Last week, a literary agent emailed to ask if we would be interested in a novel she was shopping. She said several other publishers had already made offers and she needed our response within 48 hours. I said no. Not because the book was bad. I had not read it yet. I said no because 48 hours is not enough time to decide whether to publish a book, and any process that requires that speed is, in my opinion, a process that is designed to produce bad decisions.

This is not a popular position. Speed is highly valued in modern publishing, as it is in most industries. Publishers compete to acquire books quickly. They compress editorial timelines to get titles to market faster. They rush through production to capitalize on trends before they fade. The assumption underlying all of this haste is that faster is better, that the publisher who moves quickest wins.

I think this assumption is wrong, and I want to make the case for slowness.

How Speed Warps Acquisitions

The acquisitions process is where speed does the most damage. When a publisher has 48 hours to decide on a manuscript, what actually happens?

Nobody reads the full manuscript in 48 hours. Not with the attention it deserves, not alongside their other responsibilities. What happens instead is that someone reads the first fifty pages and the proposal, skims the rest, and makes a decision based on a partial reading plus a market judgment: “Is this the kind of book that is selling right now? Does the author have a platform? Can we position this against comparable titles?” These are legitimate considerations, but they are not the same as “Is this a good book?”

The acquisitions decisions I regret most are the ones I made quickly. In one case, I acquired a novel based on a partial read and enthusiasm from a colleague, only to discover during editing that the second half had structural problems that would require months of revision. The book was eventually published and it was fine, but it would have been better if I had taken the time to read the full manuscript before committing. In another case, I passed on a book because I was not persuaded by the first three chapters, and the book went on to win a major prize. If I had read the entire manuscript, which gets dramatically better after those opening chapters, I would have made a different decision.

Speed favors certain kinds of books over others. Books with strong openings and clear commercial hooks are advantaged in a fast acquisitions process because they are easy to evaluate quickly. Books that are slower to reveal their qualities, that require patience and full engagement, are disadvantaged. This means that the acceleration of the acquisitions process systematically biases publishing toward the accessible and the immediately gratifying, and against the complex, the unusual, and the slow-burning.

I do not think this is a theoretical concern. I think it helps explain why so much of what major publishers release feels similar. When acquisitions decisions are made quickly, they are made based on pattern recognition: “This is like Book X, which sold well.” Pattern recognition favors the familiar. It penalizes the original. The result is a publishing list that is optimized for short-term sales but depleted of the kinds of surprising, challenging books that give a publisher its identity over time.

The Editorial Rush

Speed pressure does not end at acquisition. It continues through the editorial process, often with even more damaging results.

A book that needs two years of editing gets eighteen months. A book that needs eighteen months gets twelve. The author is pushed to revise faster because the publication date has been set based on a catalog deadline rather than on when the book will actually be ready. I have seen books published with revision notes still outstanding because the production schedule could not accommodate another round. I have seen authors sign off on galleys they were not satisfied with because the printer had already been booked.

At ScrollWorks, we try to set publication dates based on when the book will be finished, not when the catalog needs to be filled. This is easier for a small publisher than a large one, because we do not have a fixed number of catalog slots to fill each season. But it requires constant vigilance against the creeping pressure to move faster.

I worked on The Last Archive for an editorial period that would have been unthinkable at a major publisher. We went through multiple rounds of structural revision, followed by line editing, followed by two rounds of copyediting. Each round was followed by a pause, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, during which the author lived with the changes and came back with fresh eyes. That pause time is, I believe, one of the most valuable things a publisher can give an author. It is the time during which the author’s unconscious mind works on problems that the conscious mind has not yet identified. It cannot be compressed without cost.

The difference between a book that was rushed through editing and one that was given adequate time is not always apparent on first reading. But it accumulates. The rushed book has passages that almost work but do not quite land. It has character arcs that feel slightly forced. It has a climax that arrives too quickly or a resolution that feels unearned. The patient book has none of these problems, or rather, it had all of them at some point during the editing process, but the author had time to identify and fix them.

Production Quality and Time

The physical production of a book is another area where speed and quality are in direct tension.

Cover design is the most visible example. A good cover design typically requires the designer to read the manuscript (or at least a substantial portion of it), develop several concepts, present them for feedback, revise the chosen concept, and produce final artwork. This process takes six to twelve weeks if done properly. I have seen publishers compress it to two weeks, and the results are almost always generic. You get a cover that is competent but not distinctive, one that looks like fifty other covers in the same genre because the designer did not have time to find what makes this particular book unique.

Interior layout and typesetting also suffer under time pressure. A careful typesetter will adjust word spacing, fix awkward hyphenation breaks, ensure consistent treatment of special characters, and attend to the dozens of other small details that distinguish a well-made book from a merely adequate one. These details are invisible when done well, which is exactly why they are the first things to be cut when the schedule is tight. Nobody notices that the word spacing is slightly uneven on page 147. But the cumulative effect of hundreds of such small compromises is a book that feels cheap, even if you cannot articulate why.

Proofreading is another casualty of speed. A thorough proofread requires reading the entire typeset book at least twice, ideally by two different proofreaders. This catches not only typos but also formatting inconsistencies, orphaned lines, bad page breaks, and other layout errors that the typesetter might have introduced. A compressed schedule often reduces this to a single read by a single proofreader, and the error rate in the finished book increases accordingly.

The Marketing Paradox

Here is an irony that the speed advocates should consider: rushing a book to market often reduces its marketing effectiveness.

Effective book marketing requires lead time. Review copies need to go out four to six months before publication. Bookstore events need to be scheduled two to three months in advance. Media contacts need time to read the book, pitch it internally, and schedule coverage. Course adoptions, which can provide steady long-term sales, often operate on a semester-ahead timeline.

When a publisher compresses the production schedule, the marketing window shrinks correspondingly. There is less time to send advance copies, less time to cultivate media interest, less time to set up events. The book arrives in stores with less pre-publication buzz and fewer reviews than it would have had with a longer lead time. The publisher traded marketing effectiveness for production speed, and the book’s sales suffer as a result.

I have watched this dynamic play out repeatedly with books from other publishers. A novel that would have benefited from a long, slow marketing build is rushed to market to hit a seasonal deadline or capitalize on a trend, and it lands with a thud because nobody outside the publisher’s office has heard of it. Meanwhile, a competing title from a publisher that took its time, that sent advance copies six months out, that scheduled the author for a festival appearance, that cultivated a relationship with a key reviewer, sells steadily because the groundwork was laid properly.

The Cultural Cost

Beyond the practical arguments, I think there is a cultural cost to speed in publishing that is worth considering.

Books are supposed to be repositories of deep thought. They are the medium we turn to when we want someone to explain something complex, to tell a story with nuance, to make an argument with full supporting evidence. The book format exists precisely because some ideas cannot be compressed into a tweet or an article. They need the room that only a book provides.

When the production of books is rushed, we undermine this fundamental purpose. We are saying, in effect, that the medium dedicated to deep thought should be produced with shallow process. There is a contradiction there that I find deeply uncomfortable. If we believe that books matter because they contain ideas and stories that took time to develop, then we should also believe that the process of making those books available to readers should be given adequate time. Anything less is a betrayal of what books are for.

I am aware that this sounds idealistic. I am aware that market pressures are real and that publishers, especially small ones, need cash flow and cannot afford to sit on finished manuscripts indefinitely. I am not arguing for unlimited timelines. I am arguing for sufficient ones. And “sufficient” almost always means longer than the current industry standard.

At ScrollWorks, we have made slowness a deliberate part of our identity. We publish fewer titles than a publisher of our size could. We take longer between acquisition and publication. We give our authors more time for revision and ourselves more time for production. This costs us in market share and revenue. It earns us, I believe, in the quality of the books we produce and in the relationships we build with authors who value careful stewardship over rapid distribution.

What Slowness Looks Like in Practice

Let me be concrete about what our slower timeline actually involves, because “we take more time” is vague and could mean anything from slight delays to indefinite procrastination.

Our typical timeline from acquisition to publication is eighteen to twenty-four months. At a major publisher, the equivalent timeline is often twelve to fifteen months, sometimes less for time-sensitive titles. The extra months in our schedule are not padding. They are allocated to specific stages of the process. We give authors three to four months for a first structural revision where a faster publisher might allow six to eight weeks. We allow two months for cover design iteration where others might allow three weeks. We build in a one-month buffer between the final proofread and the print date, so that last-minute corrections can be incorporated without panic.

Each of these extra increments is modest on its own. But they add up to a fundamentally different experience for the author and a measurably different quality of finished product. Our authors do not feel rushed. They have time to sit with editorial feedback, to let it work on them before responding. They are not making revision decisions at midnight before a deadline. They are making them thoughtfully, over weeks, with the benefit of distance and reflection.

Every book in our catalog, from Still Waters to Echoes of Iron, has benefited from this philosophy. They are better books than they would have been under a faster timeline. That is not a claim I can prove with sales data. It is a judgment based on my experience of what these manuscripts looked like when they arrived and what they looked like when they were published. The difference, in every case, was time.

I went back to that agent and explained our process. She was understanding, if not enthusiastic. The book went to another publisher. I do not know if they made it better or worse than we would have. What I know is that we would have given it the time it needed, and in publishing, time is the one thing you can never get back once you have given it away.

Making predictions is a fool’s errand. I am going to do it anyway, because we are at the start of a new decade and the publishing industry is changing fast enough that even a fool’s guesses might be useful as a starting point for conversation. These are my best assessments of where books and publishing are headed over the next ten years. Some of them will be spectacularly wrong. I am okay with that.

The Consolidation Will Continue, Then Reverse

The trend toward consolidation in publishing, which has been underway for decades, will continue for the first half of this decade. The big five will likely become the big four, possibly the big three. Corporate owners will continue seeking efficiency through mergers, and imprints that do not hit profit targets will be folded into larger ones or shut down entirely.

But I think the second half of the decade will see the beginning of a counter-trend. As the major publishers become fewer and larger, they will become more risk-averse and more focused on guaranteed sellers: celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors, books tied to existing media properties. This will create a growing space for smaller publishers to occupy, because the authors and readers who are underserved by the major houses will need somewhere to go.

I am already seeing signs of this. More literary agents are approaching small publishers with manuscripts that the big houses declined, not because the manuscripts were bad but because they did not fit the increasingly narrow commercial profile that large publishers require. Ten years ago, many of these books would have been published by mid-tier imprints within the major houses. Those imprints are disappearing, and the books they would have published are becoming available to independents like us.

The opportunity for small publishers in the coming decade is enormous, if we can solve the distribution and discoverability problems that have always constrained us. More on that below.

Audio Will Become a Primary Format, Not a Secondary One

Audiobooks have been the fastest-growing segment of the book market for several years, and I see no reason for this trend to slow down. But I think something more fundamental is going to change: audio will stop being treated as a derivative format and start being treated as a primary one.

Right now, audiobooks are produced after the text is finalized. The text comes first, and the audio version is an adaptation. I predict that within ten years, many publishers will be commissioning audio and text simultaneously, with some authors writing directly for audio performance and having their work transcribed to text rather than the other way around.

This is not as radical as it sounds. For most of human history, stories were primarily oral. The written-text-first model is a relatively recent development. The technology of recorded audio makes it possible to return to an oral tradition while preserving the permanence that writing provides. I think many authors, particularly memoirists and nonfiction writers, will find that speaking their books produces a more natural, engaging voice than writing them.

For publishers, this shift will require new skills. Audio production is a different craft from book production, and most publishers, including us at ScrollWorks, currently outsource it entirely. I expect that by 2030, audio production will be an in-house capability for any serious publisher.

Direct-to-Reader Sales Will Grow Significantly

The dominance of Amazon and other large retailers has been the defining distribution reality for publishers over the past fifteen years. I think the next decade will see a meaningful shift toward direct-to-reader sales, driven by both technology and economics.

The technology part is straightforward. Platforms for building direct sales channels have become cheap and easy to use. Services like Shopify and Bookshop.org have made it possible for even tiny publishers to sell directly to readers with professional-quality storefronts and fulfillment. The friction of buying directly from a publisher has dropped dramatically and will continue to drop.

The economics part is more interesting. When a publisher sells through a retailer, the retailer takes 40-55% of the cover price. When a publisher sells directly, they keep all of it, minus payment processing and shipping. For a small publisher with thin margins, the difference between a 45% margin and a 90% margin is the difference between struggling and thriving. As more publishers realize this, and as the tools for direct sales continue to improve, I expect to see a significant migration of sales toward publisher-owned channels.

This does not mean bookstores will disappear. Independent bookstores, in particular, provide something that no online channel can replicate: curation, community, and the serendipity of physical browsing. I think bookstores and direct sales will coexist, with bookstores serving as discovery engines and direct sales serving readers who already know what they want.

The Subscription Model Will Find Its Niche

Every few years, someone launches a new book subscription service and declares it the future of publishing. Most of these services fail within a few years. I think the model itself is sound but the execution has been wrong, and I expect someone to get it right in this decade.

The problem with most book subscription services is that they try to be Netflix for books, offering unlimited access to a vast catalog for a flat monthly fee. This model does not work well for books because the economics are different. A movie or TV show has high production costs but near-zero marginal distribution costs. A book has moderate production costs but non-trivial marginal costs, especially for physical copies. The Netflix model requires massive scale to work, and the book market is not massive enough.

What I think will work is smaller, more curated subscription services tied to specific publishers or communities. Imagine a subscription where you pay $20 per month and receive one new title from a small publisher you trust, along with access to exclusive essays, author conversations, and early readings. This model works because it is built on a relationship between the publisher and the reader rather than on brute-force catalog size. It also works economically because the publisher controls the margins and the selection.

We have been experimenting with something like this at ScrollWorks, on a very small scale, and the early results are encouraging. Readers who opt in report feeling more connected to our publishing program and more excited about receiving new titles. The economics are favorable because we eliminate the retailer margin and reduce return rates to nearly zero.

Literary Fiction Will Survive, but Its Business Model Will Change

I hear a lot of doom-and-gloom about literary fiction. Sales are declining. The audience is aging. Young readers prefer genre fiction or nonfiction. I think these concerns are partially valid but mostly overstated.

Literary fiction sales have indeed declined as a percentage of the overall book market. But the overall market has grown, so the absolute number of literary fiction readers has remained relatively stable. What has changed is that literary fiction’s share of publisher attention and resources has shrunk, because publishers are chasing the higher returns available in other categories. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: publishers invest less in literary fiction, literary fiction gets less visibility, literary fiction sells less, publishers invest even less.

I think the way out of this cycle is for literary fiction to develop a different business model than the one it currently relies on. The current model, where literary fiction is subsidized by the commercial fiction and nonfiction that pay the bills at major publishers, is unstable and getting more so. The alternative is for literary fiction to be published by smaller houses that are built specifically around it, with cost structures and revenue models that make sense for the actual size of the audience.

This is essentially what ScrollWorks and many other independent publishers are already doing. We publish literary fiction because we believe in it, and we have built a business that can sustain itself on the sales volumes that literary fiction actually generates, rather than the sales volumes that a major publisher would need to justify the investment. I expect more publishers to adopt this model over the coming decade.

Translation Will Have a Moment

Translated literature accounts for roughly 3% of books published in English, a number that has barely changed in decades. I think this decade will see that percentage increase meaningfully, though probably not dramatically.

Several forces are pushing in this direction. The international success of non-English-language media (Korean film, Scandinavian television, Japanese manga) has created an audience that is more receptive to non-English storytelling than previous generations. Translation prizes, particularly the International Booker, have raised the profile of translated fiction among English-language readers. And a new generation of translators, many of whom built their reputations through social media, are making the case for translated literature with an energy and visibility that the field has not had before.

For publishers, translation represents both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is access to an enormous global backlist of outstanding books that English-language readers have never encountered. The challenge is the cost. Translation is expensive, typically $5,000-15,000 per title, and translation rights negotiations add complexity to acquisitions. These costs are significant for small publishers, but they are increasingly offset by grants from cultural organizations in the source countries, many of which are eager to see their literature reach English-language audiences.

I expect ScrollWorks to publish more translated work in the coming years. It aligns with our mission to bring readers books they would not find otherwise, and the quality of work available in translation is extraordinary.

The Role of Physical Books Will Clarify

For the past decade, the book industry has been anxiously debating whether ebooks will replace physical books. I think this debate is essentially over, and the answer is: they will not. Ebook sales have plateaued at roughly 20-25% of the market, and physical book sales have stabilized or even grown slightly. The two formats have found their respective audiences and use cases.

What I expect to happen over the next decade is a clarification of the role of the physical book. As digital reading becomes more common and more convenient, the physical book will increasingly be valued for the qualities that make it different from a digital file: its materiality, its permanence, its design, its suitability as a gift, and its resistance to distraction. Publishers who invest in making beautiful physical objects, with thoughtful design, quality materials, and careful production, will be rewarded. Publishers who treat the physical book as merely a delivery mechanism for text, interchangeable with a digital file, will see their physical sales erode.

I think we will also see more experimentation with the physical form of the book. Special editions, illustrated editions, editions with unusual bindings or paper stocks, editions that are designed as objects to be displayed and collected as well as read. The collectors’ market for books has grown significantly in recent years, and I expect this trend to continue as the physical book is increasingly understood as a craft object rather than a commodity.

This is an area where small publishers have a natural advantage. We can produce small runs of beautifully made books that large publishers, with their need for standardized production at scale, cannot easily replicate. Our titles, from The Last Archive to The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are produced with a level of design attention that we consider part of the reading experience, not an afterthought.

The Wild Card: Community and Locality

One prediction I feel particularly strong about is that the next decade will see a resurgence of local and community-oriented publishing. The internet was supposed to make geography irrelevant, and for some purposes it has. But I think there is a growing appetite for books that are rooted in specific places and communities, books that speak to a particular readership rather than trying to appeal to everyone everywhere.

Small regional publishers, university presses, and community-based literary organizations are well-positioned to serve this appetite. They know their audiences. They have relationships with local booksellers and libraries. They can publish books that a New York-based publisher would consider too niche but that are exactly what a particular community needs and wants. I think this kind of localized publishing will grow as readers become more conscious of where their cultural products come from and more interested in supporting their own communities.

I will revisit these predictions periodically to see how badly I have embarrassed myself. I suspect I am wrong about at least half of them, but I am confident about the general direction: more decentralized, more relationship-driven, more attentive to quality, and more diverse in format and content than the publishing industry we have today. That is a future I am excited to be part of building.

Every September, I sit down with a spreadsheet of the upcoming year’s literary conferences, book fairs, and industry events, and I try to figure out which ones are worth attending. It is one of the more agonizing annual exercises at ScrollWorks, because the universe of possible events is large, our budget is small, and the return on investment for any given conference ranges from “transformative” to “complete waste of three days and two thousand dollars.”

Over the years, I have developed a framework for making these decisions that I think might be useful to other small publishers facing the same dilemma. It is not a formula. There is no formula for something this context-dependent. But there are questions I ask and criteria I weight that have helped me make better choices about where to spend our limited conference budget.

The Three Reasons to Attend a Conference

I think there are exactly three legitimate business reasons for a small publisher to attend a conference. Everything else is either a vacation disguised as a business trip or an obligation that you should question.

The first reason is acquisition. You go to the conference to find books to publish. This means meeting agents, meeting authors, and hearing about manuscripts that are available or forthcoming. For this purpose, the relevant conferences are the big trade events: BookExpo (when it existed), the Frankfurt Book Fair, the London Book Fair. These are the places where rights are traded, where agents have meetings stacked back-to-back, and where the deals that shape the next season’s lists are made.

The second reason is marketing. You go to the conference to sell or promote books you have already published. This means meeting booksellers, meeting reviewers, meeting librarians, and connecting with readers who might be interested in your titles. For this purpose, regional book festivals and reader-facing events are more useful than trade fairs. An author appearance at a well-attended literary festival can sell more copies than a month of online advertising.

The third reason is learning. You go to the conference to acquire knowledge or skills that will make you better at your job. This means attending panels, workshops, and presentations on topics relevant to your publishing program. For this purpose, specialized industry conferences, such as those organized by IBPA (the Independent Book Publishers Association) or PubWest, tend to be more valuable than large general events where the programming is spread thin across too many topics.

Before committing to any conference, I ask: which of these three purposes will this event primarily serve? If the answer is unclear, or if the event serves all three purposes equally and therefore none of them well, that is a warning sign.

The Cost Calculation Nobody Does

Most publishers, when evaluating conference attendance, think about the registration fee and maybe the travel costs. But the real cost of attending a conference is much higher than that, and I think failing to account for the full cost leads to bad decisions.

Here is how I calculate the true cost of a conference. Start with the obvious expenses: registration fee, airfare or mileage, hotel for however many nights, meals, ground transportation, and any booth or table fees if you are exhibiting. For a typical three-day industry conference in another city, these direct costs add up to $1,500-3,000 for a single attendee.

Now add the opportunity cost. Every day I spend at a conference is a day I am not spending on editing, acquisitions, marketing, or administration. For a small publisher where every team member wears multiple hats, this is significant. I estimate the opportunity cost of my time at a conference at roughly $300-500 per day, based on the revenue-generating work I am not doing. For a three-day conference, that is another $900-1,500.

Now add the preparation time. Before a conference, I typically spend one to two full days preparing: researching attendees I want to meet, scheduling meetings, preparing marketing materials, briefing our authors who will be attending, and organizing our booth or table display if we are exhibiting. That is another $300-1,000 in opportunity cost.

And finally, add the recovery time. After a conference, I typically need a day to process notes, follow up on contacts, and get back up to speed on the work that accumulated while I was away. Another $300-500.

When I add all of this up, the true cost of attending a typical three-day conference is somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000. For a small publisher with an annual revenue in the low six figures, that is a meaningful investment. It is the equivalent of a modest book advance, or half the cost of a print run, or the entire marketing budget for a title. Framing the decision in those terms makes it easier to be disciplined about which conferences are actually worth it.

What I Have Learned Works

Based on several years of trial and error, here are the types of events that have consistently delivered value for us, and the types that have not.

Regional literary festivals where our authors are speaking are almost always worth attending. The combination of a captive audience, a bookselling opportunity, and the chance to meet other publishers and booksellers in a relaxed setting produces consistent returns. Our best conference experiences have been at mid-size regional festivals where we had an author on a panel and a table in the exhibitor area. These events typically cost less than major trade fairs, the audiences are engaged and enthusiastic, and the networking is more personal because the event is small enough that you can actually talk to people.

The major international book fairs, Frankfurt and London, are worth attending once every two or three years if you are actively buying or selling translation rights. They are not worth attending annually unless rights trading is a major part of your business. The fairs are expensive, exhausting, and overwhelming, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low. I found that we got more out of Frankfurt when we attended every other year and prepared intensively for each visit than when we attended annually and treated it as routine.

Industry-specific workshops and seminars, particularly those offered by IBPA and similar organizations, have been consistently valuable for learning. A two-day workshop on digital marketing or distribution strategy often delivers more actionable knowledge than a week at a general conference. These events are also cheaper and less time-consuming, which makes the cost-benefit calculation more favorable.

General literary conferences where we are not exhibiting or presenting have almost never been worth the investment. Attending as a passive audience member at a conference like AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) is an interesting experience, but it does not generate enough business value to justify the cost. The event is too large, the programming is too diffuse, and the networking is too random. Unless I am speaking on a panel or hosting a reading, I skip AWP.

The Meetings Matter More Than the Program

The single most important thing I have learned about conferences is that the official program is usually less valuable than the meetings you schedule around it.

A panel discussion on “The Future of Independent Publishing” might be intellectually stimulating, but a thirty-minute coffee meeting with a bookseller who specializes in your category is worth more in practical terms. The panel gives you ideas. The meeting gives you a relationship. And in publishing, relationships are the primary currency.

Before every conference I attend, I make a list of the five to eight people I most want to meet. These might be agents who represent the kind of authors I am looking for, booksellers who stock titles similar to ours, reviewers who cover our genre, or other publishers with whom I want to explore partnerships. I email each of these people in advance and ask for a brief meeting during the conference. Most people say yes. The hit rate on these pre-scheduled meetings is much higher than the hit rate on random networking at conference receptions.

I also leave unscheduled time in my conference itinerary for serendipitous encounters. Some of my most valuable conference connections have been with people I met by chance in a coffee line or at a shared dinner table. If your schedule is packed back-to-back with panels and meetings, you have no time for these accidents, and you miss the unplanned conversations that are often the most generative.

My ideal conference schedule allocates about one-third of my time to pre-scheduled meetings, one-third to selected panels and presentations, and one-third to unstructured networking and exploration. This ratio has consistently produced the best results for me.

The Follow-Up Is Everything

Here is a confession: for the first two years of running ScrollWorks, I attended conferences, made contacts, collected business cards, and then did almost nothing with them afterward. I would return to the office, get overwhelmed by the backlog of work that had accumulated, and the business cards would go into a drawer. Six months later, I would find them and realize I had wasted most of the networking value of the conference.

Now I have a rigid follow-up protocol. Within 48 hours of returning from a conference, I send a personalized email to every person I had a meaningful conversation with. Not a generic “nice to meet you” email. A specific email that references something we discussed and proposes a concrete next step: “I will send you a copy of our latest title,” or “I would love to schedule a call to discuss the translation project you mentioned,” or “Here is the article I recommended during our conversation.”

This follow-up habit has transformed the value I get from conferences. Probably 70% of the actual business outcomes I can trace to conference attendance came from the follow-up, not from the conference itself. The conference is the introduction. The follow-up is where the work gets done.

I also maintain a simple database of conference contacts with notes on what we discussed, when we last communicated, and what the potential value of the relationship is. This sounds bureaucratic, and it is. But it means that when I am preparing for next year’s conference, I can look up everyone I met last year and assess which relationships have developed and which need attention. It turns the random social graph of conference networking into a managed set of professional relationships.

Our Current Approach

Given everything I have described, here is how ScrollWorks currently allocates its conference budget.

We attend two to three regional literary festivals per year where our authors are speaking. We prioritize festivals in markets where we want to build our bookseller relationships and reader base. We always exhibit at these events, even if the table fee feels expensive, because having a physical presence with books on display generates more sales and conversations than attending without one.

We attend one major industry event per year, rotating between Frankfurt, London, and a domestic trade event. At these events, our focus is on rights and acquisitions rather than marketing.

We send one team member to one or two professional development workshops per year, chosen based on whatever skill gap we most need to address. Last year it was digital marketing. This year it will probably be audio production.

That adds up to five or six events per year, at a total cost of roughly $15,000-20,000 including all the hidden costs I described above. It is a significant line item for a publisher our size, and I scrutinize it carefully every year. But the relationships, knowledge, and sales generated by these events have consistently justified the investment. The key is being selective, being prepared, and following up. Without all three, conference attendance is just expensive tourism with a literary theme.

When our authors are promoting titles like Echoes of Iron or Still Waters at these events, the immediate sales are gratifying. But the lasting value is in the connections we build with booksellers, reviewers, and readers who will remember us the next time we publish something. That accumulated goodwill is the real return on our conference investment, and it is one that compounds year after year.

A year ago this week, I signed the lease on our office. It is a small space, just under 600 square feet, in a building that also houses a pottery studio and a freelance accountant. The rent is reasonable. The heating is unreliable. There is a persistent smell of kiln dust in the hallway that I have come to find comforting. It is not the kind of office that appears in magazine profiles of publishing executives, which is fine because I am not a publishing executive. I am a person who publishes books, and this is where that happens.

I want to describe what a year in the life of a small publishing house actually looks like, not the highlights-reel version with prize shortlists and glowing reviews, but the daily reality of running a business that produces and sells books. I think there is value in this kind of transparency, because the publishing industry tends to obscure its operations behind a curtain of prestige, and the result is that most people, including many aspiring publishers, have no idea what the work actually involves.

January and February: The Planning Season

Our year begins with planning, which sounds orderly but in practice involves a lot of staring at spreadsheets and arguing about priorities.

In January, we finalize our publication schedule for the coming year. This means confirming which titles are on track for their planned publication dates and which ones need to be pushed back. There are always pushbacks. An author needs more time for revisions. A cover design is not working and needs to be reconcepted. The printer has a backlog that will delay delivery by two weeks. Each of these adjustments ripples through the rest of the schedule, and the first two weeks of January are spent rearranging puzzle pieces until they fit.

We also set our budget in January, which is a euphemism for figuring out how to spend less money than we will need on everything we plan to do. The budget process at a small publisher is an exercise in creative deprivation. You know that you should spend $3,000 on marketing for each title, but you have $8,000 in your marketing budget for four titles, so someone gets shorted. You know that you should send advance copies to 200 reviewers, but postage alone for 200 copies would eat your entire publicity budget, so you send 80 and hope for the best.

February is when we start thinking seriously about acquisitions for the following year’s list. We review the manuscripts that have accumulated in our reading queue over the previous months, and we reach out to agents whose clients might be a good fit for our program. February is also when we attend our first industry event of the year, usually a domestic conference where we can reconnect with booksellers and agents after the holiday quiet.

The mood in January and February is cautiously optimistic. We have a plan. The plan seems achievable. We have not yet encountered the surprises that will blow the plan apart by April.

March Through May: Production Intensity

Spring is our heaviest production period. We typically have two or three titles in active production simultaneously, each at a different stage: one in late-stage editing, one in design and typesetting, and one in the final proofing stage before going to press.

Managing three titles in production with a small team is a logistical challenge that I consistently underestimate. Each title has its own timeline, its own set of freelancers (designer, copyeditor, proofreader, indexer), and its own complications. The cover design for Title A is stalled because the author and the designer disagree about the color palette. The copyeditor for Title B has found a factual claim that needs verification and the verification is taking longer than expected. The proofreader for Title C has discovered a formatting inconsistency that requires going back to the typesetter.

Each of these issues is manageable in isolation. Stacked together, they consume enormous amounts of time and mental energy. Spring is the season when I eat lunch at my desk most often and when my email response time is worst. It is also the season when the quality of our books is determined, because the decisions made during production, about cover design, interior layout, paper stock, print quality, are the decisions that readers will experience when they hold the finished book.

I try to remind myself, during the stressful weeks of spring production, that this is the core work. Everything else, the marketing, the conferences, the industry networking, exists to support this. Making good books. Getting the details right. Giving each title the production attention it deserves. When I lose sight of this, which happens more often than I would like, the quality of our work suffers.

June and July: Launch Season

Our primary publication window is late spring through early summer, which means June and July are dominated by launches, publicity, and the anxious monitoring of early sales data.

A book launch at a small publisher is a different animal from a launch at a major house. We do not have a dedicated publicity team. We do not have relationships with producers at morning television shows. We do not have the budget for a national advertising campaign. What we have is a personal network of booksellers, reviewers, and fellow publishers who trust our editorial judgment, and we rely on that network to give our books their initial visibility.

The weeks leading up to a launch are filled with emails. Dozens and dozens of emails. To booksellers, asking them to stock the new title. To reviewers, following up on the advance copies we sent three months earlier. To literary bloggers and podcasters, pitching interview opportunities with the author. To bookstagrammers, offering complimentary copies in exchange for posts. Each email is individually composed because form emails do not work in our niche. The bookseller in Portland wants to know something different from the reviewer in London, and both of them want to feel that they are being addressed personally rather than mass-mailed.

The launch event itself is usually the most enjoyable part of the process. After months of solitary production work, it is genuinely exciting to watch an author read from their finished book to a room full of people. The energy in the room at a good book launch is unlike anything else in publishing: the author is nervous and proud, the audience is curious and generous, and there is a feeling of shared celebration that makes all the logistical headaches worthwhile.

Then the sales data starts trickling in, and the mood shifts. First-week sales are almost always lower than hoped, no matter how realistic our expectations were. We tell ourselves and our authors that early numbers are not predictive, which is true but does not make them easier to look at. The real test is the slope of the sales curve over the following months: is it declining, holding steady, or (in the best case) building? We will not know the answer to that question until autumn.

August: The Lull

August is the quietest month in publishing, and I have learned to embrace it rather than fight it. Everyone is on vacation, or pretending to be. Agents are not pitching. Reviewers are not reviewing. Booksellers are dealing with summer foot traffic and not thinking about fall orders. The phone does not ring.

I use August for the work that requires sustained concentration and no interruptions. Reading manuscript submissions. Working on long-term strategic planning. Catching up on the industry reading that has accumulated in a pile on my desk since January. August is when I read the most, both for work and for pleasure, and the reading I do in August often shapes our acquisitions decisions for the following year.

August is also when I take my own vacation, usually a week somewhere without reliable internet, with a stack of books that have nothing to do with publishing. This week of complete disconnection is, I have come to believe, essential for the health of both the publisher and the person running it. By late July, I am usually depleted in a way that is not fixed by a weekend off. I need a full week away to remember why I got into this business and to return with the energy and clarity that the fall demands.

September Through November: The Selling Season

Autumn is when the year’s titles either find their audience or do not, and it is the most commercially intense period for a small publisher.

The fall literary festival season is our primary marketing channel. We attend two or three festivals between September and November, usually with an author in tow for readings and panel appearances. These events are our most reliable source of direct sales and new reader acquisition. A strong festival appearance can sell 50-100 copies in a weekend, which does not sound like much until you remember that our total print runs are 1,500-3,000 copies. Selling 100 copies at a single event is meaningful.

September is also when we do our most intensive work with independent booksellers, because independent booksellers drive a disproportionate share of our sales. We send catalogs, make calls, and visit stores when possible. The goal is to make sure that every independent bookstore that carries literary fiction is aware of our current titles and has copies in stock heading into the holiday season.

October is prize season, and even though I have written elsewhere about the peculiar economics of literary prizes, I cannot deny the anxiety that accompanies prize announcements. Longlists come out in September and October. Shortlists follow in October and November. Winners are announced in November and December. If one of our titles is in contention, the waiting is excruciating. If none are, we watch from the sidelines and take notes on what is being rewarded, which helps us calibrate our editorial judgment and our submissions strategy for the following year.

By November, we have a clear picture of how the year’s titles have performed. We know which ones met expectations, which ones exceeded them, and which ones disappointed. We know which marketing strategies worked and which did not. We know which booksellers are our strongest partners and which relationships need attention. This knowledge feeds directly into the planning cycle that begins again in January.

December: Reckoning and Renewal

December is a month of contradictions. The holiday season generates our strongest retail sales, particularly direct sales through our website and at holiday book fairs. At the same time, December is when we confront the full-year financial picture, which is sometimes encouraging and sometimes sobering.

I spend the first two weeks of December processing returns. Returns are the bane of book publishing: booksellers have the right to return unsold copies for a full refund, which means that a percentage of every sale is provisional until the return window closes. Our return rate typically runs between 15-25%, which is lower than the industry average but still significant. Every returned book is a book we printed, shipped, and accounted for as revenue, only to take it back and write off the cost. The returns process is physically and emotionally draining, involving literal boxes of books coming back to our office and literal adjustments to our financial statements.

By mid-December, I have a preliminary full-year financial picture. In a good year, we break even or show a small profit. In a bad year, we lose money and I have to figure out how to cover the shortfall. In our best year so far, we made a profit of about 4% of revenue, which in any other industry would be considered anemic but in independent publishing is respectable.

The last week of December is when I write the annual letter to our authors, updating them on how their books performed and what our plans are for the coming year. I take these letters seriously. Our authors have entrusted us with their work, and they deserve a full and honest accounting of what we have done with it. I report sales numbers, marketing activities, review coverage, and any awards recognition. I also describe our plans for the title going forward: are we planning a reprint, a paperback edition, a translation sale? Are there upcoming events or promotions that might generate new interest?

Writing these letters is one of my favorite tasks of the year, even when the news is mixed. It forces me to reflect on what we have accomplished and what we could have done better. It reminds me that every number in our spreadsheet represents a book that someone wrote, often over years, and that our job is to give that book the best possible chance of finding the readers it deserves.

That thought is what carries me into January, when the cycle begins again. The spreadsheets come out. The budget arguments start. The manuscripts pile up. And I sit in my office that smells faintly of kiln dust, surrounded by books that we made, and I start figuring out which ones we are going to make next.

Every title on our list, from The Last Archive and Echoes of Iron to Still Waters and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, has been through this annual cycle. Each one bears the marks of the planning, production, launching, selling, and reckoning that define a year at ScrollWorks. It is difficult, often unglamorous work. It is also the work I would choose over any other, every single time.