A hardcover book costs $28. You pick it up at the bookstore, hand over your credit card, and walk out with a physical object containing 80,000 words that someone spent years writing and that a team of people spent months producing. Twenty-eight dollars.

Is that a lot? Compared to a movie ticket ($12 for two hours of entertainment), it seems reasonable. Compared to a cup of coffee ($6 for fifteen minutes), it’s a bargain. Compared to what books cost twenty years ago, adjusted for inflation, it’s actually a bit less. The real price of books has been essentially flat for decades, even as the costs of producing them have risen.

But $28 is still $28, and we think readers deserve to know where that money goes. Publishing economics are opaque in ways that benefit no one. So here’s a transparent breakdown, using real numbers from our books. We’re going to trace a single copy of a hardcover from printing press to your bookshelf and show you who gets paid at each step.

The split, simplified

Of that $28 cover price, the bookstore keeps about 46 percent, or roughly $12.88. This is the standard retail discount in the book trade. It sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. But bookstores operate on thin margins, pay rent in expensive locations, and employ staff who need to be paid. That 46 percent is what makes physical bookselling economically viable. Barely.

The distributor takes about 15 percent of the remaining amount. Our distributor handles warehousing, fulfillment, invoicing, and returns processing. For a small press that can’t maintain its own warehouse or sales team, this is a necessary expense. That’s roughly $2.27 going to distribution.

What’s left after the bookstore and distributor is about $12.85. That’s what we, the publisher, actually receive. From that $12.85, we need to pay for everything else: printing, editing, design, marketing, overhead, and the author’s royalty.

Let’s keep going.

Printing: the physical object

Printing a hardcover book costs between $3 and $5 per copy, depending on page count, trim size, paper quality, and print run. For a typical 300-page hardcover at a first print run of 3,000 to 5,000 copies, we’re usually paying around $3.50 per unit.

That number reflects economies of scale. If we printed 50,000 copies, the per-unit cost would drop to around $2. If we printed 500, it would be $8 or more. Small publishers live in the awkward middle ground where print runs are large enough to be logistically complex but too small to benefit from deep volume discounts.

Paper costs have fluctuated significantly in recent years. After a spike during pandemic-era supply chain disruptions, prices stabilized somewhat but remain higher than pre-2020 levels. A specialty paper (uncoated, cream-colored, the kind that feels good in your hands) costs more than standard bright white stock. We pay for the nicer paper because the tactile experience of a book matters, and readers notice even if they can’t articulate what they’re noticing.

So of our $12.85, about $3.50 goes to printing. We’re down to $9.35.

The author: royalties and advances

The author typically receives a royalty of 10 to 15 percent of the cover price for hardcovers. For a $28 book at 10 percent, that’s $2.80 per copy. At 15 percent (which is more common for established authors or after a certain sales threshold), it’s $4.20.

Most authors also receive an advance against royalties. This is money paid upfront, before the book is published, which is then “earned out” against future royalty payments. If an author receives a $10,000 advance and the book earns $10,000 in royalties, the advance is earned out and the author starts receiving additional royalty checks.

The dirty secret of publishing is that most books don’t earn out their advances. Depending on whose numbers you trust, somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of books published by major houses fail to earn back the advance. At small presses, where advances are smaller, the earn-out rate is better, but plenty of our books don’t earn out either.

At a 10 percent royalty on our $28 hardcover, the author gets $2.80 per copy. That takes us from $9.35 down to $6.55.

Editing: the invisible labor

Editing is the part of publishing that’s hardest to quantify on a per-unit basis, because the cost is fixed regardless of how many copies sell. A book gets edited once, whether it sells 500 copies or 50,000.

A typical book goes through several rounds of editing. There’s developmental editing, where a senior editor works with the author on structure, pacing, and the big-picture questions of what the book is trying to do. There’s line editing, where the prose itself gets tightened and refined. There’s copyediting, where grammar, consistency, and factual accuracy are checked. And there’s proofreading, the final pass before the book goes to press.

At ScrollWorks, developmental editing is done in-house by our senior editors. This is a significant time investment. Working with an author on a manuscript can take months. Catherine Voss and her editor did four rounds of revision on The Last Archive over the course of a year. Each round involved weeks of reading, note-making, and discussion.

Copyediting and proofreading are usually freelanced out. A good copyeditor charges between $1,500 and $3,000 for a book-length manuscript, depending on length and complexity. A proofreader charges $800 to $1,500. These are skilled professionals doing detail-oriented work that directly affects the quality of the finished product.

If we add up the direct editing costs (freelance copyediting and proofreading, not counting the in-house editorial time) and spread them across a print run of 4,000 copies, we’re looking at roughly $0.75 to $1.00 per copy. The in-house editorial time is embedded in our overhead, which we’ll get to.

Subtract $1.00 for editing costs. We’re at $5.55.

Design: cover and interior

A book needs a cover, and the cover needs to be good. In a bookstore, you have about three seconds to catch a browser’s eye. The cover is doing most of the work in those three seconds.

We pay between $2,000 and $5,000 for cover design, depending on the complexity and the designer. Top-tier cover designers, the ones whose work you’d recognize from the front tables of bookstores, charge more. We think the investment is worth it. A mediocre cover can sink an excellent book, and a great cover can elevate a good one.

Interior design (typography, layout, chapter openers) runs another $1,500 to $3,000. This is the work that makes a book feel like a book rather than a printed manuscript. The choice of typeface, the spacing between lines, the margins, the running heads: these decisions affect the reading experience even though most readers never consciously notice them.

Spread across 4,000 copies, design costs add roughly $1.25 to $2.00 per unit. Call it $1.50.

We’re down to $4.05.

Marketing: the fight for attention

Marketing is where small publishers feel the squeeze most acutely. A major publisher might spend $50,000 to $100,000 marketing a lead title. We don’t have that kind of money. Our marketing budget for a typical title is $3,000 to $8,000, and we have to make every dollar count.

That budget covers advance review copies (printing and shipping ARCs to reviewers, booksellers, and media), online advertising (usually targeted social media campaigns), author events (travel, venue coordination), and publicity (either in-house or through a freelance publicist).

A freelance publicist, if we hire one, charges $3,000 to $5,000 for a three-month campaign. That’s a big chunk of our marketing budget for a single title. But a good publicist has relationships with book reviewers, podcast hosts, and media outlets that we can’t replicate in-house. For certain books, the investment makes sense.

Spread across our print run, marketing adds roughly $1.00 to $2.00 per copy. Call it $1.50.

We’re at $2.55.

Overhead: keeping the lights on

Everything else falls under overhead. Rent. Utilities. Insurance. Software subscriptions. Legal fees. Accounting. Salaries for the people who aren’t directly editing or designing a specific book but who keep the company running: the publisher, the office manager, the sales coordinator.

For a small press, overhead is a constant pressure. There’s a minimum cost to existing as a business, and that cost doesn’t scale linearly with the number of books you publish. Whether we put out eight titles or twelve, the rent stays the same. This is why small presses tend to cluster in certain ranges: below a certain number of titles per year, the overhead becomes unsustainable; above a certain number, quality suffers because the staff is stretched too thin.

Allocated across our full catalog and broken down per unit, overhead adds roughly $1.50 to $2.00 per copy. Let’s say $1.75.

That leaves $0.80 per copy. Eighty cents. That’s our margin on a $28 hardcover, assuming the book sells through its print run and we don’t have to absorb the cost of unsold inventory.

The problem of returns

And here’s where it gets really painful. The book industry operates on a returns system that would strike people in any other industry as insane. Bookstores can return unsold books to the publisher for a full refund. This means the books on the shelf of your local bookstore are, in economic terms, on consignment. If they don’t sell, the publisher eats the cost.

Return rates vary by publisher and title, but industry-wide averages hover around 20 to 30 percent. For a small press, returns can be higher because we’re less well-known and booksellers are taking a bigger risk by stocking our titles.

What does a 25 percent return rate do to our math? It means that of those 4,000 copies we printed, 1,000 come back. We’ve already paid to print them, ship them, and in many cases, paid for shelf space. The returned copies are often damaged and can’t be resold. Some can be remaindered (sold at deep discount), but the revenue from remaindering barely covers shipping costs.

When you factor in returns, that $0.80 margin per copy can easily become a loss. A book doesn’t just need to sell enough copies to cover its costs; it needs to sell enough copies plus a buffer to absorb the returns that are coming back.

The ebook and audiobook question

You might wonder: what about ebooks? Surely the margins are better when you don’t have to print anything.

They are, somewhat. An ebook typically priced at $12.99 has no printing cost, no warehousing cost, and no returns problem. The retailer (usually Amazon) takes 30 percent, leaving us about $9.09. After the author’s royalty (typically 25 percent of net for ebooks, or about $2.27), we’re left with around $6.82 to cover the fixed costs that exist regardless of format: editing, design, overhead.

Ebooks are more profitable per unit, but they don’t replace print revenue because the volume is generally lower. For most of our titles, ebook sales account for 15 to 25 percent of total units. Print still dominates, especially for the kinds of books we publish. Literary fiction and serious nonfiction readers tend to prefer physical books, and our sales data confirms this consistently.

Audiobooks are a growing segment, but the production costs are significant. A professionally narrated audiobook costs $5,000 to $15,000 to produce, and the revenue is split with the distributor (usually Audible, which takes a substantial cut). For a small press, audiobooks are worth doing for the right titles, but they’re not the margin-saver some people assume.

What this means for a small press

The economics of publishing are fundamentally a portfolio game. Any individual title might lose money. The hope is that the winners offset the losers and that, across the full catalog, the business is viable.

For a major publisher with hundreds of titles, the portfolio math works reasonably well. A few big hits can carry a lot of modest sellers. For a small press publishing ten to twelve titles a year, there’s much less room for error. A single title that underperforms can affect the entire year’s bottom line.

This is why we’re careful about what we acquire. It’s not that we won’t take risks (we will, and we do). It’s that every risk is felt more acutely at our scale. When we commit to publishing a book like Echoes of Iron, which required extensive historical fact-checking and a longer-than-average production timeline, we’re making a bet that the quality of the finished product will justify the additional cost. Sometimes that bet pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. We make the bet anyway, because the alternative is publishing only safe, cheap-to-produce books, and that’s not why we got into this business.

Is $28 too much?

Honestly, we think $28 is too little. Given the labor and expertise that goes into producing a quality book, the price should probably be higher. But pricing in publishing is constrained by consumer expectations and competitive pressure. If we price our hardcovers at $32 while comparable books from bigger publishers are $28, we lose sales. The market sets a ceiling, and we have to work within it.

What we’d like readers to take away from this breakdown is an appreciation for what goes into the object they’re holding. A book is not a commodity. It’s the product of years of work by a writer, months of work by a team of editors and designers, and a complex logistics chain that moves it from a warehouse to your hands. Everyone in that chain is doing skilled work, and most of them are doing it for less money than they’d make in a different industry.

When you pay $28 for a hardcover, you’re supporting all of those people. You’re also supporting the possibility that next year’s books will exist, because the revenue from this year’s books is what funds the advances, editing, and production of the books that haven’t been published yet. Every book sale is, in a small way, a vote for the continued existence of publishing as an enterprise.

We think that’s worth $28. We hope you do too.

Written by Marcus Rivera, Publisher at ScrollWorks Media.

People rarely talk about how books are priced. There’s an assumption, even among avid readers, that book prices are either arbitrary or dictated by some invisible market force that publishers don’t control. Neither is true. Pricing a book is a deliberate process with real reasoning behind every number, and since we’re always advocating for transparency at ScrollWorks Media, I figured it was time to open up the spreadsheet and show you how it works.

Fair warning: this post involves math. I’ll try to make it as painless as possible.

The Basic Economics of a Book

Let’s start with a hardcover novel priced at $28. That’s a common price point for literary fiction from a mid-size publisher like us. Where does that $28 go?

The retailer takes the biggest single cut. When you buy a book at a bookstore or from an online retailer, the publisher typically sells it to them at a 40-50% discount off the list price. So on our $28 book, the retailer is paying us somewhere between $14 and $16.80. The rest is the retailer’s margin, covering their costs of running a store (or website), paying staff, and hopefully making a profit.

From that $14-16.80 the publisher receives, we need to cover: printing and manufacturing, warehousing and shipping, editorial costs (editing, copyediting, proofreading), design costs (cover design, interior layout), marketing and publicity, author royalties, and our own overhead (office space, salaries, technology, insurance). What’s left after all of that is our margin, and I can tell you from experience, it’s thin.

Let me break those costs down further, because the details matter.

Printing and Manufacturing

The physical cost of producing a book is, somewhat counterintuitively, one of the smaller components of the price. A standard hardcover novel costs somewhere between $3 and $5 per unit to manufacture, depending on page count, paper quality, binding style, and print run size. That last variable is significant: printing 10,000 copies is much cheaper per unit than printing 2,000. Economies of scale are real in book manufacturing.

This is why people sometimes complain that books are “expensive for what they are” when they hold a paperback and think about the physical materials involved. A mass market paperback might cost $1.50 to print. But the physical object is a tiny fraction of what you’re paying for. You’re paying for the writing, the editing, the design, the marketing, and the infrastructure that made it possible for that book to exist and reach your hands.

Paper costs have fluctuated significantly in recent years. Supply chain disruptions pushed prices up, and while things have stabilized somewhat, paper is still more expensive than it was five years ago. This has real effects on pricing, especially for longer books. A 500-page novel costs more to produce than a 250-page novel, and that difference has to be reflected somewhere, either in the price or in our margin.

The People Behind the Book

This is where the real costs live. A typical book at ScrollWorks goes through several stages of human attention before it reaches the reader.

Developmental editing comes first. This is the big-picture editing, working with the author on structure, pacing, character development, argument, and overall coherence. For a novel, this might involve multiple rounds of revision over several months. For a non-fiction book, it might include fact-checking conversations and structural reorganization. A developmental editor’s time on a single book can easily reach 100-200 hours.

Line editing and copyediting follow. Line editing addresses the prose at the sentence level: clarity, style, consistency, rhythm. Copyediting is more technical: grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency of names and dates, adherence to house style. These are different skills, sometimes performed by different people. A thorough copyedit of a 300-page manuscript takes 40-60 hours.

Proofreading is the final check, catching errors that slipped through earlier stages. This is typically done on page proofs, the formatted pages that will become the final book. A careful proofread takes 20-30 hours.

Then there’s design. The cover might take 40-60 hours as I described in our post on book cover design. The interior design, choosing fonts, setting margins, designing chapter openings, laying out the text, takes another 20-40 hours depending on the book’s complexity.

Add it up: a single book might require 300-400 hours of skilled professional labor before it’s ready to print. Those hours have to be paid for, and they’re a significant portion of the book’s cost.

Author Royalties

Authors typically receive royalties as a percentage of either the list price or the net receipts (the amount the publisher actually receives after retailer discounts). Standard royalty rates for hardcovers are usually 10-15% of list price, with the rate often escalating after certain sales thresholds. Paperback royalties are typically lower, around 7.5% of list price.

On our $28 hardcover at a 10% royalty, the author earns $2.80 per copy sold. If the book sells 5,000 copies, which would be a respectable performance for a literary novel from a small press, the author earns $14,000. Spread that over the two or three years it might have taken to write the book, and you can see why most authors can’t support themselves on royalties alone.

Authors also typically receive an advance against royalties, a payment upfront before the book is published. The advance is “against” future royalties, meaning the author doesn’t start receiving additional royalty payments until sales have “earned out” the advance. Many books never earn out their advances. This means the advance is, in practice, the total compensation the author receives.

I share these numbers because I think readers should understand what authors actually earn. The romantic image of the wealthy author living off their book sales is accurate for maybe the top 1% of published writers. For the rest, writing books is a labor of love that requires supplemental income from teaching, freelancing, or other work.

Why Ebooks Are Still Expensive

This is probably the pricing question I get asked most often. If an ebook doesn’t require printing, paper, or shipping, why does it cost nearly as much as a physical book?

The short answer: because most of the costs of a book aren’t physical. All of the editorial work, the cover design, the interior formatting, the marketing, the author’s advance and royalties, these costs exist regardless of format. The ebook still needs to be edited. It still needs a cover for its listing page. It still needs to be marketed. The author still deserves to be paid.

The physical production of a book represents maybe 10-15% of its total cost. Removing that 10-15% doesn’t justify cutting the price in half, which is what many readers seem to expect.

That said, ebooks are typically priced lower than hardcovers. A book that’s $28 in hardcover might be $14.99 or $12.99 as an ebook. This reflects the savings on physical production and distribution. But the gap isn’t as large as people expect, because the savings on physical costs aren’t as large as people think.

There’s also a format value question. Ebooks are convenient (instant delivery, no physical storage needed, adjustable text size), but they lack the permanence and collectability of physical books. You can’t lend an ebook to a friend the way you can a paperback. You can’t display it on a shelf. For some readers, this lower perceived value makes even a modest ebook price feel too high. I understand the sentiment, even if the economics don’t support dramatically lower pricing.

The Paperback Calculation

At ScrollWorks, most of our titles follow a now-standard release pattern: hardcover first, followed by a paperback edition about a year later, with ebook and audiobook available from the start. Each format has its own pricing logic.

Trade paperbacks (the larger-format paperbacks, not the small mass market size) are typically priced between $16 and $18 for fiction, $17 to $20 for non-fiction. The lower price compared to hardcover reflects lower manufacturing costs (paperbacks are significantly cheaper to produce than hardcovers) and the fact that the book has already had its initial marketing push during the hardcover release.

The paperback is where many books make back their investment. Hardcover sales generate higher per-unit revenue but lower volume. Paperback sales generate lower per-unit revenue but, for successful titles, much higher volume. A literary novel that sells 5,000 copies in hardcover might sell 15,000-20,000 in paperback, because the lower price point opens it up to readers who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay hardcover prices.

This is why the timing of paperback release matters. Release it too soon and you cannibalize hardcover sales from readers who would have paid the higher price. Release it too late and you miss the momentum that reviews and word of mouth created during the hardcover phase. The sweet spot is usually 12-14 months after hardcover publication.

How We Price at ScrollWorks

Our pricing process starts with the production budget. We calculate the total cost of bringing the book to market: editorial, design, manufacturing, marketing, author advance, overhead allocation. We estimate sales based on comparable titles, the author’s track record, and our marketing plans. Then we work backward from the revenue we need to generate to cover costs and achieve a reasonable margin.

“Reasonable margin” in publishing is pretty modest. Most publishers target a net margin of 5-10% on their overall list. Individual titles vary wildly. Some books are profitable from the first printing. Others never earn back their costs. The portfolio approach, where successful titles subsidize less successful ones, is how most publishers stay afloat.

We also look at the competitive landscape. If every comparable title in our genre is priced at $27-29 for hardcover, we need a very good reason to price ours at $34. Conversely, pricing significantly below the market can signal low quality to readers, even if the book is excellent. Pricing has a signaling function that goes beyond pure economics.

For our recent titles, here’s roughly how the math has worked. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss and Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield were priced to compete with similar titles from comparable publishers. We looked at recent releases in their respective categories, noted the price range, and positioned our books within that range based on format, page count, and market positioning.

The Amazon Problem

Any honest discussion of book pricing has to address Amazon, which has single-handedly reshaped reader expectations about what a book should cost. Amazon routinely discounts new hardcovers by 30-40%, sometimes more. A book with a list price of $28 might sell for $17 on Amazon. This is great for the consumer who buys it, but it creates complications throughout the industry.

The publisher still receives the same amount per copy regardless of Amazon’s discount. Amazon is absorbing the discount from their margin, not from ours. But the effect on reader psychology is significant. When you can buy any new hardcover for $17 on Amazon, a bookstore charging $28 for the same book feels expensive by comparison. This puts independent bookstores at a structural disadvantage and contributes to the ongoing consolidation of book retail.

Amazon’s discounting also affects how readers perceive value. If the “real” price of a book, the price most people actually pay, is $17, then an ebook at $14.99 feels like a bad deal. The list price becomes fiction, a reference number that few people actually pay, and the actual market price becomes whatever Amazon decides it should be.

I don’t have a clean solution to this. It’s a market dynamic that individual publishers can’t change. What we can do is be transparent about our costs and pricing rationale, which is partly why I’m writing this post.

Why We Don’t Race to the Bottom

There’s a school of thought, particularly in the self-publishing world, that books should be priced as low as possible to maximize volume. You see self-published ebooks at $0.99 or $2.99, with the theory that low prices lead to high volume, which leads to visibility, which leads to a career.

This strategy works for some authors, particularly those who write quickly and produce a lot of books. But it’s not a strategy that works for the kind of publishing we do. Our books involve significant editorial investment, professional design, careful marketing. We can’t price them at $2.99 and survive. More than that, I’d argue that rock-bottom pricing devalues the work that goes into a book in a way that ultimately harms authors and readers alike.

When a book is priced at $0.99, what message does that send about its value? I’m not being rhetorical. I genuinely think price affects perception. Readers who pay $2.99 for an ebook have different expectations and, often, a different level of commitment to reading it than readers who pay $14.99. The higher price creates a small but real investment that makes you more likely to actually sit down and read the thing. Cheap books pile up unread on Kindles. Books you paid real money for tend to get opened.

At ScrollWorks, we price our books to reflect the genuine value of the labor, expertise, and care that goes into them. We believe that a well-edited, well-designed, thoughtfully produced book is worth paying for, and we believe most readers agree.

Non-Fiction Pricing Is Different

Non-fiction tends to be priced slightly higher than fiction, and there are reasons for this beyond tradition. Non-fiction often requires more editorial support: fact-checking, index creation, permissions for quoted material, sometimes photo research and reproduction rights. These costs add up.

Non-fiction also has a different demand profile. A novel competes primarily with other novels for the reader’s leisure time. A non-fiction book might be purchased as professional development, as research material, or as a reference. In these contexts, the buyer is often willing to pay more because the book has practical utility beyond entertainment.

Our non-fiction titles, like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, are priced with these factors in mind. A book that helps you understand a complex financial topic has a different value proposition than a novel. The knowledge it provides has practical applications that can, in some cases, be worth far more than the cover price. We try to price non-fiction in a range that reflects this value while remaining accessible to the widest possible audience.

What We’d Change If We Could

If I could change one thing about book pricing, it would be the opacity. Readers have almost no visibility into how books are priced and where their money goes. This lack of transparency breeds resentment (“books are too expensive”), misinformation (“publishers are greedy”), and unrealistic expectations (“why can’t this ebook be free?”).

I think the industry would benefit from more honesty about the economics. Not every publisher needs to publish their spreadsheets, but a general willingness to explain pricing rationale would help readers understand and appreciate the value chain behind the books they buy.

I’d also like to see more creative approaches to format and pricing. Some publishers are experimenting with simultaneous hardcover/paperback releases at different price points. Others are exploring serialization, subscription models, or tiered pricing for different editions. The traditional hardcover-then-paperback model has worked for decades, but it was designed for a different market. There might be better approaches for the current one.

At the end of the day, a book’s price is a negotiation between the cost of making it and what readers are willing to pay. We try to get that balance right, understanding that every pricing decision affects authors, retailers, and readers. If this post has given you a better understanding of the numbers behind the number on the back of a book, it’s done its job. And next time you wince at a hardcover price, remember: that $28 is buying you not just paper and ink, but years of an author’s work and hundreds of hours of professional craft. I think that’s a bargain.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

In the past twelve months, we’ve received somewhere around 400 nonfiction proposals and about 600 fiction queries. We said yes to nine of them. That’s a hit rate of roughly one percent, and while we’re not proud of the volume of rejections, we are proud of the books those nine yeses turned into.

What we can tell you is that most of the proposals we reject aren’t bad. They’re often well-written, on interesting subjects, by qualified people. They just don’t do the specific job a book proposal needs to do, which is to convince a publisher, in a limited number of pages, that this book needs to exist and that this writer is the person to write it.

This piece is about that job. It’s based on what we see in our actual submissions pile: what works, what doesn’t, and why. We’re going to be specific and practical, because the vague advice that floats around the internet (“be passionate!” “know your audience!”) is true but useless.

First, understand what a proposal is for

A book proposal is not a summary of your book. This is the most common misunderstanding we encounter. Writers think a proposal is a compressed version of the book itself, so they try to cram all their ideas into fifty pages. The result is dense, exhausting, and paradoxically less persuasive than a shorter, more focused document.

A proposal is a business document that answers three questions. First: what is this book, and why does it matter? Second: who will buy it, and how will they find it? Third: why are you the right person to write it? Everything in your proposal should serve one of these three questions. Everything else is excess.

For fiction, the rules are slightly different. We evaluate fiction primarily on the strength of the writing, so a query letter and sample pages carry most of the weight. But the query letter still needs to answer those same three questions, just more briefly.

The overview: your single most important page

The overview is the first section of a nonfiction proposal, and it’s the most important. We’ve acquired books based largely on a strong overview, and we’ve passed on books despite strong sample chapters because the overview didn’t land.

Your overview should be one to three pages. It should do something difficult: convey the essence of your book in a way that’s compelling to someone who knows nothing about it. Think of it as the first conversation you’d have with a stranger about your project. You wouldn’t start by explaining chapter four. You’d start by telling them what the book is about and why it matters.

The best overviews we’ve received share certain qualities. They open with a specific scene, anecdote, or piece of information that makes you lean forward. Not a gimmick, not a cliffhanger, but something concrete that demonstrates the writer’s ability to engage a reader on the first page.

David Okonkwo’s proposal for The Cartographer’s Dilemma opened with a story about a 16th-century mapmaker who deliberately introduced errors into his maps to catch plagiarists. It was a small, vivid detail that immediately established the intellectual terrain of the book and demonstrated David’s gift for finding the human story inside a technical subject.

After the hook, state your thesis clearly. What is the central argument or narrative of this book? Don’t be coy. Don’t hint. Tell us directly. We’ve seen too many overviews that dance around the central idea, building suspense as if we’re reading a thriller. We’re not. We’re reading a business document. Tell us what the book is about.

Then explain why it matters now. Why this book, at this moment? What conversation does it enter? What gap does it fill? This is where you demonstrate awareness of the landscape you’re writing into. You need to know what’s already been published on your subject and be able to articulate how your book is different.

The market section: be honest, not optimistic

The market section is where most proposals go wrong. Writers either skip it entirely (bad) or write something so optimistically vague that it’s meaningless (worse).

“This book will appeal to anyone interested in history.” That sentence describes several hundred million people and tells us nothing. Who, specifically, will buy your book? Not who might theoretically be interested in the subject, but who will actually walk into a bookstore or open Amazon and spend $28 on it?

Good market sections are specific. They identify concrete readerships. They name the publications these readers subscribe to, the podcasts they listen to, the other books they’ve bought. They demonstrate that the writer understands the actual commercial landscape, not an imagined one where everyone who’s ever Googled their topic will rush to buy their book.

We also want to see honest competitive analysis. What other books exist in your space? How is yours different? Some writers are afraid to name competitors because they think it draws unflattering comparisons. The opposite is true. Ignoring your competition makes you look either uninformed or evasive. Name the three to five most relevant books in your area and explain, specifically, what yours adds to the conversation.

When Elena Marsh proposed Still Waters, her market section was honest about the crowded memoir landscape. She named specific recent memoirs that covered adjacent territory and explained clearly what hers did differently. She wasn’t dismissive of the competition. She was respectful and precise. That honesty made us trust her judgment about everything else in the proposal.

The author bio: authority and voice

The author bio section of a proposal needs to answer two questions: why are you qualified to write this book, and can you actually write?

For nonfiction, authority matters. This doesn’t mean you need a PhD. It means you need to have a credible relationship with your subject. Maybe you’ve been a practitioner for twenty years. Maybe you’ve done extensive primary research. Maybe you have lived experience that gives you unique access to the story you’re telling. Whatever it is, make it clear.

What we don’t care about, and this might be controversial: your social media following. Or rather, we care about it less than the internet has led writers to believe. A large platform is nice to have, but it’s not a substitute for a good book. We’ve published successful books by authors with almost no online presence, and we’ve seen books from authors with huge platforms flop because the book itself wasn’t good enough.

If you have a platform, mention it. If you don’t, don’t apologize. Focus on why you’re the right writer for this subject.

The bio is also a place to demonstrate voice. Write it in the same voice you’ll use in the book. If your proposal bio is formal and stiff but your sample chapter is warm and conversational, we notice the disconnect and wonder which version is the real you.

The chapter outline: structure without tedium

Most proposals include a chapter-by-chapter outline. Most of these outlines are too long and too detailed.

Each chapter summary should be one to two paragraphs. Tell us the main idea of the chapter, the key narrative or argument, and how it connects to the chapters around it. We’re looking for a sense of the book’s architecture, not a detailed blueprint.

The outline should demonstrate that the book has a shape. This sounds obvious, but many outlines we receive are essentially lists: twelve chapters on twelve aspects of a topic, with no narrative arc, no progression, no sense of building toward something. A book needs momentum. It needs to go somewhere. Your outline should show us the trajectory.

One thing we look for specifically: does the book earn its length? If your outline describes a book that could be a long essay, we’re going to wonder why it needs to be 80,000 words. Every chapter should justify its existence. If we can read the outline and see where the padding will go, we know the manuscript will have the same problem.

Sample chapters: the proof

For nonfiction proposals, sample chapters are where the rubber meets the road. Everything else in the proposal is promise. The sample chapters are proof.

Include two to three chapters. They don’t have to be the first chapters (though including chapter one is usually a good idea). Choose the chapters that best demonstrate your ability to execute the vision described in the overview.

These chapters should be fully polished. Not first drafts. Not “rough but you’ll get the idea” versions. They should be as good as you can make them, because they’re the primary evidence we use to assess whether you can write the book you’re proposing.

The most common problem with sample chapters is that they don’t match the promise of the overview. The overview is electric, full of ideas and energy. The sample chapters are flat, buried in exposition, lacking the voice that made the overview compelling. When this happens, it usually means the writer is better at describing their book than writing it, and that’s a deal-breaker.

For fiction writers: the query letter

Fiction doesn’t typically require a full proposal. What it requires is a query letter and sample pages (usually the first fifty to one hundred pages). The query letter is doing a lot of the same work as a nonfiction overview, just in a smaller space.

A good query letter for fiction has three parts. A paragraph about the book: what it’s about, who the main characters are, what’s at stake. This should read like jacket copy, not like a book report. Convey the flavor of the book, not just the plot.

A paragraph about you: who you are, what you’ve published (if anything), why you wrote this book. Keep it short. We’re going to judge you on the pages, not the bio.

And a paragraph about context: where the book fits in the landscape, what other books it’s in conversation with. This is where comp titles go, and please choose them carefully. Two recent titles that share some quality with your book (tone, subject, structure, audience) are more useful than one classic everyone’s heard of.

Catherine Voss’s query for The Last Archive was one page. It described the novel’s premise in three sentences, named two comp titles that were well-chosen and specific, and included a brief bio that mentioned relevant (not padded) credentials. That’s all we needed. The first fifty pages did the rest.

Common mistakes, from our actual pile

Based on what we see regularly, here are mistakes you should avoid.

Starting with a rhetorical question. “Have you ever wondered why people love maps?” No. Stop. Rhetorical questions are a crutch. They create the illusion of engagement without actually engaging anyone. Start with something concrete instead.

Burying the subject. Some proposals take two pages to get to what the book is about. By that point, we’ve lost patience. Tell us what the book is about in the first paragraph. Preferably the first sentence.

Over-explaining your methodology. For academic writers crossing into trade nonfiction, this is a persistent issue. We don’t need a detailed account of your research methods. We need to see the results of your research, rendered in engaging prose.

Using jargon without realizing it. Every field has its own vocabulary, and if you’ve been immersed in your subject for years, you may not notice when you’re using terms that outsiders don’t understand. Have someone outside your field read your proposal and flag every word or phrase that doesn’t land.

Claiming your book has no competition. Every book has competition. If you think yours doesn’t, you haven’t looked hard enough. Worse, claiming uniqueness makes us wonder whether there’s simply no market for what you’re proposing.

Submitting too early. We get proposals for books that are clearly not ready. The idea is half-formed. The sample chapters are first drafts. The writer is still figuring out what the book is. We understand the impulse to send it out while you’re excited, but resist it. A premature submission is worse than a late one, because you only get one chance to make a first impression with each publisher.

What happens after you submit

We try to respond to all submissions within eight to twelve weeks. Sometimes it takes longer, especially during our busiest season (September through November). If you haven’t heard from us after twelve weeks, it’s reasonable to send a polite follow-up.

We read everything that comes in. If we pass, we try to explain why, though we can’t always be as detailed as we’d like. If we’re interested, we’ll usually ask for the full manuscript (for fiction) or a conversation about the project (for nonfiction).

A “revise and resubmit” response is not a rejection. It means we see potential but aren’t ready to commit based on what we’ve seen. Take it seriously. Address the feedback. Resubmit when you’ve done the work. Some of our best books started as revise-and-resubmits.

The emotional dimension

Writing a book proposal is an emotionally complicated act. You’re taking something personal, something you’ve invested months or years of your life in, and packaging it for commercial evaluation. It’s like writing a cover letter for a job that is also your child.

We know this. We try to be respectful of it. But we also need you to be professional, because that’s what the process requires. A proposal that reads as desperate, or angry, or defensive, works against you regardless of the quality of the underlying book.

The best proposals strike a tone of confident calm. They say: here’s what I’ve made, here’s why it matters, here’s who will read it, and here’s evidence that I can deliver. No begging. No bluster. Just clarity and competence.

If your proposal is rejected, it’s okay to feel disappointed. It’s not okay to email us arguing about the decision. We’ve had this happen, and it never changes the outcome; it just makes a future relationship unlikely.

Resources that actually help

If you want to learn more about the proposal-writing process, there are a few resources we genuinely recommend.

Jane Friedman’s blog is the single best free resource on the business side of publishing. She’s honest, specific, and current in a way that most writing advice isn’t. Her posts on query letters and proposals are worth your time.

The Art of the Book Proposal by Eric Maisel is a solid guide for nonfiction writers. It’s not flashy, but it’s practical and specific.

For fiction writers, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King is less about the query process and more about making your manuscript strong enough that the query writes itself.

And read proposals that worked. Some agents and publishers share successful proposals online. Studying them is more instructive than reading any how-to guide, because you can see what a finished, polished, successful document actually looks like.

Good luck. We mean that sincerely. The world needs more good books, and the only way to get them is for writers to take the risk of putting their work forward. We’re grateful to everyone who sends us their best work, even when the answer is no.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Submission guidelines are available on our contact page.

Last November, I walked into Powell’s City of Books in Portland with a vague idea that I wanted something to read on a long flight. I didn’t have a specific book in mind. I didn’t have a genre preference. I just wanted something good.

The person behind the counter, whose name tag said “Marianne,” asked me three questions. What was the last book I loved? What was I in the mood for, something heavy or something light? And was I okay with being surprised?

I said: Stoner by John Williams. Medium weight. And yes, surprise me.

She handed me a copy of An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’d never read it. She said: “If you liked Stoner’s quiet desperation, you’ll like what Ishiguro does with memory and regret. It’s a different register, but the emotional territory is similar.”

She was right. It was exactly what I wanted. And no algorithm on earth would have made that connection.

The recommendation machine

We live in an age of algorithmic recommendations. Amazon tells you what to read based on your purchase history. Goodreads surfaces books based on your ratings. TikTok’s algorithm can turn an obscure novel into a bestseller overnight if enough people film themselves crying over it.

These systems are powerful. They’re also limited in ways that matter.

Algorithmic recommendations work through pattern matching. They look at what you’ve bought or liked and find other things that people with similar profiles have bought or liked. This produces useful results much of the time. If you enjoyed one thriller by a certain author, you’ll probably enjoy another thriller by a similar author, and the algorithm is good at making that connection.

What algorithms can’t do is understand why you liked something. They can see the surface patterns: genre, author, subject matter, price point. They can’t see the deeper currents: that what you loved about that memoir wasn’t the subject matter but the prose rhythm, that the reason you liked that novel wasn’t the plot but the way the author handled silence between characters, that you’re in a specific emotional place right now and need a book that meets you there.

A good bookseller can see those things. Not because they’re mind readers, but because they’re trained observers of reading habits, and because they’ve read widely enough to make connections that cross the boundaries algorithms use to sort books.

What a bookseller actually does

I’ve spent time in independent bookstores across the country talking to the people who work there, trying to understand what they know that computers don’t. The conversations have been some of the most interesting I’ve had about books.

At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, a bookseller named James told me that his job is “translation.” A customer comes in and describes what they want using vague, approximate language. “Something like that book about the woman in the lighthouse, but funnier.” His job is to decode that description, which might not correspond to any actual book, into a recommendation that satisfies the underlying desire.

At The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, a staff member described her approach as “reading the reader.” She watches how people move through the store. Do they head straight for a specific section, or do they wander? Do they pick up books and read the first page, or do they flip to the back cover? These behaviors tell her something about what kind of reader she’s dealing with, and that informs her recommendations.

At Parnassus Books in Nashville (the store Ann Patchett co-founded), the staff maintains what they call institutional memory, a collective knowledge of which books work for which kinds of readers. A customer who loved one book five years ago comes back, and the bookseller remembers that and builds on it. It’s a running conversation that unfolds over years, and it produces recommendations of startling accuracy.

None of this can be replicated by an algorithm. Not because the technology isn’t sophisticated enough, but because the underlying skill is human in a way that resists quantification. It’s empathy applied to reading. It’s pattern recognition that includes emotional and aesthetic dimensions, not just behavioral ones.

The problem with “readers also bought”

Amazon’s recommendation engine is, by most accounts, the most sophisticated in the retail world. It processes enormous amounts of data and produces suggestions that are often relevant. But “relevant” and “inspired” are different things.

The structural limitation of collaborative filtering (the technique behind “readers also bought”) is that it pushes you toward the popular center. It recommends books that lots of people buy, because that’s the data it has the most of. The books it’s worst at recommending are the unusual ones, the ones that don’t fit neatly into an established category, the ones purchased by a small number of readers with eclectic tastes.

These are precisely the books that a good bookseller excels at recommending. The odd, the unexpected, the book that came out three years ago from a small press and never got much attention but is perfect for this particular reader at this particular moment.

There’s also the feedback loop problem. Algorithmic recommendations tend to narrow your reading over time. You buy a mystery, so the algorithm recommends more mysteries. You click on those, so it recommends even more mysteries. Before long, your entire recommendation feed is mysteries, and the algorithm has no reason to suggest the memoir or the science book or the poetry collection that might open a new door for you.

A bookseller does the opposite. A good one will deliberately push you outside your comfort zone. Not aggressively, not presumptuously, but gently. “I know you usually read thrillers, but have you tried this? It’s a novel about a family in Lagos, and it has the same propulsive quality you like in thrillers, but it does something different with it.”

That kind of recommendation is an act of generosity. It requires the bookseller to know both the book and the reader well enough to make a connection that isn’t obvious. When it works, it’s one of the great pleasures of being a reader.

The shelf talker as art form

One of the things I love about independent bookstores is the shelf talker: that little handwritten card tucked next to a book with a staff recommendation. They’re a minor art form, and the best ones do in three sentences what a marketing department spends thousands of dollars trying to do.

I’ve been collecting favorites for years. A few that stuck with me:

“I’ve pressed this book into the hands of eleven people this month and I’m not stopping.” That was at a store in San Francisco, next to a copy of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

“This will make you want to call your mother. Or maybe never call her again. Depends on your mother.” That was at a store in Chicago, next to a memoir I won’t name because the description is the whole recommendation.

“If you think you don’t like poetry, read page 42. Just page 42. Then we’ll talk.” I read page 42. We talked. I bought the book.

These tiny reviews work because they’re personal. They’re one human being saying to another: I read this, and it did something to me, and I think it might do something to you too. No algorithm produces that. No publisher’s marketing copy achieves it. It’s the bookseller’s unique contribution to the reading ecosystem, and it’s irreplaceable.

At ScrollWorks, we rely heavily on these bookseller recommendations. When Elena Marsh’s Still Waters was first published, the marketing budget was modest. What built its readership was booksellers who read the advance copy, connected with it, and started recommending it face-to-face. That organic process of one reader telling another is still the most powerful marketing force in publishing, and booksellers are its primary agents.

Curation versus aggregation

The fundamental difference between a bookstore and Amazon is the difference between curation and aggregation.

Amazon aggregates. It has everything. That’s its value proposition: whatever you want, it’s there. The catalog is infinite, and the search and recommendation tools help you navigate it. This is genuinely useful. If you know what you’re looking for, Amazon is hard to beat.

A bookstore curates. It has a finite number of books, chosen by people with taste and judgment. The constraint is the value. When you walk into an independent bookstore, someone has already done the work of filtering the half-million titles published this year down to the few thousand on the shelves. Every book in the store is there because a human being decided it was worth stocking.

This is a radically different shopping experience. In an aggregated environment, the burden of choice is on you. You have to know what you want, or at least be able to describe it to a search engine. In a curated environment, the burden of choice has been partially lifted. You can browse. You can discover. You can pick up something you’ve never heard of and trust that it’s there for a reason.

The curation model depends on the expertise of the curators, which brings us back to booksellers. The quality of an independent bookstore is, to a large extent, the quality of its staff. Stores that hire readers, that encourage their staff to read widely and develop opinions, produce better curation. Stores that treat bookselling as unskilled retail labor produce worse curation. The difference is enormous.

The bookstore as social infrastructure

There’s another dimension to independent bookstores that has nothing to do with buying books, and it’s worth naming.

Bookstores are gathering places. They host readings, book clubs, community events, children’s story hours. They’re places where strangers can start conversations about ideas. They’re anchors in neighborhoods, the kind of “third place” (not home, not work) that sociologists keep telling us we need more of.

When a neighborhood loses its independent bookstore, it loses more than a place to buy books. It loses a piece of social infrastructure that’s hard to replace. Amazon can deliver a book to your door in 24 hours. It can’t host a conversation about that book with your neighbors.

We’ve done author events at independent stores across the country, and the energy in those rooms is different from anything you get at a chain or online. When James Whitfield read from Echoes of Iron at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, the Q&A lasted an hour. People didn’t want to leave. They wanted to talk about history, about storytelling, about the research process. That conversation happened because a physical space existed where it could happen, staffed by people who cared enough to organize it.

The economics of hand-selling

Let’s talk money, because none of this works if it doesn’t pencil out.

Independent bookstores have had a complicated economic trajectory. They declined sharply in the late 1990s and 2000s under pressure from chains and Amazon. Then, against most predictions, they started growing again around 2009. The American Booksellers Association reported increases in membership for over a decade. By the early 2020s, there were more independent bookstores in the U.S. than there had been in years.

This recovery happened partly because indie stores figured out what they could do that Amazon couldn’t. They leaned into curation, community, and the in-store experience. They became less like retail outlets and more like cultural institutions.

But the margins are still thin. A typical independent bookstore operates on a net margin of one to three percent. That’s a business where everything has to go right just to break even. A bad holiday season, a rent increase, a construction project that blocks foot traffic for three months: any of these can be fatal.

The booksellers who work in these stores are poorly paid by almost any standard. They do the job because they love books and they love connecting people with books. This isn’t a sustainable model if we want talented people to keep doing this work, and the industry needs to grapple with that honestly.

What readers can do

If you value what independent bookstores provide, and I hope this piece has made a case for why you should, here are some concrete things you can do.

Buy from them. Even if the book is a dollar cheaper on Amazon. Even if you have to wait a day or two for a special order. The money you spend at an independent bookstore stays in your community in a way that money spent on Amazon does not.

Use Bookshop.org for online orders. It’s not perfect, but it routes a portion of each sale to independent bookstores and provides a meaningful revenue stream for stores that don’t have their own online presence.

Ask for recommendations. Walk in without a plan and say: “What’s good?” You’ll be surprised how much a bookseller can do with that question. Let them guide you somewhere unexpected. Take the risk. The worst case is you read a book you didn’t love. The best case is you discover something that changes you.

Attend events. Show up for readings and signings, even for authors you haven’t heard of. These events are often the most interesting precisely when the author is relatively unknown, because the conversation tends to be more intimate and less performative.

Tell people about your bookstore. Recommend it the way you’d recommend a good restaurant. Social media is fine for this. So is just telling a friend. The stores that thrive are the ones that their communities actively support and talk about.

The human element

I keep coming back to Marianne at Powell’s, handing me that Ishiguro novel. What she did in that thirty-second exchange was process information that no algorithm has access to: my body language, my tone of voice, the specific way I described what I was looking for, and, probably, something intuitive that she couldn’t have articulated herself. The recommendation she made wasn’t just accurate. It was generous. It said: I see you as a reader, and here’s something I think you’ll love.

That’s what a bookseller knows that algorithms don’t. Not more about books (Amazon knows more about books in aggregate than any human being ever could). But more about reading, about what it means to put a specific book in front of a specific person at a specific moment. That’s a human skill, and it’s one worth preserving.

We publish books because we believe they matter. Booksellers put those books into the hands of the people who need them. Without that last step, the whole chain is incomplete.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.

Here’s a number that surprises most people: the five largest publishers in the English-speaking world account for roughly sixty percent of all trade book revenue. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Between them, they dominate shelf space, media attention, and the prize ecosystem. If you pick up a book in an airport bookstore, odds are good that one of these five published it.

The other forty percent is split among thousands of independent presses, university presses, and self-published authors. We’re one of those thousands. ScrollWorks Media puts out ten to twelve titles a year. In the context of the industry, we’re small. Very small.

So why do we exist? Why does any independent publisher exist, when the big houses have more money, more reach, more marketing muscle, and more name recognition? It’s a fair question, and we think the honest answer is more complicated than the usual indie-publisher talking points about “passion” and “literary commitment.” Those things are true, but they’re not the whole story.

The consolidation problem

To understand why independent publishers matter, you have to understand what consolidation has done to the industry.

In 1990, there were dozens of major publishers in New York alone. By 2024, after decades of mergers and acquisitions, the field had narrowed dramatically. The attempted merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, which the Department of Justice blocked in 2022, would have created a publisher so large that it controlled nearly half the market for anticipated bestsellers.

Consolidation has consequences. When fewer companies make more of the decisions about what gets published, the range of voices in the marketplace narrows. Not because anyone sets out to narrow it, but because large organizations are risk-averse by nature. They have shareholders. They have quarterly targets. They make decisions through committees. The gravitational pull is always toward the safe bet: the established author, the proven genre, the book that looks like a book that already sold well.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an incentive structure. And it creates gaps.

The gaps we fill

Independent publishers exist in the gaps that consolidation creates. These gaps are real, and they’re bigger than most people realize.

There’s the gap of scale. A big publisher generally won’t acquire a book unless they think it can sell at least 10,000 to 20,000 copies. That’s a rough threshold, and it varies, but the principle holds: the larger the organization, the larger the minimum viable audience. This means books that might sell 3,000 to 8,000 copies, which is a lot of books, have no natural home at a major house.

Many of these are excellent books. They’re books with dedicated audiences who are hungry for them. But they don’t clear the commercial threshold that makes a big publisher’s accounting department comfortable. An independent press can publish these books profitably because our cost structure is different. We have less overhead. We don’t need a book to sell 20,000 copies to break even. We can make a book work at numbers that would be a rounding error for Penguin Random House.

There’s the gap of patience. Big publishers operate on tight timelines. A new hardcover has maybe three to six months to prove itself before it’s moved to the backlist and the marketing focus shifts to the next season’s titles. If a book is a slow starter, if it needs time to find its audience through word of mouth and hand-selling, it may never get that time at a large house.

We have the luxury of patience. Still Waters by Elena Marsh didn’t take off immediately. It sold modestly in its first few months. But we kept it in print, kept sending it to reviewers, kept talking about it. Eighteen months after publication, a bookseller in Portland started recommending it to every customer who walked through the door, and sales picked up. Two years in, it was one of the best-performing titles in our catalog. That kind of long arc is hard to sustain at a big house, where the attention has already moved on.

There’s the gap of risk tolerance. This is the one we think about most. Big publishers can afford to take big risks on individual titles; they have enough volume to absorb a failure. But they tend to take a certain kind of risk: big advances on books they believe will be big sellers. What they’re less likely to do is take a risk on something genuinely unusual, a book that doesn’t fit into an established category, a writer whose work is hard to describe in a pitch meeting.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is exactly this kind of book. It sits at the intersection of science writing, cultural criticism, and personal essay. It doesn’t have a clean comp title. When David’s agent (who is excellent) shopped it to big houses, the feedback was consistent: we love the writing, but we don’t know how to sell it. We said: we’ll figure it out. And we did, because we had the flexibility to position the book on its own terms rather than forcing it into an existing template.

The literary ecosystem argument

Think of publishing as an ecosystem. In any healthy ecosystem, you need diversity. You need large organisms and small ones. You need specialists and generalists. If the large organisms crowd out the small ones, the whole system becomes less resilient.

Independent publishers are the small organisms. We’re the ones experimenting at the margins, trying things that haven’t been tried, publishing voices that haven’t been heard. Many of these experiments fail. That’s fine. Some of them succeed, and when they do, they expand the range of what’s possible in publishing.

The history of American publishing is full of books that were first published by small presses and later became part of the cultural mainstream. Graywolf Press published the early work of several writers who went on to win major prizes. Milkweed Editions published environmental writing years before it became a mainstream category. Coffee House Press took risks on experimental fiction that larger publishers wouldn’t touch.

This pattern matters. Independent presses serve as the research and development wing of the publishing industry. We identify talent early. We take chances on forms and subjects that haven’t proven themselves commercially. We create a space where writers can develop without the pressure of immediate bestseller performance.

And yes, sometimes a big publisher comes along and offers one of our authors a deal we can’t match, and the author leaves. That stings. But it also means the system is working: the small press did its job of discovering and developing the talent, and the larger publisher can now bring that talent to a wider audience. We’d prefer to keep all our authors forever, obviously. But we’re realistic about how the ecosystem functions.

What we’re not saying

Let’s be clear about what we’re not arguing. We’re not saying independent publishers are morally superior to big publishers. We’re not saying small is always beautiful or that large is always corrupt. Big publishers put out plenty of wonderful books. They employ talented editors who care deeply about literature. Some of the best-edited books we’ve read in recent years came from major houses.

We’re also not saying that independent publishing is glamorous or easy. It isn’t. The pay is bad. The hours are long. The resources are thin. We’ve had years where the entire company’s profit margin was slimmer than the advance a single Big Five author received. There’s nothing romantic about worrying whether you can make payroll.

What we are saying is that a publishing landscape without independent presses would be impoverished. Not because big publishers are bad, but because they’re big, and bigness imposes constraints that limit what they can do. Small presses operate under different constraints, and those different constraints enable different things.

The author’s perspective

We hear from writers all the time who’ve been through the submission process at big houses and found it dispiriting. Not because anyone was unkind to them, but because the process is impersonal by nature. Your manuscript goes into a queue. It’s evaluated by an assistant. If it clears that hurdle, it goes to an editor. If the editor likes it, they take it to an editorial board. If the board approves, they make an offer. At every stage, the decision involves people who haven’t read the manuscript weighing in on commercial viability.

At a small press, the process is different. When you submit to us, your manuscript is read by the same people who will edit and publish it. If we say yes, you’ll work directly with a senior editor throughout the process. You’ll have a relationship with the people making decisions about your book’s cover, marketing, and positioning. You’ll be consulted, not just informed.

This matters to writers. Catherine Voss has said publicly that she chose to publish The Last Archive with us because she wanted to work closely with her editor, to have a real collaborative relationship rather than being one title among a hundred on a seasonal list. She could have gotten a larger advance elsewhere. She chose the relationship instead.

Not every writer makes that choice, and not every writer should. For some books and some careers, a big publisher is the right fit. But for writers who want close editorial collaboration, who want to be more than a line item on a P&L statement, an independent press offers something genuinely different.

The bookstore connection

Independent publishers and independent bookstores have a natural alliance, and it’s one of the most important relationships in the book world.

Big publishers have the muscle to get their books into chain stores and big-box retailers. Their sales teams negotiate for shelf placement and co-op advertising. An independent press can’t compete on those terms. Where we can compete is in the independent bookstore channel, where buying decisions are made by individual booksellers who actually read the books they stock.

These booksellers are our most valuable partners. They read advance copies. They write shelf talkers. They press books into the hands of customers who trust their judgment. A single enthusiastic bookseller can sell more copies of a small-press title in a year than a national advertising campaign, because the recommendation is personal and specific.

This relationship works in both directions. Independent bookstores need independent publishers because we provide the kind of books that differentiate them from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If every bookstore stocked only the same big-publisher titles, there would be no reason to shop at a neighborhood store. The quirky, distinctive titles from small presses are part of what makes independent bookstores worth visiting.

The challenges, honestly

We should be honest about what’s hard.

Distribution is hard. Getting books into stores is expensive and logistically complex. We use a national distributor, which gives us access to major retail channels, but we pay for that access, and the terms are not favorable to small publishers. Returns, the system by which bookstores can send back unsold books for a full refund, are a particular burden. When a bookstore orders a hundred copies and returns sixty, we eat the cost of shipping, handling, and damaged inventory.

Marketing is hard. We don’t have the budget for national advertising campaigns. We rely on reviews, social media, author events, and word of mouth. These strategies work, but they work slowly. A big publisher can create buzz around a new title through sheer spending power. We have to earn attention one reader at a time.

Cash flow is hard. Publishing is a business with long lag times. You commit to a book today, spend money on editing, design, and production over the next year, and don’t start seeing revenue for eighteen months to two years. For a small company with limited capital reserves, those gaps are stressful.

Keeping talent is hard. We can’t match Big Five salaries. The people who work here do it because they love the work, but love doesn’t pay rent in a major city. We’ve lost good people to bigger companies that could offer more, and while we understand that choice, it hurts every time.

Why we keep going

Given all that, why do we keep doing this? The answer is honestly pretty simple.

We keep going because of the books. Because of the moment when a manuscript arrives that makes everyone in the room sit up straighter. Because of the email from a reader who says that a book we published changed how they think about something. Because of the review that articulates exactly what we hoped the book would do.

We keep going because the books we publish wouldn’t exist, or wouldn’t exist in the same form, without us. That’s not arrogance; it’s just a fact about how the industry works. Some books need a small publisher to exist. They need the attention, the patience, the willingness to take a chance on something unusual.

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is a historical novel that took seven years to write. It required extensive fact-checking and a level of editorial care that a larger house, with tighter timelines and higher volume, might not have been able to provide. We gave that book the time and attention it needed, and the result is something we’re all proud of.

We keep going because we believe that a diverse publishing ecosystem is better than a consolidated one, not just for readers and writers, but for the culture as a whole. Books matter. Who publishes them, and how, and under what conditions, matters too. We’re doing our small part to keep the ecosystem healthy, and as long as we can sustain the business, we’ll keep doing it.

That’s the truth of it. No grand claims. No pretension. Just a small company doing work we believe in, one book at a time.

Written by Marcus Rivera, Publisher at ScrollWorks Media.

Over the past year, I have had long, candid conversations with independent booksellers across the country. Not formal interviews with tape recorders. More like dinners, phone calls, and after-hours drinks at book fairs where people let their guard down. I wanted to understand what small and mid-size publishers like ScrollWorks could do better from the perspective of the people who actually put our books into readers’ hands.

What follows is a distillation of those conversations. I have not attributed quotes to specific individuals because several booksellers asked for anonymity. They work with publishers daily and did not want their honesty to create awkwardness. I have respected that, while trying to preserve the directness of what they told me.

“Stop Sending Us Books We Did Not Ask For”

This came up in almost every conversation. Publishers send unsolicited copies to bookstores constantly, and most of them go into a pile that nobody looks at. One bookseller in the Pacific Northwest told me she receives between ten and twenty unsolicited books a week. “I do not have time to evaluate them,” she said. “They sit in a box in the back until I feel guilty and take them to the library donation bin.”

The issue is not generosity. Booksellers appreciate that publishers want to get books in front of them. The issue is relevance. A literary fiction specialist does not need unsolicited copies of self-help books. A children’s bookstore does not need adult thrillers. The scattershot approach wastes money for the publisher and time for the bookseller.

What booksellers want instead is targeted outreach. A short email describing an upcoming title, why it might be a good fit for their specific store, and an offer to send a copy if they are interested. This takes more effort than bulk mailing, but the conversion rate is dramatically higher. At ScrollWorks, we have moved entirely to this model. When we were preparing to ship ARCs of Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, our publicist researched each independent bookstore on our list and only sent copies to stores that had a track record of hand-selling literary historical fiction. Every copy we sent was requested.

“Your Metadata Is a Mess”

This surprised me, but it came up repeatedly. Book metadata, the information that flows through distribution systems and appears in bookstore ordering platforms, is frequently incomplete, inaccurate, or late.

One bookseller in the Midwest put it bluntly: “I cannot sell a book I cannot find in the system. If your metadata is wrong, your book does not exist to me.” He described cases where ISBNs were entered incorrectly, publication dates were wrong, or the book’s description was either missing entirely or clearly copied from an early draft that no longer matched the final product.

Another bookseller told me about ordering a book based on its online description, only to receive something quite different. “The description said literary fiction. The book was more genre romance. My customer was confused, I looked unprofessional, and the book got returned.” Metadata errors like this erode trust between booksellers and publishers, and they are entirely preventable.

Good metadata includes accurate descriptions, correct categorization, proper keyword tagging, the right publication date, and up-to-date author bios. It also includes comparison titles, which help booksellers understand the market positioning. We have started treating metadata as an editorial product at ScrollWorks, giving it the same attention and review process we give to cover copy. It has made a noticeable difference in how booksellers respond to our titles.

“We Need More Time With the Book Before Launch”

Several booksellers told me that publishers frequently contact them about a new title only a few weeks before the publication date. By that point, the bookseller has already made their purchasing decisions for the month. Their shelf space is allocated. Their staff picks are planned. Even if the book sounds interesting, it is too late to give it meaningful support.

“I need three to four months,” one bookseller said. “Ideally, I want an ARC four months out so I have time to read it, form an opinion, and plan how to feature it in my store. When a publisher contacts me two weeks before pub date, I can maybe squeeze in an order, but I am not going to hand-sell a book I have not read.”

Hand-selling is the lifeblood of independent bookstores. It is what separates them from online retailers. A bookseller who has read a book and loves it can move dozens of copies by personally recommending it to customers. But that requires lead time. The bookseller needs to read the book, think about which customers would enjoy it, and integrate it into their mental catalog of recommendations. None of that happens in two weeks.

This is something we have taken to heart. When we were preparing the launch of Still Waters by Elena Marsh, we sent ARCs to our priority booksellers a full four months ahead of the pub date. Several of them became passionate advocates for the book, and their recommendations drove a significant percentage of our first-month sales.

“Tell Us Why the Book Matters, Not Just What It Is About”

Booksellers receive pitches constantly, and most of them are interchangeable. “Here is a new literary novel about a family coming to terms with loss.” “Here is a non-fiction book about technology and society.” These descriptions are accurate but meaningless. They describe hundreds of books.

What booksellers want to know is what makes this particular book different. Why should they care about it? What is the author doing that has not been done before, or doing differently than other writers in the same space? What specific readers in their store would respond to it?

A bookseller in New England told me about a pitch that worked: “A publisher wrote to me saying, ‘This novel is going to be compared to The Remains of the Day, but it is set in a modern archive, and the unreliable narrator is a woman who does not realize she is unreliable. If you have customers who like literary mystery with zero violence, this is the book.’” She ordered it immediately. The specificity of the pitch told her everything she needed to know.

Compare that to a generic pitch: “A compelling new literary novel that explores memory and identity.” That describes approximately four thousand books published this year. It gives the bookseller nothing to work with.

We have restructured our bookseller communications around this insight. Every pitch now includes three things: a specific comparison that identifies the book’s neighborhood, a one-sentence description of what makes it distinctive, and a description of the reader who would love it. It requires more thought than a generic blurb, but it gets results.

“Respect Our Shelf Space”

Independent bookstores have limited physical space. Every book on the shelf represents a decision, and every decision has an opportunity cost. When a bookseller gives face-out placement to your title, they are not displaying one other book. When they put it on their staff picks table, they are choosing it over dozens of alternatives.

“Publishers do not always understand how precious shelf space is,” one bookseller told me. “When I commit to carrying a title, I am making a bet. I am betting that this book will sell enough copies to justify the space it occupies. If it does not sell, I am stuck with inventory that I cannot move, and I have lost the opportunity to display something that might have sold better.”

This has implications for how publishers handle returns, co-op programs, and reorder processes. Several booksellers mentioned that the returns process is too slow and too cumbersome. “If a book is not moving after six weeks, I need to return it and replace it with something else,” one said. “When the returns process takes two months, I am holding dead inventory for that entire time.”

Another bookseller raised the issue of overprinting. “When a publisher prints too many copies and pushes them into stores, the bookseller bears the cost of slow sales. I would rather a publisher tell me honestly that a book will appeal to a niche audience and let me order accordingly, than overhype it and leave me with thirty unsold copies.”

At ScrollWorks, we try to be honest with booksellers about our expectations for each title. When we published The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo, we told booksellers upfront that it was a non-fiction title with a specific audience: readers interested in maps, geography, and how knowledge systems shape our understanding of the world. We did not try to position it as a mass-market bestseller. The booksellers who ordered it did so with clear expectations, and sell-through was strong because the right stores were carrying it for the right customers.

“Author Events Should Sell Books, Not Just Draw Crowds”

Author events are a staple of the publisher-bookseller relationship, and booksellers had a lot to say about how they work (and do not work).

The consensus was that events need to be designed around sales, not just attendance. “I have had events with a hundred people where we sold ten books,” one bookseller said. “And I have had events with twenty people where we sold forty books. The difference is not crowd size. It is whether the audience came to buy a book or just to see an author speak.”

What makes a sales-driven event? According to the booksellers I spoke with, a few things matter. The author needs to be engaging and personable. The event should include a book-signing component, because people who get their book signed are less likely to return it. Pre-event promotion should emphasize the book, not just the author’s celebrity or credentials. And the bookseller should have enough copies on hand to meet demand, which requires the publisher to communicate realistic attendance estimates.

Several booksellers also mentioned that publishers sometimes schedule events at stores without checking whether the store wants to host one. “An event requires staff time, setup, cleanup, and promotion,” one said. “If a publisher just tells me an author is available next Tuesday, that is not enough lead time and it is not enough collaboration. The best events are planned together, months in advance, with both sides invested in making it work.”

One bookseller shared a positive example that stuck with me. A publisher called her three months before a book’s release and said, “We have a debut novelist who grew up in your city. She has local connections and we think an event at your store could be special. Can we plan this together?” They did, and the event sold out. “That is how it should work,” she said. “Partnership, not instruction.”

“Digital Is Not the Enemy, but Stop Pretending It Does Not Exist”

This one came with some heat. Independent booksellers live in a world where Amazon is their primary competitor, and they are tired of publishers acting like the digital marketplace does not exist, or worse, like it is someone else’s problem.

“When a publisher prices an ebook at the same price as the hardcover, it hurts us,” one bookseller said. “Because the customer sees the ebook price, assumes the physical book is overpriced, and buys neither. Or they buy the ebook and never walk into my store.” The pricing relationship between formats affects bookseller viability, and booksellers feel that publishers do not always consider this when setting prices.

Multiple booksellers also mentioned that publisher websites often link to Amazon for purchasing. “If a publisher’s own website sends customers to Amazon, what message does that send about their commitment to independent bookstores?” one asked. Several said they appreciated publishers who include Bookshop.org links or indie bookstore finders on their websites alongside (or instead of) Amazon links.

At ScrollWorks, this feedback has made us rethink our online presence. When we link to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners or any other title, we try to provide multiple purchasing options. We want our readers to have choices, and we want independent booksellers to know that we value their role in the ecosystem.

“Small Publishers Are Our Best Partners, If They Show Up”

This was the most encouraging thing I heard. Multiple booksellers said that their best publishing relationships are with small and mid-size houses, not the Big Five. The reason is personal attention.

“When I call a big publisher’s sales rep, I am one of two hundred accounts,” one bookseller said. “When I call a small publisher, I talk to someone who knows my store and my customers. That personal relationship is enormously valuable. It helps me sell books because I trust the publisher’s recommendations.”

But several booksellers added a caveat: small publishers need to be reliable. Missed ship dates, incorrect invoices, and unresponsive customer service erode the trust that personal relationships build. “I love working with small presses,” one bookseller said, “but I need them to be professional. Answer my emails. Ship on time. Send me accurate invoices. These are basic things, and they matter more than any fancy marketing campaign.”

Another bookseller put it more bluntly: “The small publishers who show up consistently are the ones I champion. I will hand-sell their books every day. The ones who are unreliable, no matter how good their books are, get moved to the back of the shelf.”

What We Are Doing With This Feedback

These conversations have changed how we operate at ScrollWorks. We have overhauled our metadata process. We have moved to opt-in ARC distribution. We are giving booksellers more lead time with our titles. We are writing better, more specific pitches. We are being honest about each book’s audience and market positioning.

None of this is complicated. Most of it comes down to respect: respecting booksellers’ time, their expertise, and their role in connecting readers with books. Independent bookstores are where literary culture lives at the local level. They are the places where a bookseller can put The Last Archive into the hands of a reader who will love it, or recommend Still Waters to someone going through a difficult time, or suggest The Cartographer’s Dilemma to a curious mind looking for something different.

Those interactions are irreplaceable. No algorithm can do what a good bookseller does. And as publishers, our job is to make their work easier, not harder. I am grateful to every bookseller who spoke honestly with me, and I am committed to acting on what they said. The publishing industry only works if every link in the chain, from author to editor to publisher to bookseller to reader, is strong. Strengthening the publisher-bookseller link is work worth doing.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I read seventy-three books last year. That number sounds impressive until I tell you that I remember maybe eight of them well enough to have a real conversation about what was in them. The rest left a vague residue: a feeling, a fragment of plot, an image or two. Gone within weeks.

This bothered me enough that I started paying attention to how I read, not just what I read. And what I found was that I’d become, without realizing it, a speed reader. Not in the formal sense of someone who took a course and learned to scan lines of text. In the cultural sense. I’d absorbed the ambient message that more is better, that a long reading list is a mark of a serious person, and that the point of picking up a book is to get through it.

Getting through it. As if a book were an obstacle between you and the next book.

I think a lot of readers have ended up in the same place. Not deliberately, but gradually. And I think something real is lost when we read this way.

When speed became the default

There’s always been a competitive element to reading. Samuel Johnson was famous for tearing through books. Theodore Roosevelt supposedly read a book a day during his presidency. But the modern version of this competition feels different. It’s quantified. Goodreads has a yearly reading challenge. Bookstagram accounts announce their monthly tallies. End-of-year lists are measured in volume as much as quality.

None of this is inherently bad. Setting reading goals can be motivating. Sharing what you’ve read builds community. The problem arises when the number becomes the point, when you start choosing shorter books to stay on pace, or when you feel guilty about spending three weeks with a novel that deserves three weeks.

The speed reading industry is part of this, though it’s been around longer than social media. Courses and apps promise to double or triple your reading speed with techniques like chunking, minimizing subvocalization, and using a pointer to guide your eyes. These techniques work, in the narrow sense that they increase the number of words your eyes pass over per minute. Whether they increase comprehension or retention is another question, and the research on that is not encouraging.

A 2016 study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest reviewed decades of speed reading research and concluded that there’s a fundamental trade-off between speed and understanding. You can go faster, but you’ll understand less. The authors were blunt about it: there is no free lunch when it comes to reading speed.

What slow reading actually means

When I talk about slow reading, I don’t mean anything mystical or precious. I don’t mean reading by candlelight while wearing a velvet robe. I mean paying attention. Reading at the speed of thought rather than the speed of ambition.

In practice, this looks like several things.

It means reading a sentence and sitting with it before moving to the next one. Not every sentence. Some sentences are functional; they move you from one idea to the next and don’t need lingering over. But some sentences contain an entire world, and if you blast past them at full speed, you miss it.

It means rereading paragraphs that didn’t fully land. Not because you’re a slow reader, but because the writer put something there that rewards a second look. Good prose is layered. A fast read catches the surface. A slow read catches the rest.

It means putting the book down periodically to think about what you just read. This drives some people crazy. They want momentum. They want the narrative pull that carries them forward. And I get that. There’s real pleasure in being swept along by a book. But there’s also pleasure in stopping to ask: what just happened there? Why did the writer make that choice? How does this passage change what came before it?

It means, sometimes, reading out loud. This is the one that draws the most skepticism, so let me make the case. Prose has a rhythm. Good prose has a specific, intentional rhythm that you can hear. When you read silently, especially at speed, you flatten that rhythm. When you read aloud, even in a whisper, you feel it. The cadence, the weight of certain words, the way a long sentence gives way to a short one. These things are part of the reading experience. They’re part of what the writer crafted. Speed reading erases them.

A book that changed when I slowed down

I want to be specific, because this isn’t an abstract argument for me.

Three years ago I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for the first time. I read it quickly. I thought it was fine. Beautiful prose, not much plot, a quiet book about a quiet man. I put it on my yearly list and moved on.

Last year I picked it up again because a friend insisted I’d missed something. I read it slowly this time. Two, maybe three chapters a night. I’d stop when a passage struck me and sit with it. I’d reread the letters the narrator writes to his son, paying attention not just to what he says but to what he doesn’t say, to the gaps and silences.

It was a different book. Or rather, it was the same book and I was a different reader. The grief in it, the complicated love, the theological wrestling that I’d breezed past the first time, all of it opened up because I gave it space to open. I finished it shaken in a way I hadn’t been by a novel in years.

I’m not saying you have to read every book this way. Some books are meant to be consumed quickly. Thrillers, for instance, are engineered for speed; slowing down can actually work against their design. But literary fiction, poetry, serious nonfiction, memoir: these forms reward patience in ways that speed undermines.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is another book that works this way. It’s a memoir built on accumulation, on small details that gather weight over pages and chapters. Rush through it and you’ll think it’s pleasant but slight. Read it slowly and the emotional architecture reveals itself. The book is doing something careful and deliberate, and it asks for a reader willing to be careful and deliberate in return.

The economics working against slow reading

I don’t want to be naïve about why people read fast. Time is finite. Most adults are busy. The list of books you want to read grows faster than you can possibly shrink it. Reading faster feels like a rational response to a genuine problem.

There’s also the publishing industry itself, which produces an enormous number of new titles every year. In the United States alone, somewhere around 500,000 new books are published annually. That number includes self-published titles and academic works, but even filtering for trade books, the number is staggering. The sheer volume creates pressure to keep up, to stay current, to have read the thing everyone’s talking about.

Social media amplifies this. Book recommendations cycle through feeds at the speed of every other kind of content. A book has maybe two weeks in the cultural spotlight before the conversation moves on. If you haven’t read it by then, you feel left out. So you read faster, finish sooner, move to the next one.

The result is a kind of treadmill. You read more but enjoy it less. You accumulate titles but not experiences. You can list what you’ve read but not articulate what it did to you.

What we lose at speed

Let me try to name specifically what’s lost when we read too fast.

We lose subtext. Most good writing operates on at least two levels: what’s being said and what’s being implied. Speed reading catches the first level and mostly misses the second. In a novel, this means missing the emotional undercurrents between characters. In nonfiction, it means missing the qualifications and complications that make an argument honest rather than simplistic.

We lose the writer’s craft. This is an aesthetic loss. A beautifully constructed paragraph, a perfectly placed image, a transition that does something clever with time, all of these become invisible at speed. You might register them unconsciously, but you don’t experience them. It’s like walking through a museum at a jog. You see the paintings, technically. But you don’t look at them.

We lose the internal conversation. Reading, real reading, is a dialogue between the book and the reader’s own experience. When you slow down, you bring your own life to the text. You remember things. You make connections. You argue with the author. You feel things you didn’t expect to feel. Speed reading short-circuits this process. The book washes over you instead of engaging you.

We lose retention. This is the most measurable loss. If you read a book at speed and can’t recall its main arguments or its plot six months later, what was the point? You spent the time. You didn’t get the benefit. Slower reading, with pauses for reflection, produces better long-term memory. This isn’t mysticism. It’s cognitive science.

The rereading question

Rereading is the most radical form of slow reading, and it’s become almost countercultural. The assumption in reading culture is that rereading is a waste of time. There are too many new books to read; why go back to one you’ve already read?

I understand this argument. I also think it’s wrong.

When you reread a book, you’re not having the same experience again. You’ve changed since the first reading. The world has changed. The book hasn’t, but the reader has, and reading is always a collaboration between the two. A novel you read at twenty-two and a novel you read again at forty-two will feel like two different books, because in some real sense, they are.

Vladimir Nabokov, who knew something about reading, argued that the only way to read a book is to reread it. The first time, he said, you’re just getting oriented. You’re learning the landscape. The second time, you actually begin to see.

I wouldn’t go as far as Nabokov. Some books give you everything on the first pass. But the ones that don’t, the ones that feel like they have more going on than you were able to absorb, those books are asking to be reread. And rereading them is a better use of your time than racing through three new books you’ll forget by next month.

Practical suggestions for slowing down

If you’re convinced, even partially, here are some things that have helped me.

Drop your reading goal, or at least stop counting. I deleted the Goodreads reading challenge from my profile. It felt like a small rebellion, and it removed a source of pressure I didn’t need. I still track what I read, but I don’t set a number. The absence of a target changed how I read almost immediately.

Read physical books when possible. Screens encourage skimming. The scroll gesture, the blue light, the proximity of notifications, all of it pushes you toward speed. A physical book has a different tempo. You can’t scroll it. You can only turn pages, and the physical act of turning a page creates natural pauses.

Give yourself permission to abandon books. This sounds like the opposite of slow reading advice, but it isn’t. If you’re not enjoying a book or getting something from it, put it down. The point of slow reading isn’t to slog through everything at half speed. It’s to give your full attention to the books that deserve it. Life is too short to read books you don’t care about, slowly or otherwise.

Read with a pencil. Marginalia forces engagement. You can’t annotate at full speed. The act of underlining a sentence or writing a note in the margin pulls you out of passive consumption and into active reading. If you’re using a library book, keep a notebook nearby instead.

Try reading the same book at different times of day. This sounds odd, but I’ve found that a book reads differently in the morning than at night. Morning reading tends to be more analytical. Evening reading tends to be more emotional. Both are valid. Both reveal different things.

Talk about what you’re reading. Not in a performative way, but genuinely. Tell a friend about the chapter you just finished. Try to articulate what it made you think or feel. This forces you to process what you’ve read, which deepens your engagement with the text.

The deeper question

Behind all of this is a question about what reading is for.

If reading is for information transfer, then speed makes sense. You want the data. Get it fast. Move on. There are plenty of things worth reading this way: news articles, emails, instruction manuals, most of what crosses your screen in a given day.

But if reading is for something more, for the experience of being inside another person’s consciousness, for the slow alteration of your own thinking and feeling, for the pleasure of language itself, then speed works against you. You’re optimizing for the wrong variable.

I think about this a lot in relation to the books we publish at ScrollWorks. When Catherine Voss wrote The Last Archive, she spent four years crafting sentences that reward close attention. Every paragraph has been worked and reworked. The prose is dense, not in the sense of being difficult, but in the sense of being rich. There’s a lot happening on every page. A speed reader will get the plot. A slow reader will get the experience.

The same is true of James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, which uses historical detail the way a painter uses brushstrokes. You can step back and see the big picture. But if you lean in, the detail itself is where the art lives.

These books were written slowly. They deserve to be read slowly. That’s not a marketing pitch. It’s a statement about what the books are.

A modest proposal

I’m not asking anyone to give up speed reading entirely. Sometimes you need to get through a book quickly. Sometimes the book itself doesn’t warrant deep attention. Reading is not a monolith; it’s a collection of practices, and different practices suit different situations.

What I am suggesting is balance. If you read fifty books this year and remember five of them, consider reading twenty-five next year and remembering fifteen. The math of enrichment doesn’t work the way the math of productivity does. More is not always more.

Pick one book this month and read it slowly. Really slowly. A chapter a day, or less. Read it with a pencil. Read some of it aloud. Put it down when you need to think. Come back to it. Let it work on you the way good books are supposed to: gradually, cumulatively, changing you in ways you don’t notice until you’re done and you realize you see something differently than you did before.

That’s what reading can be. Not a race. Not a list. Not a performance. Just a conversation between you and a book, with all the time in the world.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.

Every week, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five manuscripts land in our submissions queue. Some arrive through agents we know well. Others come over the transom from writers we’ve never heard of. A few are referrals from authors we’ve already published. By the end of most months, we’ll have looked at roughly eighty to a hundred prospects, and we’ll say yes to maybe two or three.

That rejection rate bothers us. Not because we think we’re wrong to pass on so many projects, but because every submission represents months or years of someone’s life. We take that seriously, even when the answer is no.

People sometimes ask what our secret formula is, what checklist we run through, what algorithm we use. The honest answer is messier than that. We do have principles. We have patterns we’ve noticed over the years. But we don’t have a formula, and anyone who claims to have one is probably selling something.

What follows is as honest an account as we can offer of how books end up on our list, and how so many others don’t.

The first read is fast, and that’s okay

We don’t read every submission cover to cover. That would be impossible given the volume, and frankly, it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The first pass is quick. Someone on our editorial team reads the query letter, the synopsis, and the first thirty pages. Sometimes fewer.

This sounds brutal, and in some ways it is. But here’s the thing: thirty pages is a lot. If a novel hasn’t found its footing by page thirty, that’s a real problem. Not an insurmountable one, but a real one. We’ve occasionally asked writers to revise and resubmit when we liked the concept but the opening didn’t land. A few of those turned into books we’re proud of.

What are we looking for in those first pages? Voice, mostly. A sense that the writer has something specific to say and a particular way of saying it. We can teach structure. We can help with pacing. We can suggest cuts and additions. But voice is the one thing that has to be there from the start. If the prose feels generic, if it could have been written by anyone, we’re probably going to pass.

This is where we’ve made mistakes, by the way. There have been manuscripts we rejected because the opening was flat, only to see the book published elsewhere and do well. It stings every time. We’ve gotten better at reading past a weak opening to find the voice underneath, but we still miss things. Every publisher does.

What we mean when we talk about voice

Voice is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot without much precision. We should be specific about what we mean.

When we say voice, we mean the quality that makes a reader feel like they’re in the presence of a specific human intelligence. It’s the accumulated effect of word choice, sentence rhythm, the things a writer notices and the things they skip over, their sense of humor (or lack thereof), their relationship with the reader.

Catherine Voss has a voice you’d recognize within a paragraph. When we first read the manuscript for The Last Archive, what struck us wasn’t the plot (which is excellent) or the setting (which is vivid). It was the particular quality of her attention. She notices things most writers don’t, and she describes them in ways that feel both precise and slightly off-kilter. That’s voice.

James Whitfield’s voice is completely different. Echoes of Iron has a measured, deliberate cadence to it. His sentences tend to be longer and more architecturally complex. He’ll build a paragraph the way a mason builds a wall, each sentence supporting the next. You feel the weight of research behind every line, but it never reads like a textbook.

We can’t tell you what “good voice” sounds like in the abstract. We can only tell you that we know it when we hear it, and that it’s different every time.

The question we keep coming back to

After voice, the question we ask most often is: does this book need to exist?

That sounds harsh. It isn’t meant to be. Lots of perfectly competent books get published every year that don’t really need to exist. They’re fine. They’re readable. They fill a slot in a catalog. But they don’t add anything new to the conversation.

We’re a small publisher. We put out maybe ten to twelve titles a year. That means every book we publish is a book we’re choosing over dozens of others. So the bar has to be: is this book saying something that isn’t already being said? Is it looking at something familiar from an angle we haven’t seen before?

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is a good example. When we first got the proposal, we had a room full of people who weren’t sure there was space for another book about how science intersects with culture. The topic has been well-covered. But David’s approach was so particular, so rooted in his own experience as a cartographer turned science writer, that the book carved out territory (pun intended) that no one else had claimed.

We’ve also passed on books that were perfectly good but felt duplicative. A well-written memoir that covered ground already covered by ten other memoirs that year. A novel with a fresh voice but a plot we’d seen three times in the past six months. This isn’t a judgment of quality. It’s a judgment of timing and positioning, and it’s one of the harder calls we make.

The role of market thinking (and its limits)

We’d be lying if we said we don’t think about the market. We do. We have to. Publishing is a business, and we can’t keep the lights on by publishing books nobody buys.

But market thinking has real limits, and we’ve learned this the hard way.

Early on, we made the mistake of chasing trends. A certain kind of book was selling well, so we acquired something similar. By the time our version came out eighteen months later, the trend had moved on and we were stuck with a book that felt like yesterday’s news. We lost money. More importantly, we published a book we weren’t passionate about, and readers could tell.

Now our approach to market thinking is more like a negative screen. We ask: is there a reason this book can’t find an audience? If the answer is yes (it’s too niche, the timing is wrong, the category is oversaturated), we think hard about whether to proceed. But we don’t try to predict what will be popular eighteen months from now. Nobody can.

The books that have done best for us have generally been the ones we loved most, not the ones we thought were most marketable. Still Waters by Elena Marsh is a memoir that doesn’t fit neatly into any trending category. It’s quiet. It’s introspective. It doesn’t have a hook you can summarize in a tweet. But it’s beautiful and true, and readers have found it, slowly but steadily.

That’s the bet we keep making: that quality finds an audience, even if it takes time.

What agents do (and don’t) matter for

We accept both agented and unagented submissions. This is unusual for a publisher our size, and there are days we wonder if we should change the policy. Unagented submissions take more work to evaluate because there’s no filter between the writer and us.

But some of our best books have come from the slush pile. Writers without agents, without connections, without MFA degrees, who just wrote something remarkable and sent it in. Closing that door would mean missing those books, and we’re not willing to do that.

That said, a good agent does real work. They help shape a manuscript before we ever see it. They know our list and our taste, so they’re less likely to send us something wildly inappropriate. And they handle the business side in a way that lets the writer focus on writing.

What an agent doesn’t do, at least from our perspective, is guarantee quality. We’ve received plenty of agented manuscripts that weren’t right for us. And the agent’s reputation doesn’t sway our decision. The manuscript has to stand on its own.

The editorial meeting where it all comes together

Once a manuscript makes it past the first read, it goes to our full editorial team. Currently, that’s five people. Each person reads the manuscript independently and comes to our weekly meeting with notes.

These meetings are the part of the process we enjoy most, and also the part where things get most contentious. We’ve had genuine arguments. Voices raised. One memorable meeting involved someone leaving the room for fifteen minutes to cool down. (The book in question did get published. It did well.)

We don’t vote. We don’t have a formal scoring system. We talk. We argue. We try to persuade each other. If someone feels strongly that a book is right for our list, they make their case. If someone feels strongly that it isn’t, they make theirs.

Usually, a consensus emerges. Not always agreement, but consensus. There’s a difference. Agreement means everyone is enthusiastic. Consensus means everyone can live with the decision, even if some people have reservations.

The books we’ve been most proud of tend to be the ones where at least one person in the room was a passionate advocate. Lukewarm consensus rarely produces great results. We want someone banging the table.

Red flags in submissions

Since people always ask, here are the things that make us nervous about a submission. These aren’t automatic rejections, but they’re warning signs.

A query letter that spends more time on marketing strategy than on the book itself. We appreciate that you’ve thought about audience, but if your letter reads like a business plan, we worry that the book is a product first and a work of art second.

Comp titles that are all massive bestsellers. If you describe your novel as “The Goldfinch meets Where the Crawdads Sing,” you’re not helping us understand your book. You’re telling us you want to be a bestseller. Everyone wants that. Tell us what’s specific about your work instead.

A manuscript that’s been through six or seven rounds of beta readers and shows it. Over-workshopped prose has a distinctive quality: it’s smooth and competent and utterly lifeless. All the interesting rough edges have been sanded away. We’d rather see something messy and alive than something polished and dead.

Writers who tell us their book is “unlike anything you’ve ever read.” It probably isn’t, and that’s fine. Every book exists in conversation with other books. Acknowledging your influences and predecessors is a sign of maturity, not weakness.

A cover letter that mentions platform metrics before mentioning the book. Your Instagram following is not irrelevant, but if it’s the first thing you bring up, we have questions about your priorities.

Green flags, or what makes us lean forward

On the other side, here’s what gets us excited.

A query letter that sounds like a person, not a template. We can always tell when someone has downloaded a “How to Write a Query Letter” guide and followed it to the letter. Those letters are functional. They’re also forgettable. The ones that stick with us have personality. They take small risks. They show us who the writer is, not just what the book is about.

A manuscript where we can feel the writer’s obsession. The best books come from writers who couldn’t not write them. There’s a quality of urgency, of deep investment, that’s hard to fake and easy to recognize.

Strong opening sentences. Not gimmicky ones, not “It was the best of times” imitations, but sentences that establish voice and tone immediately. Elena Marsh’s Still Waters opens with a sentence so quiet and confident that we knew within ten words we were in good hands.

Subject matter the writer has genuine authority to address. This doesn’t mean you need a PhD. It means you need to have lived with your subject long enough to have real things to say about it. David Okonkwo spent twenty years as a working cartographer before writing The Cartographer’s Dilemma. That depth of experience is on every page.

The books that got away

We should talk about our mistakes, because we’ve made plenty.

There are books we passed on that went on to do well at other houses. At least two that became bestsellers. One that won a prize we won’t name because it still hurts to think about.

In most of these cases, the reason we passed was defensible at the time. The manuscript needed more revision than we could commit to. The subject matter felt too risky for our list. The timing was wrong. These were reasonable judgments that turned out to be wrong.

The lesson we’ve drawn is not to be less cautious. It’s to be more honest about the limits of our judgment. We’re pretty good at recognizing quality. We’re not good at predicting success. Those are different skills, and conflating them has cost us.

There have also been books we acquired that didn’t work out. Books we loved editorially that readers didn’t connect with. Books where we misjudged the market or failed to support them adequately after publication. These failures teach us more than our successes, though they’re harder to talk about.

How diversity fits into our selection process

We’re conscious of whose voices we’re amplifying. Publishing has a well-documented diversity problem, and we don’t pretend to have solved it. But we do make deliberate efforts to read widely across communities and backgrounds, to solicit submissions from writers who might not think of sending work to a small press, and to examine our own biases when they surface.

What we don’t do is treat diversity as a checkbox. We don’t acquire a book because it fills a demographic slot on our list. That would be patronizing to the writer and unfair to the work. We acquire books because they’re excellent, and we try to make sure our definition of excellence isn’t inadvertently narrow.

This is ongoing work. We’re better at it than we were five years ago. We’ll be better at it five years from now. But we’re honest about the fact that it’s a process, not a destination.

The financial calculation

Every book we publish represents a financial risk. Editing, design, printing, distribution, marketing: a single title can easily cost us $30,000 to $50,000 before a single copy sells. For a small press, that’s a meaningful number.

So yes, when we’re evaluating a manuscript, we’re thinking about whether we can sell it. Not in a cynical way, but in a practical one. Can we write jacket copy that will make people pick it up? Can we describe it in a way that makes bookstore buyers want to stock it? Is there a clear audience, even if it’s not a huge one?

We’ve learned that small, well-defined audiences are better than vague, large ones. A book that will sell 5,000 copies to dedicated readers of literary fiction is a better bet for us than a book that might sell 50,000 copies if everything goes right but probably won’t.

Sustainability is the word we use a lot internally. We don’t need every book to be a hit. We need our list, taken as a whole, to sustain the business so we can keep publishing the kinds of books we believe in.

What we wish more writers knew

If we could tell every submitting writer one thing, it would be this: rejection from us is not a verdict on your talent. It’s a decision about fit. We reject manuscripts we admire all the time, because they’re not right for our list, or because we don’t have the resources to do them justice, or because someone else on the team feels more strongly about a different submission that season.

The publishing process selects for persistence. Not in a romantic “keep trying and you’ll succeed” way, but in a practical one. The writers who get published are usually the ones who kept sending work out after the fifteenth rejection, who revised when they got useful feedback, who treated setbacks as information rather than verdicts.

We also wish more writers read widely in the area where they’re writing. If you’re submitting a literary novel, you should know what’s been published in the last five years by presses like ours. Not to imitate, but to understand the conversation you’re entering. The best submissions we receive show an awareness of the landscape, a sense of where the writer fits into the broader ecosystem of contemporary publishing.

And please, follow the submission guidelines. Every publisher has them. They exist for a reason. When someone ignores ours, it suggests either carelessness or a belief that the rules don’t apply to them. Neither is a good look.

The part that still surprises us

After years of doing this, the thing that still catches us off guard is how a manuscript can change our minds. We’ll start reading something with low expectations, maybe because the query was weak or the premise didn’t grab us, and fifty pages in we’ll realize we’re reading something special.

That’s why we keep reading, even when the volume feels overwhelming. Because the next great book might be sitting in our inbox right now, disguised as something ordinary. And the job of a publisher, the real job, is to recognize it when it arrives.

We don’t have a formula. We have instincts, shaped by years of reading and arguing and being wrong. We have a commitment to quality that sometimes costs us commercially. And we have each other: a small team of people who care deeply about books and who hold each other accountable.

If you’re thinking about submitting to us, or to any publisher, know that there are people on the other side of the process who take it seriously. We might say no. We probably will say no. But we’ll read your work with genuine attention and respect, and if it’s right for us, we’ll fight for it.

That’s the best promise we can make.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. If you have questions about our submissions process, visit our contact page.

Nobody in publishing likes to talk about this. There are hundreds of articles about how books get acquired, how they’re edited, how they’re marketed. There are interviews with bestselling authors, profiles of legendary editors, features about the magic of the book-making process. But the industry is remarkably quiet about what happens when none of that works. When the reviews don’t come. When the sales are disappointing. When a book you believed in lands with a thud.

I want to talk about it, because I think the silence around commercial failure does real harm. It harms authors, who feel isolated and ashamed when their book doesn’t sell. It harms aspiring writers, who have unrealistic expectations about what publication means. And it harms the industry itself, which perpetuates a fantasy of meritocratic success that doesn’t match reality. Most books don’t sell well. That’s the truth. Let me explain what that actually looks like from the inside.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Hear

The statistics on book sales are genuinely sobering. According to various industry analyses over the years, the median number of copies sold by a traditionally published book in the U.S. is somewhere around a few thousand copies over its lifetime. Many books sell fewer than one thousand copies. Bestsellers, the books you see stacked on tables at Barnes & Noble, represent a tiny fraction of all titles published.

At ScrollWorks, we’re a small press, and our expectations are calibrated accordingly. We don’t expect every title to sell 50,000 copies. But even with realistic expectations, some books underperform. I’ve published books that I thought were brilliant, that received strong reviews, that our team worked tirelessly to promote, and that still sold under 2,000 copies in their first year. This is a painful experience for everyone involved, but especially for the author.

The financial reality is stark. An author who receives a $10,000 advance (which is fairly standard for a debut at a small-to-medium press) and whose book sells 1,500 copies has earned about $6.60 an hour for the time they spent writing it, assuming it took them a year. Less than minimum wage. And that’s before taxes. The advance is the only money most authors will ever see from their book, because most books never “earn out” (sell enough copies for the royalties to exceed the advance).

How a Book Disappears

The mechanics of commercial failure in publishing are worth understanding, because they’re different from what most people imagine. A book doesn’t fail dramatically. It fails quietly. It fades.

Here’s a typical trajectory for a book that doesn’t sell. Six months before publication, the publisher sends advance copies to reviewers, bloggers, and booksellers. The publicist pitches features and interviews to media outlets. The marketing team runs ads, posts on social media, contacts bookstores about events and displays. This is the launch campaign, and for a small press, it represents a significant investment of time and energy.

Then the book comes out. For the first week or two, there’s activity: a few orders, maybe some social media attention, perhaps a review in a trade publication. If the book is lucky, it gets reviewed by a major outlet (the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR). If it’s less lucky, the trade reviews are the only coverage it gets. If it’s unlucky, there are no reviews at all.

After the initial publication window, which lasts about four to six weeks, attention moves on. The media is looking at next month’s releases. Booksellers are restocking with new titles. The book’s placement in stores (if it was stocked at all) moves from the new arrivals table to the regular shelves, and then, if it’s not selling, off the shelves entirely. In physical bookstores, space is finite and competitive. A book that doesn’t move gets returned to the distributor to make room for one that might.

Online, the book remains available indefinitely. Amazon never runs out of stock. But discoverability is a problem. Without sales momentum, the book drops in Amazon’s algorithm. It stops appearing in “customers also bought” recommendations. It becomes invisible, technically available but practically unfindable unless you already know it exists and search for it by name.

Within six months, a book that hasn’t found its audience has largely exhausted its commercial potential. There are exceptions, of course. Some books find readers slowly through word of mouth, building an audience over years rather than weeks. But the industry’s infrastructure, its review cycles, its bookstore shelf space, its marketing budgets, is designed around the launch window. If a book doesn’t connect during that window, the system moves on.

What It Feels Like for the Author

I’ve had these conversations with authors, and they’re among the hardest parts of my job. An author has spent years writing a book. They’ve revised it through multiple drafts. They’ve survived the anxiety of submission and the elation of acceptance. They’ve worked with an editor to make the book as good as it can be. They’ve done readings, interviews, social media campaigns. And then the sales numbers come in, and they’re disappointing.

The emotional response varies. Some authors are pragmatic about it. They knew the odds going in, they’re grateful the book was published, and they’re already working on their next project. These are usually authors who write because they need to write, regardless of commercial outcome. They’d be writing even if no one read them. Publication is a bonus, not the purpose.

Other authors are devastated. And honestly, I think devastation is a perfectly reasonable response. You put years of your life into something, you shared it with the world, and the world shrugged. That hurts. It raises uncomfortable questions about the value of your work, the sustainability of your career, and whether the sacrifices you made (financial, personal, emotional) were worth it.

The worst part, the thing that authors tell me haunts them, is the silence. A book that gets panned at least provokes a reaction. You can argue with a bad review. You can tell yourself the reviewer missed the point. But a book that’s simply ignored offers nothing to push against. There’s no conversation to join. There’s just absence, a void where the readership should have been.

Why Books Fail (It’s Rarely About Quality)

Here’s the part that’s hardest to accept, both for authors and for publishers: commercial failure is often unrelated to the quality of the book. I’ve seen mediocre books sell extremely well because they hit the right cultural moment, or because the author had a built-in platform, or because a celebrity mentioned them on social media. And I’ve seen genuinely excellent books sink without a trace because of factors entirely outside anyone’s control.

Timing is a massive factor. If your novel about a pandemic comes out the same month as three other pandemic novels, your book has to fight harder for attention. If a major news event dominates the media cycle during your publication week, your book launch gets drowned out. If a much bigger book is published the same day and sucks all the oxygen out of the room, that’s bad luck. There’s nothing anyone could have done differently.

Author platform matters more than publishers like to admit. A debut novelist with 500 Twitter followers and no media connections is starting from a fundamentally different position than an established journalist writing their first book with 50,000 newsletter subscribers. The quality of the writing may be identical. The commercial outcomes will likely be very different. This is unfair, and I don’t have a solution for it. The publishing industry rewards existing visibility, which means that the writers who most need a publisher’s help with marketing are often the ones who get the least of it, because the publisher’s resources flow toward the books with the best chance of recouping their investment.

Cover design and title can make or break a book’s commercial prospects. I’ve seen books with beautiful, eye-catching covers outsell comparable books with bland covers by significant margins. The cover is the book’s advertisement, and in an online environment where most books are discovered through thumbnail images, a weak cover is a serious handicap. At ScrollWorks, we invest heavily in cover design for exactly this reason. When we published Still Waters by Elena Marsh, we went through five rounds of cover concepts before we found one that captured the book’s mood while also functioning as a strong visual at thumbnail size.

And sometimes, honestly, we get the positioning wrong. We publish a book as literary fiction when it would have found a larger audience as upmarket commercial fiction. We pitch a non-fiction title to the wrong reviewers. We misjudge the audience. Publishing involves hundreds of small decisions about how to present and sell a book, and getting even a few of those decisions wrong can make the difference between a book that finds readers and one that doesn’t.

What Happens at the Publisher When a Book Underperforms

I want to be transparent about the publisher’s side of this equation, because authors often feel like their publisher moves on from an underperforming book too quickly. They’re right. We do. And I want to explain why, not to justify it, but to illuminate the constraints we’re operating under.

A small press like ScrollWorks publishes a limited number of titles per year. Each title requires editorial time, design work, marketing effort, and publicity outreach. These resources are finite. When a book’s launch campaign doesn’t generate the expected response, we face a difficult choice: continue investing resources in a title with diminishing returns, or redirect those resources to upcoming titles that haven’t had their chance yet.

We almost always redirect. This feels callous to the author whose book is being deprioritized, and I understand their frustration. But the math is unforgiving. Spending another $5,000 on marketing for a book that’s selling fifty copies a month is unlikely to change its trajectory. Spending that same $5,000 on the launch campaign for a new title might help that book find its audience. From a business perspective, the choice is clear. From a human perspective, it’s agonizing.

We try to be honest with our authors about this. When sales are disappointing, I’d rather have a direct conversation about it than pretend everything is fine. Some of those conversations have been uncomfortable. But I think authors deserve to know where they stand, and I think false optimism does more damage than honest assessment.

The Slow Build: When Failure Becomes Success

Let me offer some counterbalance to all this grimness. Some books that fail commercially on their initial release go on to find audiences later. This happens more often than you might expect, and when it does, it’s one of the most gratifying experiences in publishing.

The history of literature is full of books that were commercial failures on first publication. Moby-Dick sold so poorly that Melville essentially gave up on fiction. The Great Gatsby sold modestly during Fitzgerald’s lifetime and only became a classic after it was distributed to American troops during World War II (there’s the paperback again, changing literary history). John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by dozens of publishers and only published eleven years after Toole’s death. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

These are extreme examples, but the principle applies at a smaller scale too. A book that sells 1,500 copies in its first year might sell 3,000 in its second year because of a book club pick, or a podcast mention, or because a more famous author publicly recommended it. Word of mouth is slow and unpredictable, but it’s also powerful. I’ve watched books on our list find their audience two or three years after publication, long after we’d mentally moved them into the “didn’t work” category.

This is one reason we keep all our titles in print. Even a slow seller earns a small but steady income over time, and the longer a book is available, the more chances it has to find the reader who will champion it. Alexander Hawthorne’s Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners is an interesting case: non-fiction about a timely subject can see sudden spikes in sales when the news cycle swings in the right direction. A book about cryptocurrency that’s barely selling might explode during the next Bitcoin bull run. You can’t predict these things, but you can keep the book available so it’s ready when the moment comes.

What Authors Can Do (And What They Can’t)

Authors have some influence over their book’s commercial fate, but less than the self-help industrial complex would have you believe. Building a social media following helps. Being an engaging public speaker helps. Having connections in media helps. Writing a second book (and a third, and a fourth) helps, because each new book draws attention back to the earlier ones.

But the single most important thing an author can do has nothing to do with marketing: write the best book they can. A mediocre book with a massive marketing campaign might sell well initially, but it won’t generate the word-of-mouth recommendations that build a long-term readership. A brilliant book with no marketing might struggle at first, but if it’s genuinely good, readers who find it will tell other readers, and the audience will grow. Slowly, unevenly, frustratingly slowly. But it will grow.

What authors can’t do is control the market. You can’t make a book a bestseller through willpower. You can’t guarantee reviews by being persistent. You can’t force readers to care about your book by promoting it harder. At some point, you have to accept that you’ve done what you can and let the book find its own way. This requires a kind of surrender that’s deeply uncomfortable for people who are used to working hard and seeing results. The relationship between effort and outcome in publishing is loose at best.

The Bigger Picture

I want to end by putting commercial failure in a broader context. The value of a book is not determined by its sales. This should be self-evident, but in an industry that’s constantly tracking numbers, checking rankings, and comparing advances, it’s easy to lose sight of.

Some of the books I’m proudest of having published are not our bestsellers. They’re books that changed how a small number of readers thought about a particular subject, or that gave voice to an experience that hadn’t been articulated before, or that demonstrated a level of literary craft that set a standard for our list. Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive didn’t sell as many copies as I’d hoped in its first year. But the letters we received from readers, the depth of engagement they described, told me the book was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It was finding its people, even if those people were fewer in number than we’d anticipated.

There’s a distinction in publishing between a book that reaches a wide audience and a book that reaches its audience deeply. Both have value. I’d rather publish a book that changes 500 readers’ lives than one that mildly entertains 50,000. That’s a personal preference, and it’s one of the reasons ScrollWorks exists. We’re not trying to be the biggest publisher. We’re trying to be the publisher whose books matter most to the readers who find them.

Commercial failure is real, and it’s painful, and I don’t want to minimize that. But the measure of a book’s worth isn’t its Amazon ranking. The measure is whether it needed to exist, and whether the people who needed it were able to find it. Sometimes the answer to both questions is yes, and the sales numbers are still lousy. That’s the frustrating, unglamorous reality of publishing. We keep going anyway.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I once received a book as a birthday gift that was so perfectly chosen it changed my opinion of the person who gave it to me. We had been casual friends. After that gift, we became close ones. The book was not expensive or rare. It was a paperback novel by an author I had never heard of. But the giver had paid attention to a passing comment I made months earlier about the kind of stories I liked, remembered it, found a book that matched, and wrapped it up. That level of attention is the real gift. The book is just the vehicle.

I have also received book gifts that were clearly about the giver, not about me. Self-help books from people who thought I needed improving. Bestsellers that the giver had enjoyed but that bore no relationship to my tastes. Books I already owned (which, honestly, I take as a compliment, it means we have similar instincts). Getting a book gift wrong is easy. Getting it right takes thought, but the thought itself is what makes book gifts special.

This guide is for people who want to give books as gifts and do it well. I have been in the book business for years, and I have given hundreds of books as presents. Some landed beautifully. Some missed entirely. I have learned from both outcomes.

The Cardinal Rule: It Is About the Recipient

This seems obvious, but it is violated constantly. The most common mistake in book gifting is choosing a book you love and assuming the recipient will love it too. Your taste and their taste may overlap, or they may not. Giving someone your favorite novel because it changed your life is lovely in theory. In practice, it puts pressure on the recipient to share your experience, and that pressure often backfires.

A better approach: think about what the recipient is interested in, what they have mentioned enjoying, what they are going through right now. A friend starting a new business might appreciate a sharp, practical nonfiction book. A friend going through a difficult time might appreciate an absorbing novel that offers escape rather than self-help advice. A friend who just had a baby might appreciate a short story collection, something they can read in fifteen-minute increments between feedings.

The worst book gift I ever gave was a dense 800-page history of the Roman Empire to a friend who, I later realized, reads exclusively contemporary thrillers. He thanked me politely. The book went straight to his shelf, where it has remained, spine uncracked, for six years. I still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I visit his apartment.

How to Figure Out What Someone Wants to Read

If you are giving a book to someone you know well, you probably already have some sense of their reading taste. But “some sense” is not always enough. Here are specific strategies for getting closer to a good choice.

Look at their existing bookshelf, if you have access to it. What is there? What is not? If someone has a shelf full of literary fiction and no nonfiction at all, they probably prefer literary fiction. Obvious, but useful. Also notice what looks read versus what looks untouched. A book with a cracked spine and dog-eared pages was loved. A pristine hardcover might have been received as a gift and never opened.

Ask indirect questions. “Read anything good lately?” is better than “What do you want for your birthday?” because it does not put them on the spot. Listen to the answer carefully. If they mention a book, make a mental note of the genre, the tone, and what specifically they liked about it. Then find something in the same neighborhood.

Check their Goodreads profile, if they have one. This is not creepy; it is research. Their “want to read” list is literally a gift guide they have written for you. If they do not use Goodreads, check their social media. Book lovers often post about what they are reading.

Ask a bookseller. This is underused advice that works extremely well. Walk into a good independent bookshop and say: “I need a gift for someone who loved [specific book]. What would you recommend?” A knowledgeable bookseller will give you three options in sixty seconds. They do this all day. They are good at it.

The Safe Choices (and When to Make Them)

Sometimes you do not know the recipient well enough to make a specific choice. You are buying for a colleague, a distant relative, a friend’s partner you have met twice. In these situations, certain categories of books are reliably good gifts.

Beautifully illustrated nonfiction works well across a wide range of recipients. A large-format photography book about national parks, or architecture, or food. A well-designed atlas. An illustrated history of a subject with broad appeal. These books work as gifts even for people who do not read much, because they function as objects. They look good on a coffee table. They can be browsed rather than read cover to cover.

Cookbooks are another safe category, with a caveat: match the cookbook to the person’s actual cooking level. A beginner cook will be overwhelmed by a chef’s cookbook full of three-day recipes. An experienced cook will be bored by a basics cookbook. For someone whose cooking level you do not know, go with a cookbook organized around a specific cuisine or ingredient, something with personality and a point of view.

Short story collections and essay collections make good gifts because they are low-commitment. The recipient can read one piece at a time, in any order. If they love one story, great. If they do not connect with another, they can skip ahead. This is safer than a 400-page novel that they might not finish.

For someone with a specific hobby or interest (gardening, astronomy, chess, running, music), a well-chosen book about that interest almost always works. It says: I noticed what you care about, and I found something that honors that.

The Risky Choices (and When to Take Them)

Safe choices are fine. They will be received warmly, displayed appropriately, and possibly read. But the book gifts that people remember for years are usually the risky ones: a book the recipient never would have found on their own, something outside their usual range, a title that says “I think you would love this even though you would never pick it up yourself.”

Risky gifts require confidence and knowledge of the recipient. They also require a willingness to be wrong. If you give someone an unexpected book and it does not land, that is okay. The attempt itself communicates something: I thought about you carefully enough to take a chance.

One approach I like is giving a book from a genre the person does not usually read, but choosing one that connects to something they do care about. A friend who reads only nonfiction but loves cooking might enjoy a novel set in a restaurant kitchen. A thriller reader who is interested in history might appreciate a literary novel with a mystery at its center, like The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, which blends archival research with suspense in a way that crosses genre boundaries.

Another good risky gift: a translated novel from a country the recipient is connected to or interested in. Giving a Japanese novel to someone who just returned from their first trip to Tokyo, or a Nigerian novel to someone whose family is from Lagos. These gifts feel personal and specific, even if you are not certain the book will match their taste.

Presentation Matters More Than You Think

A book handed over in a plastic bag from the bookshop communicates something very different from a book that has been thoughtfully wrapped with a handwritten note inside the cover. The content is the same. The experience is not.

Write an inscription. This is the single most impactful thing you can do when giving a book as a gift. Not just “Happy Birthday, love Sarah.” Write a sentence or two about why you chose this particular book for this particular person. “I thought of you when I read the chapter about coastal mapping, because of our conversation at dinner last month.” That inscription transforms the book from a generic present into a personal message. Twenty years from now, the recipient might pick up the book and re-read your inscription, and it will carry them back to that moment.

I collect inscribed books. Not valuable first editions with famous signatures, but ordinary books with handwritten notes from the people who gave them. They are my most treasured possessions. The inscriptions are a record of relationships, frozen in time on the flyleaf of a book.

Wrap the book properly. This does not require expensive wrapping paper. Plain brown kraft paper with a piece of twine looks better than most printed wrapping paper, and it is cheaper. Add a sprig of something green if you are feeling ambitious. The point is to make the unwrapping an event, a moment of anticipation before the book is revealed.

Consider pairing the book with something small that connects to it. A novel set in France with a bar of good French chocolate. A book about tea with a tin of loose-leaf tea. A book about Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners with a novelty physical bitcoin coin. These pairings are easy, inexpensive, and show a level of thought that elevates the gift.

What Not to Give

Some book gifts are well-intentioned but carry unintended messages. Awareness of these pitfalls will save you from awkward moments.

Self-help books are almost always a bad gift unless the recipient has specifically asked for one. Giving someone a book about productivity, weight loss, communication skills, or overcoming anxiety implies that you think they have a problem that needs fixing. Even if you mean well, the message received is: “I think there is something wrong with you.” Give self-help books only when someone has explicitly told you they are looking for one on that specific topic.

Parenting books are similarly fraught. Giving a new parent a book about sleep training or discipline techniques, unless they specifically asked for it, can feel like criticism of their parenting. New parents are already drowning in unsolicited advice. Do not add to the pile.

Books you are trying to push on someone for ideological or religious reasons. I should not need to explain this, but I will. Giving someone a book about your political views or religious beliefs, when they have not expressed interest in either, is not a gift. It is an argument in wrapping paper.

Books that are primarily about your taste rather than theirs. This is subtle but worth thinking about. If you are giving someone a book mostly because you want to discuss it with them afterward, check whether that is really about them or about you. A gift should enrich the recipient’s life, not create an obligation to perform for the giver.

Giving Books to Children

Children are wonderful book recipients because they are less likely to overthink the gift. A child either likes a book or does not, and they will tell you honestly. This makes the stakes feel lower, though getting it right is still satisfying.

Age-appropriate is the baseline, but do not be too rigid about it. A precocious ten-year-old might be ready for a young adult novel. A twelve-year-old going through a difficult time might enjoy a picture book that deals with emotions in a gentle, non-threatening way. Read the child, not just the age recommendation.

For very young children (under five), go for books with physical appeal: textured pages, flaps to lift, bright illustrations. At this age, the book is an object to interact with, not just to read. Board books survive more handling than paperbacks, which matters when the reader is also a drooler and a chewer.

For middle-grade readers (roughly 8-12), series starters are excellent gifts. If a child likes the first book in a series, you have given them not just one book but a whole reading project. They will come back for the rest, and you have started something that could sustain months of reading.

For teenagers, respect their autonomy. Do not give them a book that is obviously intended to teach a lesson. Give them a book that respects their intelligence and meets them where they are. Ask what they are reading at school, and then give them something different, something they would never encounter in a curriculum. That is the gap where a well-chosen gift can make a real difference.

The Gift of a Bookshop Visit

If you are really stuck, or if the recipient is someone whose taste you cannot decode, consider giving the experience of choosing a book rather than the book itself. A gift card to a good independent bookshop is not a lazy gift. It is an invitation. It says: go spend an hour in a place full of books and pick whatever speaks to you.

Even better: offer to go with them. “My gift is an afternoon at the bookshop. I am buying whatever you want.” This turns the gift into a shared experience. You browse together, recommend things to each other, have coffee in the shop’s cafe, and each go home with a stack of books. I have done this with friends and it has become one of my favorite ways to spend time with people I care about.

Some bookshops offer curated gift packages: a bookseller selects several titles based on your description of the recipient. This combines the personal touch of a human recommendation with the convenience of not having to choose yourself. If your local independent shop offers this service, use it. The booksellers are usually thrilled to be asked, and the results are often better than what you would have chosen on your own.

Occasions and Timing

Books work for almost every occasion, but the type of book should match the moment.

Birthdays are wide open. Anything goes, as long as it reflects the recipient.

Holidays call for something with a bit more visual appeal, since the book may be opened alongside flashier gifts. A beautiful hardcover or a special edition holds its own next to electronics and clothing in a way that a mass-market paperback might not.

Graduations pair well with books that mark a transition: a classic that every adult should have read, a book about the field the graduate is entering, or something by an author the graduate has always meant to read. I gave my niece a copy of Joan Didion’s collected essays when she graduated from college, with a note about how Didion’s writing had helped me make sense of my own twenties. She tells me she has re-read the inscription several times.

Condolence and sympathy occasions are tricky. A book about grief can be helpful or intrusive, depending on the person and the timing. If you want to give a book to someone who is grieving, choose carefully and consider the timing. Immediately after a loss, a beautiful novel that offers gentle distraction may be more welcome than a book about grief itself. Weeks or months later, when the initial shock has passed and the person might be ready to process, a thoughtful book about loss might land better.

Weddings and housewarmings call for books with staying power. A gorgeous cookbook, a coffee-table photography book, a beautifully bound classic. Something that will live in the new home for years.

The best occasion for a book gift, honestly, is no occasion at all. An unexpected book, given on an ordinary Tuesday because you saw it and thought of someone, carries more emotional weight than a birthday gift. It is pure thoughtfulness, untethered from obligation.

The Follow-Up

After you give a book, resist the urge to ask immediately whether the person has read it. This is the book-giver’s equivalent of hovering over someone while they open a present. Give them space. Give them time. If they mention the book weeks or months later, fantastic. If they do not, that is okay too. The gift was in the giving. What happens afterward is theirs to decide.

If they do read it and want to talk about it, let them lead the conversation. Ask what they thought rather than telling them what they should have thought. A book gift that leads to a genuine conversation between two people is one of the best outcomes possible. Some of my most meaningful literary discussions have started with a friend saying, “I finally read that book you gave me.”

Finally, remember that every book gift, even the ones that miss, says something good about you. It says you believe in reading, in the life of the mind, in the possibility that a few hundred pages can make someone’s life a little richer. That belief is itself a kind of gift. Even if the book ends up on the shelf unread, it is there, waiting, ready for the day the recipient picks it up and discovers exactly what you hoped they would find.

If you are looking for a book to give, our catalog has options for readers across genres. Still Waters by Elena Marsh is a beautiful choice for literary fiction lovers, and Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield works well for readers who enjoy historical narratives with emotional depth.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team has given and received more book gifts than we can count. We are always happy to help with recommendations; reach out via our contact page.