience, I would encourage you to explore our fiction catalog, where several of our titles reward the kind of careful, questioning attention that unreliable narration demands. The best compliment I have received about one of our novels was from a reader who said, “I had to read it twice to really understand it.” That is not a failure of clarity. That is a success of depth.

In 2003, it cost ScrollWorks roughly $14,000 to print 3,000 copies of a trade paperback. That included setup, plates, paper, binding, and shipping to our warehouse. The per-unit cost was about $4.67, which meant we needed to price the book at $15.95 or higher to have any chance of breaking even after distribution fees, returns, and the author’s royalty. We printed 3,000 because that was the minimum run that made economic sense. Printing fewer copies would have driven the per-unit cost even higher. Printing more would have been reckless, because most books from a small press do not sell 3,000 copies.

This was the math that governed small press publishing for decades. It was simple math, and it was brutal. You had to guess how many copies you would sell, commit to printing that many (or more, because of minimum run sizes), and then hope your guess was right. If you printed too many, the unsold copies sat in your warehouse eating storage fees. If you printed too few and the book found an audience, you had to wait weeks for a reprint while the book was unavailable and the momentum was dying. Either way, you were making a high-stakes bet with incomplete information.

Digital printing changed all of that. And I do not think the publishing industry has fully reckoned with how much it changed, or how profound the implications are for small publishers like us.

Let me explain the difference between traditional offset printing and digital printing, because it matters. Offset printing, the method that dominated book manufacturing for most of the 20th century, works by creating physical plates that transfer ink to paper. Making those plates is expensive and time-consuming, but once they exist, printing each additional copy is very cheap. This creates a classic economy of scale: the more copies you print, the lower the per-unit cost. A run of 5,000 copies might cost $3.50 per unit, while a run of 500 copies might cost $8 per unit. The setup cost is spread across the entire run, so bigger runs are more economical.

Digital printing eliminates the plate-making step. The book is printed directly from a digital file, essentially the same technology as a very sophisticated office printer. There is no expensive setup, which means the per-unit cost is roughly the same whether you print 10 copies or 1,000 copies. The cost per unit is higher than offset at large volumes (digital printing cannot match the per-unit economics of a 10,000-copy offset run) but dramatically lower at small volumes. And, critically, there is no minimum run size. You can print one copy at a time.

This sounds like a technical detail, but it fundamentally altered the risk calculus of small press publishing. Let me walk through exactly how.

Before digital printing, acquiring a book was a financial commitment that started at several thousand dollars and scaled from there. The moment you decided to publish a book, you were on the hook for a print run, and that meant spending real money before a single copy was sold. This created a conservative bias in acquisitions. We could not afford to take a chance on a book unless we were reasonably confident it would sell enough copies to cover the print run. “Reasonably confident” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because nobody is ever truly confident about book sales. But we tried to be, and that meant we passed on books that we loved but could not justify financially.

I think about those books sometimes. The manuscripts we turned down not because they were not good enough, but because we did not think we could sell enough copies to cover the printing costs. Some of those books were published by other houses and did fine. Some were never published at all. And some of them, I suspect, would have found their audience if we had been willing to take the risk. The economics of offset printing made us more cautious than our editorial instincts wanted to be.

Digital printing removed that barrier. Today, we can publish a book with an initial print run of 200 copies. If it does not sell, our financial exposure is minimal. If it starts to sell, we can reprint in small batches, matching supply to actual demand rather than guessing in advance. The risk of each individual publishing decision has dropped by an order of magnitude, and that has made us braver as publishers.

We have published at least a dozen books in the past five years that we would not have published in the offset-only era. Not because they are lesser books, but because their commercial prospects were uncertain enough that committing to a 3,000-copy offset run would have been irresponsible. With digital printing, we could take the chance. Some of those books found their audience and went on to sell thousands of copies through successive small print runs. Some sold modestly and that was fine. A couple barely sold at all, and our financial loss was small enough to absorb.

This shift has had a real effect on the diversity of books being published. When every book requires a significant upfront investment, publishers naturally gravitate toward books with the broadest possible appeal, because those are the ones most likely to recoup the investment. Niche books, experimental books, books aimed at small but passionate audiences, these are harder to justify under offset economics. Digital printing makes them viable. A book that will sell 500 copies over five years is not a commercial failure if you printed 200 copies at a time and your total investment was modest. Under offset economics, that same book would have been a disaster.

Now, I should be honest about the downsides of digital printing, because there are some. The first is quality. Digital printing has improved enormously over the past decade, but it still does not match offset for certain types of books. Art books, photography books, and any book that requires precise color reproduction are still better served by offset printing. The difference has narrowed, and for most text-heavy books, the average reader would not notice any quality difference. But for visually intensive titles, offset remains superior.

The second downside is per-unit cost at scale. If you know a book is going to sell 10,000 copies, offset printing is still significantly cheaper per unit. Digital printing makes sense for uncertain quantities and small runs, but once a book has proven demand, switching to offset for larger reprints saves real money. At ScrollWorks, we often use a hybrid approach: digital printing for the initial run, then offset for reprints once we have a better sense of demand. This gives us the flexibility of digital at the start and the cost efficiency of offset once the uncertainty is resolved.

The third downside is the psychology of scarcity. This might sound strange, but when offset printing forced publishers to commit to a specific number of copies, it created a form of discipline. You had to think carefully about demand, plan your marketing around the print run, and make every copy count. Digital printing, with its “print what you need” flexibility, can lead to a more casual attitude toward sales and marketing. Why hustle to sell books when you can always print more? I have noticed this tendency in myself and have had to consciously resist it. The ease of digital reprinting can make you complacent, and complacency is the enemy of effective publishing.

Let me talk about print-on-demand specifically, because it is the most radical extension of digital printing and it has its own set of implications. Print-on-demand (POD) means exactly what it sounds like: a book is printed only when a customer orders it. The order goes to a POD facility, a single copy is printed and bound, and it ships directly to the customer. There is no warehouse, no inventory, no unsold copies. Every book that is printed has already been purchased.

POD eliminates inventory risk entirely. You never have unsold copies sitting in a warehouse. You never have to write off unsold stock. You never face the painful decision of whether to pulp 2,000 unsold copies of a book that did not find its audience. From a pure risk perspective, POD is the ideal model. Publish a book, make it available, and if nobody buys it, your financial loss is limited to the editorial and design costs. The printing cost is zero because no printing happens until a sale occurs.

We use POD for our backlist titles and for books where demand is unpredictable. It keeps books available indefinitely at no carrying cost. A book published five years ago that sells one copy a month is still generating revenue through POD, whereas under the old model, it would have gone out of print long ago because maintaining warehouse inventory for a slow-selling title does not make financial sense.

The concept of “out of print” has essentially been eliminated by POD. Any book with a digital file can remain available for purchase indefinitely. This is a profound change for authors, who used to face the indignity of seeing their books become unavailable within a few years of publication. It is also a profound change for readers, who can now find and buy books that would have been impossible to obtain under the old system.

But POD has limitations that are worth understanding. The per-unit cost is the highest of any printing method, because every book is produced individually. There are no volume efficiencies at all. For a trade paperback, POD might cost $5-7 per unit, compared to $3-4 for a short digital run and $2-3 for a large offset run. This means the retail price needs to be higher, or the publisher’s margin needs to be thinner. For slow-selling titles, the higher per-unit cost is acceptable because there is no alternative. For faster-selling titles, it makes more sense to switch to digital or offset runs.

There is also a quality consideration with POD. While the printing quality is good and improving, the binding quality can be inconsistent. I have seen POD copies of the same book where the spine glue was perfect on one and slightly off-center on another. This variability is a consequence of producing books one at a time rather than in batches where quality control can be applied across the entire run. For most readers, the difference is negligible. But for a publisher who cares about the physical quality of their products, it can be frustrating.

Let me zoom out and talk about what all of this means for the economics of small press publishing in general. The shift from offset-only to a mixed model of offset, digital, and POD has fundamentally changed the financial profile of a small press. Under the old model, publishing was capital-intensive. You needed significant upfront investment for each title, and your cash was tied up in physical inventory that might or might not sell. Under the new model, publishing is much less capital-intensive. Your upfront costs are primarily editorial and design, which are largely fixed regardless of how many copies you print. The variable costs (printing and shipping) scale with actual demand.

This has lowered the barrier to entry for small publishers. It is now possible to start a small press with much less capital than it would have required twenty years ago. Whether this is entirely positive is debatable. More publishers means more competition for readers’ attention, and some of the new entrants lack the editorial standards and professionalism that the capital barrier used to enforce. But on balance, I think democratizing access to publishing is a good thing. More voices, more perspectives, more books that might not have existed under the old economics.

At ScrollWorks, digital printing has allowed us to build a catalog that is more diverse and more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Titles like The Cartographer’s Dilemma and The Last Archive were acquired with the knowledge that digital printing gave us the flexibility to manage the financial risk of books with uncertain commercial prospects. Both of those books found their readers, and both justified the bet we made on them. Under the old economics, I am not sure we would have made those bets at all.

The revolution in printing technology is not finished. Advances in digital printing continue to close the quality gap with offset, reduce per-unit costs, and expand the range of formats and finishes available. I expect that within ten years, the distinction between digital and offset will be largely irrelevant for most books. We will simply print books, using whatever technology produces the best result at the best price for the specific quantity we need. The technology will become invisible, which is exactly what technology should do. What will remain visible is the books themselves, and the fact that more of them exist, reaching more diverse audiences, because the economics of printing finally caught up with the ambitions of publishers who always wanted to take more chances.

I read a 12,000-word article last week about water rights in the Colorado River basin. It took me about 45 minutes. When I finished, I felt like I understood something I had not understood before, not just the facts of the situation (which I could have gotten from a news summary) but the texture of it. The competing interests, the historical decisions that created the current mess, the human stories of the people caught in the middle. I could feel the weight of the problem in a way that a 1,200-word news piece could never achieve.

That article was published in a magazine, which is where most long-form journalism lives these days. But at ScrollWorks, we believe there is a case for publishing long-form journalism in book form, between actual covers, and we have been acting on that belief. I want to explain why, because I think the argument is stronger than most people in publishing realize.

First, let me define what I mean by long-form journalism. I am talking about deeply reported, narrative non-fiction that goes beyond the daily news cycle to explore a subject with the kind of depth and nuance that requires space. We are talking about pieces that range from 10,000 to 100,000 words. At the shorter end, they are magazine features. At the longer end, they are books. The sweet spot for what we publish at ScrollWorks is somewhere in the middle: book-length journalism, typically 50,000 to 80,000 words, that tells a single story or explores a single subject with sustained attention.

The case for this kind of work is, at its core, an argument about attention. We live in an information environment that is optimized for speed and brevity. News articles are getting shorter. Social media posts are getting shorter. Video content is getting shorter. The entire architecture of online media is designed to deliver information in quick, digestible bursts, because that is what the attention economy rewards. Every platform is competing for your time, and the way they compete is by making their content easier and faster to consume.

I understand why this is happening, and I do not think it is entirely bad. Quick, accessible information serves important functions. But there are subjects that cannot be meaningfully addressed in 800 words or a three-minute video. Complex problems, systemic issues, historical patterns, stories that involve multiple perspectives and competing interests: these require space. They require the kind of sustained, patient reporting that takes months or years to complete, and they require a reader who is willing to give them the time they demand.

A book provides that space in a way that no other format does. A magazine article, even a long one, has to compete with other articles in the same issue for the reader’s attention. An online piece has to compete with everything else on the internet, which is essentially everything. A book creates a self-contained environment. When you pick up a book, you are committing to spending time with a single subject. The physical object itself, its weight, its pages, its covers, communicates a seriousness of intent. The author is saying: I spent a long time on this. The reader is saying: I am willing to spend a long time with it. That mutual commitment is rare and valuable.

Let me give you a concrete example of why format matters. A few years ago, I read two pieces about the same subject: the opioid crisis in a specific Appalachian community. One was a 4,000-word magazine article. The other was a book-length account, roughly 70,000 words. The magazine article was well-written and informative. It gave me the key facts, quoted several local sources, and painted a vivid picture of the situation. It was a perfectly good piece of journalism.

The book did something different. It spent its first 50 pages on the history of the community before the crisis: the industries that sustained it, the families that had lived there for generations, the churches and schools and local institutions that gave it shape. By the time the opioid crisis entered the narrative, I understood the community as a place with a past, not just a problem with a location. The people affected were not case studies. They were people I felt I knew, because the author had taken the time to introduce them properly.

The middle section of the book traced the crisis itself, not as a single narrative but as a web of overlapping stories. The doctor who prescribed the pills. The pharmaceutical sales representative who marketed them. The local pharmacist who noticed the surge in prescriptions and tried to raise an alarm. The first families to be affected, and the slow, painful process by which the community recognized what was happening. The author followed these threads over years, conducting hundreds of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of documents. The depth of reporting was evident on every page.

The final section dealt with the community’s response, the failures and partial successes of recovery programs, the legal battles, the ongoing struggle. It did not offer neat solutions or uplifting conclusions. It ended with the situation still unfolding, which felt honest in a way that a tidy ending would not have.

None of this could have been accomplished in a magazine article. The article I read about the same subject was like a photograph of a landscape. The book was like spending a month living in that landscape. Both had value, but the book left me with an understanding that the article could not match.

Now, let me address the obvious question: who is the audience for this kind of work? In an age of shrinking attention spans and infinite entertainment options, who is going to spend 10 or 15 hours reading a deeply reported book about a single subject?

The honest answer is: fewer people than I would like. Book-length journalism does not sell in the volumes of commercial fiction or celebrity memoirs. Our non-fiction titles at ScrollWorks typically sell in the low thousands, which is modest by mainstream publishing standards. But the readers who do engage with this work are remarkably loyal and passionate. They buy multiple copies to give as gifts. They recommend the books aggressively to friends and colleagues. They write long, thoughtful reviews. They attend events and ask substantive questions. They care about the subjects, and they are grateful when someone takes those subjects seriously enough to spend years reporting on them.

I have come to think that the audience for long-form journalism in book form is not defined by demographics or reading habits. It is defined by curiosity. There are people in every age group, every income bracket, every political persuasion, who have a hunger for deep understanding that cannot be satisfied by news summaries and hot takes. They want to know not just what happened, but why it happened, how it happened, and what it felt like from the inside. Book-length journalism serves that hunger in a way that no other form does.

There is also a preservation argument. Magazine articles and online features have a short lifespan. A magazine article is current for a month. An online piece might stay accessible longer, but it competes with an ever-growing archive of content and becomes harder to find over time. A book persists. It sits on shelves in libraries, bookstores, and readers’ homes. It gets assigned in college courses. It gets cited in other works. It remains accessible and findable in a way that digital content often does not.

This matters because the subjects addressed by long-form journalism are often subjects that need to be remembered. The opioid crisis. Environmental destruction. Political corruption. Racial injustice. Economic inequality. These are not issues that get resolved and become irrelevant. They persist, they evolve, and they need to be understood in their historical context. A well-reported book creates a record that future readers can return to, not just for the facts it contains, but for the understanding it builds.

I want to talk about the economics of publishing long-form journalism, because the economics are challenging and I think honesty about that is important. Deeply reported non-fiction is expensive to produce. The author may spend years reporting a single book. Travel, document acquisition, and research assistance cost money. The editorial process is longer and more involved than for most other types of books, because the editor is not just checking prose quality but also verifying factual claims and ensuring that the reporting meets journalistic standards (see our post about fact-checking for more on this).

At ScrollWorks, we can typically offer our non-fiction authors advances that are modest by industry standards. We compensate for this by offering a higher royalty rate than the major houses, so that if the book does well, the author benefits proportionally. But “if the book does well” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Most of our non-fiction titles earn out their advances, but they do so slowly. The economics work because we keep our overhead low, use digital printing to manage inventory costs, and take a long view of each title’s commercial life.

The long view is important. Book-length journalism often has a longer sales life than other types of books. A thriller peaks in its first few months and then fades. A deeply reported non-fiction book might sell steadily for years, driven by course adoptions, ongoing public interest in its subject, and word of mouth among readers who care about the topic. Our non-fiction backlist, including titles like The Cartographer’s Dilemma, continues to generate meaningful revenue years after publication. This long tail changes the economics significantly. A book that sells 500 copies a year for ten years has sold 5,000 copies, which is a respectable number for a small press. It just takes patience to get there.

I also want to mention something that I think gives book-length journalism an advantage over its digital counterparts, which is the absence of distraction. When you read a long article online, you are one click away from everything else on the internet. Your email is open in another tab. Notifications are pinging. The article itself might be surrounded by ads, recommended content, and other visual noise. The reading environment is hostile to sustained attention.

A book eliminates all of that. It is just you and the text. There are no hyperlinks to pull you away, no ads competing for your attention, no algorithm deciding what you should read next. This is not a trivial advantage. Research on reading comprehension consistently shows that people understand and retain more when they read printed text than when they read the same content on a screen. The reasons for this are debated (some researchers point to the physicality of pages, others to the absence of distraction), but the effect is real. If you want someone to truly understand a complex subject, giving them a physical book is one of the best ways to do it.

Some people in publishing argue that long-form journalism in book form is a dying category, that readers have moved to podcasts, documentaries, and online content for their deep-dive needs. I think this argument is wrong, or at least premature. Yes, other formats are growing. Yes, some readers who would have bought a non-fiction book ten years ago are now listening to a podcast instead. But the book offers something those other formats do not: the combination of depth, permanence, and focused attention that I have been describing. Podcasts are wonderful, but they are consumed while doing other things (driving, cooking, exercising). Documentaries are powerful, but they are constrained by runtime and production costs. Online articles are accessible, but they exist in an environment designed to pull your attention in every direction at once.

The book remains the best technology we have for delivering a sustained, complex argument or narrative to a single human mind. It has been the best technology for that purpose for centuries, and I do not think that is going to change anytime soon. What might change is the number of people who want that experience, and I am cautiously optimistic that the number is growing, not shrinking. I see evidence of this in the success of non-fiction books that tackle serious subjects with real depth. I see it in the growth of book clubs focused on non-fiction and journalism. I see it in the college students who email us saying they discovered one of our titles in a class and it changed how they think about a particular issue.

At ScrollWorks, we will keep publishing long-form journalism between covers. We will keep investing in the kind of deep reporting that takes years and costs more than it should. We will keep betting on the existence of readers who are curious enough, patient enough, and serious enough to spend real time with a real book about a real subject. We do this because we believe the work matters, and because, every once in a while, a reader tells us that one of our books changed the way they see the world. That does not happen with a tweet. It does not happen with a 90-second video. It happens with a book, and that is reason enough to keep making them. You can explore our non-fiction catalog to see the kind of work I am talking about.

I have never been to Vladivostok. I have never stood on the banks of the Ural River or watched the sun set over the rooftops of Lisbon. I have never eaten breakfast in a Nairobi cafe or taken a late-night train through the Swiss Alps. And yet I have written about all of these places, sometimes with enough confidence that readers have asked me which hotel I stayed at.

This is one of those uncomfortable truths about fiction writing that nobody talks about at literary festivals. We praise authenticity. We celebrate writers who “write what they know.” But the reality is that most fiction writers, especially those of us working in historical or international settings, spend a lot of time writing about places we have never physically visited. And I think that is not only fine but sometimes preferable.

Let me explain what I mean by that, because it sounds controversial and I want to be precise.

The Myth of the Writing Traveler

There is a romantic image of the writer as world traveler. Hemingway in Paris. Orwell in Burma. Chatwin wandering Patagonia with a notebook. We have built an entire mythology around the idea that great writing about place requires physical presence, that you need to have breathed the air and tasted the water before you can describe it honestly.

I bought into this for years. In my twenties, I delayed writing a novel set in postwar Germany because I had not yet visited Berlin. I felt like a fraud even considering it. Then I read an interview with Hilary Mantel where she talked about writing Wolf Hall. She had obviously never met Thomas Cromwell. She had never walked through Tudor London because it no longer exists. What she had done was research, imagination, and careful attention to the textures of daily life that she could reconstruct from primary sources.

That interview changed how I thought about place in fiction. Not because research replaces experience, but because experience alone has never been sufficient either. I have been to plenty of cities that I could not write about convincingly. I spent a week in Tokyo and came away with impressions so shallow they would embarrass a travel brochure. Being somewhere does not automatically mean you understand it. Sometimes the opposite happens: the overwhelming flood of sensory information makes it harder to select the details that matter.

Research as a Different Kind of Seeing

When I write about a place I have not visited, my research process is obsessive and specific. I am not trying to learn everything about a city. I am trying to learn the particular things my characters would notice.

This distinction matters enormously. A character who is a dock worker in 1930s Marseille does not care about the architecture of the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde. He cares about the wind called the mistral and how it affects loading schedules. He cares about the smell of fish guts on the quay and whether the foreman is in a good mood. He knows which bars will let him run a tab and which ones water their pastis.

This is the kind of detail you get from reading memoirs, letters, and oral histories. Not from a three-day visit to the modern city. The Marseille my character inhabits does not exist anymore, just as Mantel’s London does not exist. What we are both doing is constructing a plausible world from fragments of evidence, and I would argue that this kind of deliberate construction sometimes produces more vivid settings than the distracted observations of an actual visit.

My process usually starts with maps. I love old maps. I will spend hours on archive websites looking at street-level maps from the period I am writing about. I want to know which streets intersected, where the markets were, how far it was from the railway station to the river. Google Earth is useful for contemporary settings because you can drop into street view and look at the actual facades of buildings. For historical periods, I rely on photographs, city directories, and sometimes architectural surveys.

After maps, I move to sensory details. What does the place sound like? What are the common smells? What is the quality of light at different times of day? For these, I read travel writing, personal diaries, and newspaper accounts from the era. Newspapers are especially useful because reporters describe mundane things that novelists and memoirists often skip. A newspaper article about a municipal sanitation dispute will tell you exactly what the streets smelled like in a way that a literary memoir might gloss over.

The Five-Detail Rule

Here is a technique I have developed over the years that I think works well for place-writing, whether you have visited or not. I call it the five-detail rule.

For any scene set in a specific location, I choose exactly five sensory details to anchor it. Not ten. Not twenty. Five. One for each sense, ideally, though sometimes I double up on sight or sound and skip taste if the character is not eating.

The reason for the limit is that readers do not actually want a comprehensive description of a place. They want enough to build their own mental image and then they want you to get on with the story. Five well-chosen details will do more work than two pages of exhaustive description. This is true whether you are writing about a place you know intimately or one you have only researched.

Let me give you an example. Say I am writing a scene set in a Buenos Aires cafe in the 1940s. My five details might be: the sound of a tango playing on a scratchy radio behind the counter, the bitter smell of mate mixed with cigarette smoke, the feel of a marble tabletop cool under the character’s forearms, the sight of condensation running down a window that looks out onto a grey afternoon, and the taste of a medialunas pastry that is slightly stale. Five details. Maybe sixty words total. But they put you in that room.

I did not need to visit Buenos Aires to write those details. I needed to know that cafes in that era had marble tables (from photographs), that mate was commonly consumed alongside coffee (from social histories), that tango was everywhere on the radio in the 1940s (from music histories), that medialunas are the standard cafe pastry (from food writing), and that Buenos Aires has grey, humid winters (from weather records and travel accounts).

Each detail is specific and verifiable. None of them are generic “exotic location” details. They are grounded in the actual texture of life in that particular place and time.

When Not Having Been There Is an Advantage

I said earlier that not visiting a place can sometimes be preferable, and I want to defend that claim.

When you visit a place, especially as a tourist, you are experiencing a version of it that has been curated for visitors. You see the landmarks. You eat at the restaurants that cater to outsiders. Your experience is filtered through the infrastructure of tourism, which is designed to show you a particular version of the city that may have little to do with how residents actually live.

I once met a writer who had set a novel in Naples after spending two weeks there on vacation. The Naples in her book was all pizza and Vesuvius views and charming old men playing cards in the piazza. It was a postcard. It bore almost no relationship to the complex, difficult, fascinating city that Neapolitans actually inhabit. She had been there, but she had only seen the surface designed for her consumption.

Contrast this with Elena Ferrante’s Naples, which feels so viscerally real that people make pilgrimages to the neighborhoods she describes. Ferrante obviously knows Naples intimately, but her knowledge is not tourist knowledge. It is the knowledge of someone who has paid attention to the domestic details, the social hierarchies, the way light falls in a particular courtyard. This is the kind of knowledge you can get from research if you are careful and patient enough.

When I research a place from my desk, I am forced to be deliberate about every detail I include. I cannot fall back on “well, that is what it looked like when I was there.” I have to justify every choice against my sources. This discipline often produces writing that is more carefully observed than memoir-style recall, which tends to drift toward the impressionistic and the generic.

The Ethical Questions

I do think there are ethical considerations here, and I do not want to brush past them.

Writing about a place you have not visited is different from writing about a culture you do not belong to. Place and culture overlap, obviously, but they are not the same thing. I feel comfortable writing about the physical geography and architecture of Nairobi because those are observable facts that can be researched. I would be much more cautious about writing from the perspective of a Kenyan character whose inner life is shaped by cultural experiences I have not shared.

This is not a hard boundary. Fiction writers cross cultural boundaries all the time, and some do it brilliantly. But I think the risk of getting things wrong increases significantly when you move from describing a place to inhabiting a perspective. My advice to other writers is to be honest about the distinction and to seek sensitivity readers when you are writing across cultural lines, regardless of whether you have visited the country in question.

Another ethical consideration is accuracy. If you write about a real place, you have a responsibility to get the basic facts right. Readers who live there will notice if you put the river on the wrong side of the city or describe snow in a tropical climate. This is where research becomes non-negotiable. I have a checklist that I run through for every real-world location I describe, covering geography, climate, architecture, flora, transportation, and food. If I cannot verify a detail, I either cut it or fictionalize the location enough that accuracy is not expected.

Practical Techniques for Research

Let me share some specific tools and methods that I have found useful over the years.

Google Earth and Google Street View are obvious starting points for contemporary settings. I have spent entire afternoons virtually walking through neighborhoods in cities I am writing about. You can see the color of the buildings, the width of the sidewalks, the types of cars parked on the street, even the brands on shop signs. It is not the same as being there, but it is remarkably close for visual reference.

For historical settings, I rely heavily on photograph archives. Most major cities have digitized historical photo collections. The Library of Congress has an extraordinary collection of photographs from around the world. The Imperial War Museum in London has photographs from both world wars that cover dozens of countries. University libraries often have specialized collections for their regions.

YouTube is an underrated research tool. People upload walking tours of cities, time-lapse videos of daily life, and amateur documentaries about neighborhoods. These give you a sense of pace and rhythm that photographs cannot capture. I once found a twenty-minute walking tour of a market in Marrakech that gave me more useful detail for a scene than any book I had read about the city.

Podcasts and radio documentaries are excellent for capturing the sound of a place. The BBC World Service archive has programs about virtually every country on earth, many of which include ambient audio recordings. Listening to the background sounds of a street in Lagos or a train station in Mumbai gives you a sonic texture that you can translate into prose.

Local newspapers are gold. Most countries have English-language newspapers or at least newspapers with online translation available. Reading the local news tells you what people actually care about, what problems they face, what their daily routines involve. A week of reading the Buenos Aires Herald archives taught me more about middle-class Argentine life in the 1940s than any history book.

Cookbooks and food writing are another underused resource. Food is one of the strongest anchors for place in fiction, and cookbooks often contain detailed descriptions of markets, kitchens, and dining customs that go far beyond the recipes themselves. Claudia Roden’s books on Middle Eastern food, for example, are as much social history as they are cookbooks.

What I Got Wrong

I should be honest about my failures, too. I have made mistakes writing about places I had not visited, and they taught me useful lessons.

In an early novel, I described a character walking from one neighborhood to another in a foreign city, and I got the distance completely wrong. What I described as a ten-minute walk would actually have taken over an hour. A reader who lived there wrote me a polite but firm email pointing out the error. I was mortified. Now I always check walking distances on a map before I have characters travel on foot.

In another book, I described the weather inaccurately. I had a scene set in a city during what I thought was the rainy season, but I had the months wrong. The rainy season there starts in June, not April. Again, a local reader caught it. Now I check climate data for every month I write about.

These are small errors, but they matter. Each one is a crack in the reader’s trust. If you get the weather wrong, the reader starts wondering what else you got wrong, and they stop trusting your descriptions. The whole illusion of the fictional world depends on the accuracy of its small details. Get the big things right and nobody checks. Get a small thing wrong and everyone notices.

The Question of Authenticity

I want to return to the question of authenticity because it is the one that comes up most often when I talk about this subject at workshops and panels.

People ask: “Is it authentic if you have not been there?” And my answer is always the same. Authenticity in fiction is not about the writer’s biography. It is about the quality of attention the writer brings to the work. A writer who has visited a place casually and writes from fuzzy memory is less “authentic” than a writer who has spent months researching from a distance with focused intent.

Consider science fiction. Nobody has been to Mars, but some novels set on Mars feel extraordinarily real while others feel flat and unconvincing. The difference is not travel experience. It is imaginative rigor. The writers who make Mars feel real have done their homework on Martian geology, atmospheric conditions, and the practical challenges of living in a low-gravity environment. They have thought carefully about what their characters would see, hear, and feel. They have made specific choices rather than relying on generic “alien planet” imagery.

The same principle applies to writing about real places on Earth. Specificity is what creates the feeling of authenticity. Not “a European city with cobblestone streets” but “a narrow street in the Alfama district where the cobblestones are worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic and the houses lean toward each other overhead like old friends sharing a secret.” That level of specificity can come from a visit or from a photograph. What matters is that the writer chose that particular detail and deployed it with purpose.

At ScrollWorks, we work with authors who write across a wide range of settings, from the historical fiction of The Last Archive to the international scope of Echoes of Iron. In both cases, the power of the setting comes not from where the author has physically traveled but from the depth and specificity of their research and imagination.

A Reading List for Place Research

If you are interested in getting better at writing about places you have not visited, here are some books I recommend. These are not writing guides. They are books that demonstrate exceptional place-writing and that also reveal their research methods, either explicitly or implicitly.

Fernand Braudel’s “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II” is a masterpiece of place-as-history. Braudel writes about the Mediterranean as a living entity with its own rhythms and moods, and his descriptions of coastal cities and maritime life are so vivid they could serve as models for fiction. Jan Morris’s city portraits, especially “Venice” and “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,” show how a skilled writer can capture the essence of a place through carefully selected detail. W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” blends walking, memory, and historical research into something that feels like fiction even when it is ostensibly nonfiction. And for pure craft in fictional place-making, I think Roberto Bolano’s descriptions of Mexico City in “The Savage Detectives” are unmatched.

Each of these writers teaches a different lesson about how to evoke place through language. Braudel teaches scope and context. Morris teaches selectivity and voice. Sebald teaches the layering of past and present. Bolano teaches how to make a city feel alive through the movement and conversation of its inhabitants rather than through static description.

The common thread is that none of them treat place as backdrop. In their work, place is a character, with moods and histories and agendas of its own. That is the standard I try to hold myself to, whether I am writing about a city I know well or one I have only visited through books and maps and photographs.

Writing about places you have not been is not a limitation. It is a skill. Like any skill, it improves with practice and attention. The writers who do it well are not faking anything. They are doing a different kind of seeing, one that is mediated by research and imagination rather than by direct physical experience. In my view, that kind of seeing is just as valid and sometimes more precise than the distracted glancing we do when we actually stand in a place for the first time, overwhelmed by everything and truly seeing nothing at all.

I keep a shelf in my office that is separate from the main library. It is not organized alphabetically or by genre. The books on it are the ones I think every publisher, editor, or anyone working in the book business should own and return to regularly. Some of them are about publishing. Most of them are not. They are books about taste, judgment, attention, and the strange alchemy of putting words in front of people who need them.

This list is personal. It reflects my own biases and blind spots. Other publishers would assemble a completely different shelf, and that is fine. But these are the books that have shaped how I think about this work, and I think anyone starting or running a publishing operation would benefit from reading them.

The Books About the Business Itself

Let me start with the practical ones, the books that deal directly with what it means to publish and sell books in the modern world.

Jason Epstein’s “Book Business” is the single best overview of how American publishing evolved from a cottage industry into a corporate enterprise and what was lost along the way. Epstein was an editor at Random House for decades, and he writes with the authority of someone who watched the industry transform from the inside. His chapters on the economics of publishing are more honest than anything I have read before or since. He does not sentimentalize the old days, but he is clear-eyed about the costs of consolidation. I have re-read this book at least four times, and each time I find something new that applies to a problem I am currently facing.

Andre Schiffrin’s “The Business of Books” is a useful companion piece. Schiffrin ran The New Press and had strong opinions about the commercialization of publishing. He is more polemical than Epstein, and I do not agree with everything he argues, but his account of how profit margins crept up from the traditional 3-4% to the double digits demanded by corporate owners is essential reading. It explains so much about why the industry makes the decisions it does today.

For the mechanics of actually running a small press, I recommend Jonathan Galassi’s “Muse.” It is technically a novel, but it is so clearly based on Galassi’s decades at Farrar, Straus and Giroux that it reads as a roman a clef about literary publishing. The relationships between editors and authors, the politics of acquisitions meetings, the anxiety of waiting for reviews. It is all there, thinly veiled and very funny.

Michael Korda’s “Another Life” covers his years at Simon & Schuster and is both entertaining and instructive. Korda writes about the editorial process with more candor than most memoirists in the business. His accounts of working with authors on revisions, of navigating corporate politics while trying to maintain editorial standards, and of the sheer volume of reading required to do the job well are all useful for anyone considering this career.

The Books About Editing and Taste

A publisher’s most important skill is judgment. Knowing what is good. Knowing what will find an audience. Knowing when a manuscript needs another draft and when it is ready. These are not skills you can learn from a textbook, but there are books that sharpen your ability to think about quality.

William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” is the first book I give to new editors. Not because editing is the same as writing, but because Zinsser articulates principles of clarity and economy that apply to both. His chapters on simplicity and clutter have probably done more to improve my editorial eye than any formal training I received. I open it to a random page every few months and always find something worth underlining.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Steering the Craft” is my favorite book on prose style. Le Guin was a brilliant writer, obviously, but she was also a brilliant teacher. Her exercises in point of view, sentence rhythm, and voice are extraordinarily useful for editors who need to diagnose why a passage is not working. I have used her exercises in editorial meetings to help authors see problems in their own prose, and they work every single time.

For understanding narrative structure, I prefer John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” to any of the more popular alternatives. Gardner is rigorous and demanding. He does not offer shortcuts or formulas. Instead, he insists that fiction must create a “vivid and continuous dream” in the reader’s mind, and he explains, with precision and examples, what breaks that dream and what sustains it. This concept has become my primary criterion for evaluating manuscripts. Does the dream hold? If it does not, why not? Gardner usually has the answer.

I also keep a copy of Francine Prose’s “Reading Like a Writer” nearby at all times. Prose goes through classic works of fiction sentence by sentence, explaining why specific word choices work and how small decisions about syntax and rhythm create large effects in meaning. It is the closest thing to a masterclass in close reading that exists in book form. After reading it, you will never look at a paragraph the same way again.

The Books About the Reader

Publishers talk a lot about readers, but we do not always think carefully about what reading actually is, what it does to the brain, and why people do it. A few books have changed how I think about our audience.

Maryanne Wolf’s “Proust and the Squid” is a neuroscience book about reading. Wolf explains how the brain rewires itself to process written language, a task for which it was never evolutionarily designed. Her account of how reading develops in children and what happens when it goes wrong (in dyslexia, for instance) gave me a much deeper appreciation for how remarkable the act of reading is and how much we take it for granted. If you publish books, you should understand what happens in the mind of the person who opens them.

Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading” takes a different approach, tracing the cultural and social history of reading from antiquity to the present. Manguel writes about silent reading versus reading aloud, about private reading versus public performance, about the political implications of literacy. His book is a reminder that the way we read today is not the way people have always read, and it may not be the way they will read in the future. For a publisher, this historical perspective is invaluable. It prevents you from assuming that current reading habits are permanent.

Virginia Woolf’s essays on reading, especially “How Should One Read a Book?” and “The Common Reader,” are still the best articulations of why general readers matter and what they bring to literature that professional critics sometimes miss. Woolf argues for reading as a form of active collaboration between writer and reader, and her description of the “common reader” who reads for pleasure and personal meaning, rather than professional obligation, is one I think about every time we consider which books to acquire.

The Books About Design and Presentation

A book is a physical object, or at least a visual one even in digital formats, and how it looks affects how it is received. Publishers who ignore design are making a mistake.

Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style” is the typography bible. If you publish books and you have not read it, you should stop reading this blog post and order a copy right now. Bringhurst writes about typefaces, margins, line spacing, and page proportions with a care and precision that borders on the spiritual. His book will change how you look at every page of every book you encounter for the rest of your life. I am not exaggerating. My copy is heavily annotated and held together with tape.

Jan Tschichold’s “The Form of the Book” is a collection of essays by the Swiss typographer who standardized the design of Penguin Books in the late 1940s. Tschichold was opinionated to the point of dogmatism, but his opinions were grounded in centuries of typographic tradition and a genuine reverence for the reading experience. His essay on margins alone is worth the price of the book.

For cover design, I recommend Chip Kidd’s “Book One.” Kidd is the most famous book cover designer in America, and his work for Knopf over the past three decades has defined what literary fiction looks like on the shelf. His book is mostly visual, which makes sense, but his annotations about why he made specific design choices are instructive. He talks about the relationship between the cover image and the text, about how much to reveal and how much to withhold, and about the difference between a cover that is merely attractive and one that actually communicates something about the book inside.

The Books About Culture and Context

Publishing does not exist in a vacuum. The books we publish are shaped by and respond to the culture around them. Understanding that culture, its history and its pressures, makes you a better publisher.

Ted Gioia’s “The Gutenberg Parenthesis” argues that the era of print dominance, roughly 1450 to 2000, was a historical anomaly and that we are now returning to an oral, performative culture more similar to the pre-print world. I do not fully agree with his thesis, but it is a bracing challenge to the assumptions most publishers carry around. Even if you reject his conclusions, his framing forces you to think about what books uniquely offer that other media cannot replicate.

Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” is a book about the economics of creative work, arguing that art operates in a gift economy alongside (and sometimes in tension with) the market economy. Hyde’s ideas about how creative work circulates, about the relationship between generosity and commerce, and about the obligations that gifts create have profoundly influenced how I think about the relationship between publishers and authors. We are not just buying and selling a product. We are participating in a gift exchange that has its own rules and expectations.

For a more hard-nosed perspective on the economics of creative industries, I recommend Richard Caves’ “Creative Industries.” Caves was a Harvard economist who applied industrial organization theory to the arts, including publishing. His analysis of why creative industries work the way they do, why most products fail, why the “nobody knows” principle governs investment decisions, and why contracts take the forms they do, is dry but extraordinarily clarifying. It will not make you feel better about the economics of publishing, but it will help you understand why those economics are the way they are.

The Wild Cards

The last few books on my shelf are harder to categorize. They are not about publishing or books specifically, but they have shaped how I approach the work in ways I find difficult to articulate.

John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” changed how I think about images and visual communication. Since so much of publishing involves visual presentation (covers, layouts, marketing materials), Berger’s arguments about how context shapes perception are directly relevant. His chapter on publicity and advertising, where he argues that all publicity works by proposing that we will be transformed by buying something, applies disturbingly well to book marketing.

Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” is a slim book that I keep returning to for courage. Dillard writes about the daily struggle of sitting down to produce work that you know will probably fail, and her honesty about the emotional costs of creative labor helps me be a better editor and publisher. When an author tells me they are struggling, I think of Dillard, and it helps me respond with understanding rather than impatience.

Finally, I keep a copy of Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic” on the shelf. This may seem odd for a publishing office, but Seneca writes about time, priorities, and the difference between being busy and being productive in ways that feel eerily relevant to modern work life. His letter on the shortness of life, where he argues that life is long enough if we stop wasting it on trivial pursuits, is one I re-read every January. It helps me remember that every book we choose to publish is also a choice not to publish something else, and that our time and attention are the most finite resources we have.

At ScrollWorks, our editorial philosophy is shaped by many of these ideas. When we work on a project like Still Waters or The Cartographer’s Dilemma, the decisions we make about editing, design, and presentation draw on the accumulated wisdom of these books and the conversations they have provoked over the years.

You do not need to agree with everything on this shelf. I do not agree with everything on this shelf. What matters is that you have a shelf like it, a collection of books that challenge your assumptions, refine your taste, and remind you why this strange, unprofitable, irresistible business is worth doing at all. If you work in publishing and you do not have such a shelf, start building one today. Your future decisions will be better for it.

We printed the second run of one of our titles last month. It had been out of print for almost eight months. During that time, I received eleven emails from readers asking when it would be available again, three from booksellers wondering about restocking, and one from a book club in Portland that had apparently built their entire spring reading schedule around it.

I felt bad about every one of those emails. I also believe we made the right decision in waiting.

Small publishers operate under different constraints than large ones, and one of those constraints is that we cannot afford to keep titles in continuous print the way a major house can. Our print runs are small, typically between 1,500 and 3,000 copies. When a run sells out, we face a decision: reprint immediately or wait. Most of the time, we wait. And I want to explain why, because from the outside it probably looks like incompetence or indifference, when it is actually a deliberate strategy rooted in the economics and philosophy of how we publish.

The Math of Small Print Runs

To understand why we take our time between printings, you first need to understand the economics of book printing at small scale.

Printing books has enormous economies of scale. The setup costs for an offset print run, creating plates, calibrating colors, running test sheets, are roughly the same whether you are printing 500 copies or 50,000. This means the per-unit cost drops dramatically as the quantity increases. A major publisher printing 50,000 copies of a novel might pay $1.50 per book. We might pay $4.50 per book for a run of 2,000.

That per-unit cost difference cascades through every other financial calculation. Our margins are thinner. Our break-even point is higher as a percentage of the run. We have less room for error. A large publisher can absorb the cost of pulping a few thousand unsold copies. For us, pulping 500 copies could wipe out the profit from the entire title.

So when a first printing sells out and we need to decide about a second, we are making a consequential financial decision. Print too many and we are stuck with inventory we cannot move. Print too few and we are spending nearly as much on setup costs for an uneconomically small run. The sweet spot requires us to have good data about likely demand, and getting that data takes time.

We typically wait three to six months after a first printing sells out before committing to a reprint. During that period, we track several indicators. How many direct inquiries are we getting from readers and booksellers? How is the book performing on the secondary market? (If used copies are selling for significantly above cover price, that is a strong signal of unmet demand.) Are there upcoming events, such as a festival appearance by the author or a paperback rights sale, that might generate new interest? Is the book being assigned in any courses?

All of this information helps us size the second printing accurately. And accuracy matters far more to us than speed.

The Print-on-Demand Question

The obvious response to everything I have just said is: why not use print-on-demand to keep titles continuously available?

We do use print-on-demand for some titles, particularly backlist titles with low but steady demand. It is a useful technology and it has improved enormously in recent years. But it has limitations that matter to us, and I think they matter to readers too, even if readers do not always know how to articulate them.

The quality of print-on-demand books is good. It is not great. The paper stock is limited to a few standard options. The color reproduction is adequate for text-heavy covers but often disappointing for complex artwork. The binding, particularly on paperbacks, tends to be stiffer and less pleasant to handle than offset-printed books. These differences are subtle enough that many readers will not consciously notice them. But I believe they affect the reading experience at a level below conscious awareness, in the same way that a well-designed room feels different from a poorly designed one even if you cannot identify which specific elements are creating that feeling.

There is also a question of editorial integrity. When we do a new printing, we have the opportunity to correct errors. Every first printing contains mistakes. Typos that survived three rounds of proofreading. A hyphenation error introduced by the layout software. A factual claim that turned out to be slightly inaccurate. The gap between printings gives us time to compile an errata list and incorporate corrections into the new edition. If we were simply printing on demand from the same files, those errors would persist indefinitely.

I realize this sounds like a minor point. Who cares about a couple of typos? I care. Our authors care. And I think serious readers care more than they let on. A book that has been through multiple corrected printings is a more finished object than a first printing, and I take pride in the fact that our second and third printings are better than our firsts.

Scarcity and Value

I am going to say something that might sound cynical, though I do not intend it that way: temporary scarcity can be good for a book.

When a book is constantly available, there is no urgency to buy it. It will be there tomorrow. It will be there next month. You add it to your wish list and forget about it. But when a book goes out of print, something changes. The people who want it start talking about it more. They post on social media asking if anyone has a copy. They check used bookstores. The book acquires a mystique that it did not have when it was sitting in a warehouse waiting to be ordered.

I am not suggesting that we deliberately manufacture scarcity as a marketing tactic. That would be dishonest. What I am saying is that the natural rhythm of small-press publishing, where books go in and out of print as editions sell through, creates a dynamic that is actually healthy for the long-term life of the book. It creates moments of renewed attention. It rewards the readers who bought early. It gives the publisher a chance to refresh the cover design or add a new introduction for the reprint. Each printing becomes a small event rather than an unnoticed continuation.

Think about how wine works. Vintages sell out and new ones replace them. Each vintage is slightly different. The scarcity of past vintages adds to their perceived value and creates a culture of collecting and discussion that benefits the entire winery. I think book publishing could learn from this model rather than trying to keep everything available in identical form forever.

What We Do During the Gap

The period between printings is not idle time for us. It is when we do some of our most important work on a title.

First, as I mentioned, we compile corrections. I keep a running file for every title we publish, and whenever someone reports an error (readers, reviewers, the author, our own team), I log it with the page number and the correction. By the time we are ready to reprint, we often have twenty or thirty corrections to incorporate. Some of these are trivial (a missing comma, a misspelled foreign word) and some are significant (a factual error, a passage that could be read as unintentionally offensive). The corrections file is one of the most important quality documents we maintain.

Second, we evaluate the cover design. Does it need refreshing? Has feedback from booksellers or readers suggested that the cover is not communicating the book’s genre or tone effectively? Sometimes a minor adjustment, changing a subtitle, tweaking the color palette, using a different author photo, can significantly improve how the book performs on its second time around. We also consider whether to add review quotes or prize nominations to the cover, which were not available when the first printing went to press.

Third, we look at the book’s metadata. The keywords and categories we assigned when the book launched may not be the ones that are actually driving discovery. We analyze sales data and search traffic to see what terms readers are using to find the book, and we update the metadata accordingly. This is tedious, unglamorous work, but it has a real impact on discoverability, especially on online retail platforms where the right category placement can double or triple a book’s visibility.

Fourth, we reconsider the book’s positioning in our catalog. How does it relate to our newer titles? Are there cross-promotion opportunities that did not exist when the book first came out? Can we bundle it with a more recent title for a themed promotion? The gap between printings gives us the space to think strategically about the book’s role in our overall list.

The Patience Problem

The hardest part of this approach is managing expectations, both our own and everyone else’s.

Authors understandably want their books to be available at all times. When a reader cannot buy your book, it feels like a failure. I have had uncomfortable conversations with authors who see the gap between printings as a sign that we are not committed to their work. I have to explain that the opposite is true: we are waiting because we care enough to get the reprint right rather than rushing out an identical copy of the first printing.

Booksellers, especially independent ones, also find the gap frustrating. They have customers asking for the book and they cannot get copies. Some booksellers lose patience and stop stocking the title even after it becomes available again. This is a real cost of our approach, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Every gap in availability risks permanently losing some bookseller relationships.

And then there is the internal pressure. Every month a title is out of print is a month of lost revenue. For a small publisher operating on thin margins, that is not abstract. It is real money that is not coming in, money we need to fund new acquisitions and pay our team. The temptation to rush a reprint is constant, and it takes discipline to resist it.

What sustains my conviction is the evidence from our own catalog. The titles we have reprinted carefully, with corrections and updated covers, consistently outperform the ones we rushed back into print. They get better reviews. They sell more steadily. They have longer lifespans. The short-term cost of waiting is real, but the long-term benefit is larger.

A Different Rhythm

I think this approach reflects something broader about our philosophy at ScrollWorks. We are not trying to maximize the velocity of our publishing. We are trying to maximize the quality and longevity of each title we publish. Those are different goals, and they lead to different decisions.

A velocity-focused publisher would reprint immediately, accept the errors in the first printing, use print-on-demand to fill any gaps, and move on to the next title. That is a perfectly valid approach. Many successful publishers operate that way. But it is not our approach, because we believe that each printing of a book is an opportunity to make it better, and we do not want to waste that opportunity by rushing.

This philosophy extends beyond reprints. We take our time between acquisitions, too. We would rather publish six books a year that we are deeply proud of than twelve that we feel lukewarm about. We take our time with editing, often going through four or five rounds of revision with an author before we are satisfied. We take our time with design, working with our cover designers on multiple concepts before committing to one.

All of this slowness has costs. We publish fewer titles than we could. We miss trend waves that faster publishers catch. We lose authors who want a publisher that can move quicker. I accept these costs because I believe the alternative costs are higher: publishing books we are not proud of, or publishing them in a form that we know is not their best.

If you are a reader waiting for a ScrollWorks title to come back into print, I understand your frustration, and I appreciate your patience. Know that when the book does return, it will be better than the copy you missed. The typos will be fixed. The cover might be improved. The text will have had the benefit of another round of care and attention. It is not a consolation prize for waiting. It is the reason for the wait.

We apply this same patient approach to every title in our catalog, from The Last Archive to Echoes of Iron. Each reprinting is an opportunity to make the book a little closer to what it wants to be. That process takes time. We think the results justify it.

Last year, one of our authors was longlisted for a literary prize that I will not name. The longlist announcement generated a brief spike in sales, a few congratulatory emails, and a mention in two trade publications. Then our author was not shortlisted, and that was the end of it. The total financial impact of the longlisting was, by my calculation, about $2,400 in additional revenue. The total cost of the submission process, including entry fees, shipping copies to judges, and staff time spent on the application, was about $1,800. So we netted roughly $600.

I share these numbers not to be bitter (we were genuinely delighted by the longlisting) but because they illustrate something that very few people in the book world talk about openly: the economics of literary prizes are strange, often irrational, and frequently misunderstood by everyone involved.

The Cost of Entering

Most readers do not know that publishers pay to submit books for prizes. This is not common knowledge, and it surprises people when I mention it. Entry fees vary widely. Some prizes charge nothing. The National Book Award charges $160 per title (though there have been periodic adjustments). Many smaller prizes charge between $25 and $100. A few charge significantly more.

The fees themselves are not the expensive part. The expensive part is the physical copies. Most prizes require between three and ten copies of each submitted title. For a hardcover that costs us $4.50 to print, sending eight copies to a prize committee costs $36 in manufacturing plus $15-25 in shipping. Multiply this across twenty or thirty prize submissions per year, which is not unusual for even a small publisher, and you are looking at a meaningful line item in the budget.

Then there is staff time. Someone has to research which prizes are appropriate for which titles. Someone has to fill out the application forms, which range from simple online submissions to elaborate dossiers requiring author biographies, publication histories, and promotional materials. Someone has to track the timelines, because prize deadlines are scattered throughout the year with no coordination between them. Someone has to package and ship the books.

At a large publisher, this work is handled by a dedicated publicity department. At a small press like ours, it is one of approximately forty tasks being handled by a team of five people. The opportunity cost is significant. Every hour spent on prize submissions is an hour not spent on editing, marketing, or acquiring new titles.

I estimate that our total annual spend on prize submissions, including fees, copies, shipping, and staff time, is between $8,000 and $12,000. That is a significant investment for a small publisher. It is roughly equivalent to the advance we might pay for a new title. The question of whether that investment pays off is one I wrestle with every year.

The Winner’s Windfall

The economics change dramatically if you actually win. Winning a major literary prize, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, can increase sales by a factor of ten or more. The “Booker effect” has been studied by economists, and the numbers are striking. A Booker winner typically sees a sales increase of 300-500% in the months following the announcement. A Pulitzer winner can see even larger jumps. These are life-changing numbers for an author and transformative numbers for a publisher.

But here is the catch: the odds of winning are extremely small. The Booker Prize receives roughly 150-170 submissions each year from eligible publishers. The longlist is 13 titles. The shortlist is 6. The winner is 1. Even getting longlisted puts you in the top 8% of submissions. Winning puts you at 0.6%.

For smaller prizes, the odds are sometimes better but the payoff is proportionally smaller. A regional literary prize might receive 50 submissions and award one winner, giving you a 2% chance. But the sales bump from a regional prize might be measured in dozens of copies rather than thousands.

If you think of prize submissions as a form of gambling, which in some ways they are, the expected value calculation is not favorable for most publishers. You spend $8,000-12,000 per year for a small probability of a large payoff. A casino would love those odds. A financial advisor would tell you to invest the money elsewhere.

The Prestige Economy

So why do publishers, including us, keep submitting? The answer is that prizes operate in a prestige economy that is partially decoupled from the financial economy. The value of a prize is not measured entirely in sales. It is measured in reputation, in visibility, in the ability to attract better manuscripts in the future, and in the morale of your team and your authors.

When one of our titles is longlisted for a prize, the financial impact may be modest. But the reputational impact is significant. It tells agents that we are a serious publisher whose books get noticed. It tells booksellers that our titles are worth stocking. It tells readers that our editorial judgment can be trusted. It tells our own team that the work they do is being recognized.

These benefits are real but extremely difficult to quantify. How do you put a dollar value on the manuscript that an agent sends you because they saw your title on a longlist? How do you measure the lifetime value of a bookseller who starts carrying your titles because one of them won a prize? How do you calculate the retention value of a team member who stays because they feel proud of the work?

I do not know the answers to these questions, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims they do. What I know is that the prestige effects of prize recognition compound over time. A publisher with a history of prize-recognized titles has a fundamentally different market position than one without, even if the direct financial impact of any single prize recognition was negligible.

The Hidden Politics

Prizes also have a political dimension that is rarely discussed publicly but is well understood within the industry.

Prize juries are composed of human beings with tastes, biases, and relationships. The judging process is not a blind evaluation of literary merit. Judges know which publishers submitted which books. They have opinions about those publishers. They have relationships with some of the authors under consideration. They have aesthetic preferences that favor certain kinds of writing over others.

None of this is corrupt, exactly. It is just human. But it means that certain publishers have structural advantages in the prize ecosystem. A title from a major publisher with a well-known author and a large publicity budget is more likely to be noticed by judges than a title from a small press, even if the small press title is the better book. Judges are readers, and they are influenced by the same signals that influence all readers: reviews, media coverage, word of mouth, the reputation of the imprint.

I have served on one prize jury (for a small regional award, nothing prestigious) and the experience was eye-opening. The stack of submitted books was enormous. No one on the jury read every submission cover to cover. We all made triage decisions based on first pages, author bios, and publisher reputations. The books that got the fullest readings were the ones that had already accumulated some external validation: strong reviews, a recognizable author name, a publisher known for quality. The books from unknown publishers with no reviews and no blurbs were at a structural disadvantage before the jury opened them.

This is not a complaint. It is simply a description of how the system works. And understanding how the system works is important for publishers making decisions about where to invest their limited prize-submission budgets.

Our Strategy

Given all of this, here is how we approach prize submissions at ScrollWorks.

We are selective about which prizes we target. We do not submit every title to every available prize. Instead, we identify the two or three prizes that are the best fit for each title based on genre, theme, and the aesthetic preferences of recent juries. This means doing our homework: reading the last five years of winners and shortlisted titles to understand what each prize tends to reward. A prize that consistently honors formally experimental fiction is probably not the right venue for a straightforward literary novel, regardless of how good it is.

We invest more heavily in the submission itself than in the entry fees. A thoughtful cover letter that explains why this particular book is right for this particular prize is more valuable than paying the entry fee for five additional prizes. Judges respond to publishers who demonstrate genuine engagement with the prize’s mission and history.

We try to build relationships with the prize ecosystem over time rather than treating each submission as a one-off transaction. This means attending award ceremonies when our titles are recognized, even at the longlist level. It means nominating judges when we are asked for suggestions. It means reviewing and promoting prize-winning books from other publishers. The literary prize world is a community, and being a good citizen of that community pays dividends over time.

We are honest with our authors about the odds. When I tell an author that we are submitting their book for a prize, I also tell them the statistical likelihood of recognition. I do not want them to expect a shortlisting and be crushed when it does not happen. Managing expectations is one of the most important things a publisher can do for an author’s emotional health and long-term career satisfaction.

The Bigger Picture

I think literary prizes perform a genuine service for the reading public. In a world of overwhelming choice, they function as curated recommendations from people who have read deeply and widely. A prize shortlist is, at its best, a list of books that have been tested against rigorous standards by thoughtful readers. That has real value for the ordinary reader trying to decide what to read next.

But I also think the prize system has structural problems that the industry is reluctant to address. The entry fee model transfers cost from the prize organization to the publishers, which disproportionately burdens small presses. The judging process favors books with existing visibility, which reinforces the advantages of large publishers. The winner-take-all dynamic means that the gap between the winner and the shortlisted titles, in terms of sales impact, is enormous, even though the quality difference is often negligible.

Some of these problems have straightforward solutions. Entry fees could be scaled to publisher size. Blind judging, where the publisher’s identity is concealed, could reduce bias. Prizes could share sales data to help publishers make more informed submission decisions. Whether any of these reforms will actually happen is another question. The prize system has powerful incumbents who benefit from the current structure and little incentive to change it.

What Prizes Mean to Authors

I have been talking about prizes primarily from the publisher’s perspective, but I should also say something about what they mean to authors, because the emotional dimension is at least as important as the financial one.

For most literary authors, especially those who are not bestsellers, writing is a lonely and largely unacknowledged activity. You spend years working on a book. You publish it. A few hundred or a few thousand people read it. Some of them write kind reviews. Most of them say nothing. You go back to your desk and start the next book, wondering if anyone noticed the first one.

A prize nomination, even a longlisting, breaks that isolation. It says: someone read your book carefully, compared it to the best work published this year, and decided it belonged in that company. For an author who has been working in relative obscurity, that recognition can be profoundly sustaining. I have had authors tell me that a longlisting gave them the confidence to finish their next book, that it validated years of work in a way that sales numbers alone could not.

This emotional value is real and it matters to me as a publisher. Part of my job is supporting authors through the long, unglamorous middle of their careers, and prizes are one of the few external sources of encouragement that the literary world provides. Even when the financial return is negligible, the human return can be significant.

In the meantime, small publishers like us will continue to play the game, submitting our best titles, hoping for recognition, and trying to extract maximum value from whatever attention comes our way. It is an imperfect system, but it is the one we have. And occasionally, against the odds, one of our books will find its way to a longlist or a shortlist, and the phone will ring a little more often, and we will sell a few more copies, and someone somewhere will discover a book they would not have found otherwise. That is worth $600 to me. Most years, it is worth even more.

Every title in our catalog, whether it is The Last Archive or Still Waters, represents a bet that good writing will eventually find its audience. Prizes are one mechanism for accelerating that discovery, and despite their peculiar economics, I remain convinced they are worth pursuing.

I launched my first book at an event in a borrowed gallery space on a Tuesday evening in March. It rained. The wine was cheap. Seventeen people came, and five of them were family. The author read for nine minutes, took two questions, and we sold eleven copies. I went home thinking it had been a catastrophe.

It was not a catastrophe. It was a perfectly normal book launch. I just did not know that yet.

In the years since, I have organized or attended dozens of book launches, and I have learned that the gap between expectations and reality is the single most dangerous thing about them. Authors imagine packed rooms and rapturous applause. Publishers imagine media coverage and immediate sales spikes. What actually happens is almost always smaller, messier, and more human than either party anticipated. The trick is not to make the launch perfect. It is to survive it with your sanity, your relationships, and your enthusiasm for the book intact.

Before the Launch: Managing Your Own Expectations

The most important work of a book launch happens in your own head, weeks before the event itself. You need to calibrate your expectations to something resembling reality, because if you go in expecting a triumph, almost anything that actually happens will feel like a failure.

Here are some realistic benchmarks for a first-time or mid-career author launching with a small to mid-size publisher. Attendance at a launch event in a bookstore or gallery will typically be between 15 and 40 people, assuming good weather and no competing events. About half of them will buy a book. Reviews, if they come at all, will appear two to eight weeks after publication, not on launch day. Social media mentions will be sporadic and largely from people you already know. Sales in the first week will not tell you anything meaningful about the book’s long-term performance.

These numbers are not depressing. They are normal. Most books, even very successful ones, have modest launches. The launch is the beginning of a book’s public life, not its culmination. Thinking of it as the beginning helps enormously with managing the emotional rollercoaster.

I tell our authors three things before every launch. First, the size of the crowd does not determine the value of the book. Second, the most important person at the launch is not the person who writes a review; it is the person who reads the book, loves it, and tells their friends. You will probably not know who that person is on launch night. Third, the launch is a celebration, not a judgment. You wrote a book. It exists in the world. That is worth celebrating regardless of how many people show up.

The Logistics Nobody Warns You About

Let me talk about the practical side of putting a launch together, because there are a surprising number of things that can go wrong if you do not think them through in advance.

Venue selection is more complicated than it seems. A bookstore is the obvious choice, and it is usually the best one, because the bookstore has a built-in audience, a point-of-sale system, and staff who know how to run events. But not all bookstores are equally good at events. Some have dedicated event spaces with chairs and a microphone. Others will clear a corner and expect you to project from your diaphragm. Before committing to a venue, visit it during a similar event and assess the acoustics, the seating, and the sight lines.

If you are doing the event at a non-bookstore venue (a gallery, a bar, a community center), you need to figure out book sales logistics. Who is handling the money? Do you need a card reader? How many copies should you bring? (I recommend bringing 20% more than you think you will sell. Running out of copies at your own launch is a terrible feeling.) Who is going to set up the table and arrange the books? These details seem trivial until the evening of the event when you realize nobody thought about them.

Audio equipment matters more than you think. A room that seems small enough for unamplified speech is often too large once it is full of people who are chatting, shifting in their chairs, and knocking over wine glasses. If the venue has a microphone, use it. If it does not, consider bringing a portable PA system. I have watched too many readings derailed by authors straining to be heard over ambient noise. It does not matter how beautiful your prose is if the back half of the room cannot hear it.

Timing is important. Weekday evenings, Tuesday through Thursday, between 7:00 and 7:30 PM tend to work best in my experience. Monday is too early in the week; Friday and weekends have too much competition from other social activities. Start on time, even if the room is not full. Latecomers will filter in. Waiting for a larger crowd to materialize is awkward for everyone already there.

Have a plan for the reading itself. I recommend that authors read for no more than 15 minutes. This is shorter than most authors want to read, and I understand the temptation to share more, but 15 minutes is the sweet spot. Long enough to give the audience a real taste of the book. Short enough that attention does not wander. Choose a passage that works as a standalone excerpt, one that does not require extensive context to appreciate. Avoid passages with heavy dialogue (hard to follow in a reading) and passages that depend on earlier plot developments (confusing for new readers).

The Social Performance

A book launch is, among other things, a social event, and social events require social skills that many writers, who chose this profession partly because it allows them to work alone, do not naturally possess.

Here is what I have learned about the social dynamics of launch events.

The author is the host, not the guest of honor. This is a counterintuitive mindset shift, but it makes a huge difference. If you think of yourself as the guest of honor, you stand awkwardly waiting for people to come to you, interpreting every moment of being alone as a sign that nobody cares. If you think of yourself as the host, you circulate, you introduce people to each other, you thank everyone for coming, and you make sure people are having a good time. The host mindset keeps you active and engaged instead of passive and anxious.

Have a friend or partner designated as your “handler.” This person’s job is to rescue you from long conversations when you need to circulate, to make sure you eat something (authors often forget to eat at their own launches), to replenish drinks, and to subtly herd people toward the book-selling table at appropriate moments. A good handler is worth more than a publicist on launch night.

Prepare for the question-and-answer session. Most audiences are initially reluctant to ask questions. The silence after “Any questions?” can feel interminable. I recommend planting one or two questions with friends in the audience, not fake questions but genuine ones that you have discussed in advance. This breaks the ice and gives others permission to speak up. Also, prepare answers for the three most common questions: “Where did you get the idea for this book?”, “How long did it take to write?”, and “Are the characters based on real people?” You will get asked at least one of these at every launch for the rest of your career.

The signing line is important. Even if only six people want their copies signed, the act of sitting at a table and personalizing books creates a moment of genuine connection between author and reader. Do not rush it. Ask each person their name. Ask if they want a personalization or just a signature. Make eye contact. These small interactions are often the most rewarding part of the entire evening.

The Week After

The week after a book launch is, in my experience, the hardest week of the entire publishing process. The adrenaline has worn off. The sales numbers are trickling in and they are almost certainly lower than you hoped. The reviews have not appeared yet. You are checking your sales dashboard obsessively and refreshing your mentions on social media every thirty minutes.

Stop it. I mean this sincerely. Step away from the dashboard.

First-week sales are a poor predictor of a book’s long-term performance. Some books that sell briskly in the first week fade quickly. Some books that start slowly build momentum over months and years. At ScrollWorks, some of our best-selling titles had unremarkable launches. They found their audience gradually, through word of mouth, course adoptions, and belated reviews.

What you should be doing in the week after launch is writing thank-you notes. Email every person who attended. Thank the bookstore or venue. Thank anyone who posted about the event on social media. Thank your editor, your agent (if you have one), your publicist, and your family. Gratitude is not just good manners; it is good publishing strategy. The people you thank today are the people who will show up for your next book.

You should also be scheduling your next batch of promotional activities. The launch is not the end of promotion; it is the starting gun. Guest posts, podcast appearances, bookstore visits, festival panels: these should be lined up for the weeks and months following publication. A book launch without follow-up promotion is like a firework. Bright for a moment, then dark.

What I Wish I Had Known

Looking back at that first launch, the rainy Tuesday with seventeen people, I wish someone had told me a few things that I had to learn the hard way.

I wish someone had told me that the people who come to a book launch are almost all people who already care about the author. They are friends, family, colleagues, and existing fans. You are not converting strangers at a launch event. You are rewarding the people who already believe in you. Treat them accordingly.

I wish someone had told me that the media is not watching. Unless you are already famous or your book is generating controversy, no reporter is going to cover your launch. This is not a failure of your publicity plan. It is simply the reality of how media attention works in 2021. Your launch is important to you. It is not news to anyone else. And that is okay.

I wish someone had told me that the best launches are the ones that feel like parties, not performances. The readings I remember most fondly are the ones where the author was relaxed, the audience was enjoying themselves, and the book felt like an excuse for people who love reading to be in the same room together. The worst launches are the ones that feel like an obligation, where everyone is performing their roles (author reads, audience claps, everyone goes home) without any genuine human connection.

I wish someone had told me that it is okay to feel deflated afterward. Every author I know, even ones with very successful launches, experiences a post-launch emotional dip. You have spent months or years building toward this moment, and then it passes in two hours, and life goes on. That is a loss, even when everything goes well. Give yourself permission to feel it, and then start thinking about what comes next.

The Long Game After Launch Night

One thing I want to stress, because it took me years to internalize, is that the launch event is perhaps the least important part of a book’s commercial life. The books that sell well over time, the ones that are still generating royalty payments five years later, are not the ones that had the best launch parties. They are the ones that benefited from sustained, patient effort in the months after publication.

This means continuing to pitch the book to reviewers and bloggers weeks after the publication date. It means looking for course adoption opportunities at universities. It means reaching out to book clubs through local bookstores and libraries. It means being alert to news hooks and cultural moments that create an opening for the book to be relevant in new conversations. A novel about immigration might find a second life when an immigration story dominates the news. A memoir about illness might resonate newly during a public health discussion. These opportunities are unpredictable, but you can only seize them if you are paying attention.

The authors who handle the post-launch period best are the ones who shift their mindset from “performing” to “connecting.” Instead of big public events, they focus on small, personal interactions: responding to reader emails, engaging thoughtfully on social media, showing up at local bookstore events as an audience member rather than a presenter. These small acts of literary citizenship build the kind of grassroots support that no publicity campaign can manufacture.

We have been through this cycle many times now with our authors at ScrollWorks, whether launching The Last Archive or The Cartographer’s Dilemma. The advice I give to every one of them is the same: lower your expectations, raise your energy, thank everyone, and remember that the launch is chapter one of your book’s public life, not the whole story. The best is almost always yet to come.

I have been thinking a lot about literary communities lately, partly because I live in one and partly because I have visited several that felt hollow in ways I could not immediately identify. The difference between a literary community that works and one that does not is surprisingly subtle. From the outside, they can look identical: readings, bookstores, writing groups, small magazines, a few local publishers. All the right ingredients. But some of these communities produce remarkable work and support their members through long careers, while others remain inert collections of people who happen to live in the same city and write.

I have been trying to figure out what separates the two, and I think I have identified some patterns. These are not universal rules. Every community is shaped by its specific geography, demographics, and history. But there are common features that seem to distinguish the literary communities I admire from the ones that left me cold.

Real Institutions, Not Just Events

The first thing I notice about strong literary communities is that they have institutions with continuity. Not just events that happen once and vanish, but organizations that persist over years and decades, building relationships and institutional memory.

A reading series that has run monthly for fifteen years is qualitatively different from a reading series in its first season, even if the individual events are similar in format. The long-running series has a reputation. Local writers aspire to read there. Audience members have the habit of attending. The organizer knows which pairings of readers work and which do not. There is a history that newcomers can plug into rather than having to build everything from scratch.

The same goes for bookstores, literary magazines, writing groups, and publishers. When these institutions persist over time, they create scaffolding that individual writers can lean on. A writer moving to a city with a strong independent bookstore, two established reading series, a respected literary magazine, and a few small publishers is entering an ecosystem that can support their career. A writer moving to a city where none of these things exist, or where they keep appearing and disappearing, faces a much lonelier path.

This means that one of the most valuable things anyone can do for a literary community is to keep showing up. Running a reading series for one season is nice. Running it for ten years is transformative. Publishing three issues of a magazine and then burning out is understandable. Publishing thirty issues over a decade is community infrastructure. Persistence is unsexy but it is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Genuine Cross-Pollination

The literary communities I admire most are the ones where people read across genre and form. Where the poets go to the fiction readings and the fiction writers read the poetry magazine. Where the nonfiction writers attend the playwriting workshops and the playwrights buy the essay collections.

This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly rare. In most cities, the literary community is actually several separate communities organized by genre, and they overlap less than you might expect. The poetry people know each other. The fiction people know each other. The literary journalists know each other. But the three groups rarely interact in meaningful ways.

When they do interact, interesting things happen. Poets who read fiction develop an appreciation for narrative momentum that can energize their own work. Fiction writers who read poetry develop an ear for language that makes their prose more precise. Nonfiction writers who attend fiction workshops absorb techniques for scene-building and character development that enliven their reportage.

The communities that facilitate this cross-pollination tend to do it through mixed-genre events and publications. A reading series that pairs a poet with a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer for each event forces audience members to encounter work they might not seek out on their own. A literary magazine that publishes all three forms in every issue creates a shared cultural reference point that transcends genre silos.

I think small publishers can play a role here, too. At ScrollWorks, we try to publish across categories rather than specializing narrowly. Our list includes fiction like Echoes of Iron alongside more research-intensive works like The Cartographer’s Dilemma. This range reflects our belief that good writing is good writing regardless of genre, and that a publisher’s catalog should encourage readers to explore forms they might not have tried otherwise.

A Culture of Honest Feedback

Here is where things get uncomfortable. The literary communities that produce the best work are the ones where people tell each other the truth about their writing. Not cruelly. Not competitively. But honestly.

Many writing communities develop a culture of reflexive praise. Every reading is “amazing.” Every draft is “really strong.” Every effort is met with encouragement and affirmation. This feels good. It also stunts growth. A writer who only receives praise has no idea what is not working in their manuscript. They submit to publishers and get rejected and have no understanding of why, because everyone in their community told them the work was great.

The best writing groups I have been part of were the ones where members were genuinely rigorous with each other. Where someone would say, “This chapter loses momentum after the second scene” or “The narrator’s voice is inconsistent between sections” or “I do not believe this character’s motivation.” These comments sting in the moment, but they are worth more than a hundred “I loved it” responses because they give the writer something to work with.

Building this kind of honest culture requires trust, and trust requires time. You cannot walk into a new writing group and start delivering harsh critiques. You have to earn the right to be honest by first demonstrating that you are paying close attention to the work, that your feedback is specific and constructive, and that you are motivated by a desire to help the writer succeed rather than a desire to demonstrate your own critical acumen.

The communities that manage this balance well tend to have norms, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, about how feedback is delivered. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop famously requires the author to remain silent while the group discusses their work. This prevents the author from defending or explaining, which forces the feedback to stand on its own merits. Other groups use a “praise first, then concerns” structure that softens the delivery without diluting the content. The specific format matters less than the underlying commitment to taking the work seriously enough to engage with it critically.

Economic Support Structures

Let me talk about money, because literary communities that ignore economics tend to be communities that only serve people who can afford to write for free.

The most vibrant literary communities I know have found ways to put money into writers’ pockets. Not large amounts, usually. But consistent, meaningful support that acknowledges writing as labor deserving compensation.

This takes many forms. Literary magazines that pay contributors, even modestly, signal that the work has value and that the community respects the time writers invest. Reading series that offer honorariums tell writers that their presence is worth more than exposure. Residency programs that provide free housing and a stipend give writers the time and space they need to complete projects. Grants from local arts councils and foundations, when they are accessible and well-administered, can be the difference between a writer finishing a book and abandoning it.

I am realistic about the limits of what a small literary community can afford. Most literary magazines operate on shoestring budgets. Most reading series are organized by volunteers. I am not demanding that every community pay professional rates. What I am saying is that the question “How do we get money to writers?” should be a central question for any literary community, not an afterthought. And the communities that take this question seriously tend to be more diverse, more productive, and more sustainable than the ones that rely entirely on the goodwill and financial privilege of their members.

Libraries play a role here that I think is underappreciated. A good public library with an active programming budget can anchor a literary community in ways that no other institution can. Libraries provide free meeting space, audience development, and institutional credibility. A library that hosts writing workshops, reading groups, and author visits is doing more for its local literary community than most people realize.

Welcoming Newcomers Without Losing Identity

Every community faces a tension between welcoming new members and maintaining its character. Literary communities are no exception.

I have seen communities that are so insular that newcomers cannot break in. The same twenty people attend every event. The same six people get published in the local magazine. Everyone knows everyone, and the social dynamics are so established that a new writer feels like an intruder. These communities can produce good work, for a while, but they eventually stagnate because they are not absorbing new influences and energy.

I have also seen communities that are so open that they have no character at all. Every event is a mix of people who do not know each other and have no shared aesthetic commitments. There is no sense of purpose or direction. Anyone can show up and read anything, which sounds democratic but in practice means that the quality is inconsistent and the audience never knows what to expect.

The best communities find a middle path. They have a clear identity, a particular aesthetic sensibility, a set of values, a mission, but they also actively seek out and welcome people who share those commitments. They are selective about quality but not about credentials. They care about the work more than the resume.

Practically, this means having clear points of entry for newcomers. An open-submission magazine that responds promptly and respectfully to every submission. A reading series that reserves slots for emerging writers alongside established ones. A writing group that periodically opens its membership. A publisher that reads unsolicited manuscripts with genuine attention. Each of these is a door that a new writer can walk through, and the community’s willingness to keep those doors open determines whether it will renew itself or slowly calcify.

The Role of Argument

This might be my most controversial opinion about literary communities: the best ones argue. Not about personal grievances or petty politics, but about literature itself. About what is good and what is not. About what writing should be trying to do in this particular moment. About which traditions are worth carrying forward and which should be challenged.

A community where everyone agrees about everything is a community where nobody is thinking very hard. The most generative literary periods in history were characterized by fierce aesthetic disagreements. The modernists argued with the traditionalists. The realists argued with the experimentalists. The New York School poets argued with the Beats. These arguments were not obstacles to good work. They were the fuel for it.

I am not advocating for toxicity or personal attacks. I am advocating for taking literature seriously enough to disagree about it. When someone says, “I think the novel is dead,” and someone else says, “I think the novel has never been more alive,” and they sit down together over drinks and argue about it with passion and evidence and mutual respect, that is the kind of conversation that sharpens everyone involved. It forces people to examine their assumptions. It generates ideas. It produces the creative friction that keeps a community intellectually alive.

The communities I have found most valuable are the ones where I have had my mind changed. Where I walked in believing one thing about writing and walked out believing something different because someone made a compelling argument I had not considered. That kind of intellectual generosity, the willingness to engage with ideas you disagree with, is rare and precious. It is also, I believe, the ultimate test of a literary community’s health.

What I love about the community of readers and writers we have built around ScrollWorks is that people bring genuine passion to their opinions about books. When we publish something like Still Waters, the conversations it generates among readers are often more interesting than anything a professional reviewer might write. Those conversations, the agreements and the disagreements, are exactly what a literary community is for.