Every book begins as a manuscript, but it becomes a book only when someone designs a cover for it. That might sound like a publishing cliche, but after fifteen years of bringing titles to market at ScrollWorks Media, we can tell you it is one of the truest things we know. The cover is the first conversation between a book and its reader. It happens in a fraction of a second, usually from across a bookstore table or in the fleeting scroll of a social media feed, and it determines whether that conversation continues or ends before it starts.

When Catherine Voss delivered the final manuscript of The Last Archive to us in the spring of 2024, we knew we had something special. The novel is a literary thriller set against the backdrop of a crumbling Eastern European archive, where a young archivist discovers that the documents she has been cataloging tell a story that powerful people would prefer to keep buried. It is a book about memory, power, and the fragile institutions that stand between knowledge and oblivion. We needed a cover that could carry all of that weight in a single image.

What followed was a six-month design process involving three designers, more than forty concept sketches, and a level of deliberation that might surprise anyone who assumes covers are an afterthought. This is the story of how we designed the cover for The Last Archive, and what it taught us about the relationship between visual design and literary storytelling.

Writing the Design Brief

At ScrollWorks Media, the cover design process always begins with what we call the design brief, a document that translates the editorial vision of a book into a set of visual parameters. The brief is not a set of rigid instructions. It is a creative framework that gives designers enough direction to begin exploring while leaving room for the unexpected ideas that often turn out to be the best ones.

For The Last Archive, our editorial director and lead designer sat down with the manuscript and spent a week pulling out the key visual and emotional threads. We identified five core elements that the cover needed to communicate:

• The novel has a distinctly European, institutional quality — old buildings, long corridors, dust in the air. The cover needed to feel like a place you could step into.
• It is a thriller at its core, even though the prose is literary, so there needed to be a sense of unease, of something hidden beneath the surface.
• The protagonist is a scholar, and the book deals with documents, history, and the ethics of knowledge. The cover needed to signal that this was a thinking person’s thriller.
• We did not want the cover to look like it belonged to a particular trend or era. The Last Archive is a book we expect to sell for years, and the cover needed to age gracefully.
• We wanted readers to want to touch this book. The physical qualities of the cover — its texture, its weight, its finish — were part of the design from the very beginning.

We also included a list of comparable titles whose covers we admired, along with a list of visual cliches we wanted to avoid. In literary thriller design, certain tropes have become exhausted: the lone figure walking down a dark street, the single eye peering through torn paper, the heavily manipulated photograph drenched in blue or green tint. We told our designers that if any of those appeared in the first round of concepts, we would send them back to the drawing board.

Catherine Voss herself contributed to the brief. She sent us a collection of reference images: photographs of the Latvian National Archives, paintings by Vilhelms Purvitis, screenshots from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. She described the emotional palette of her novel as amber light falling through dusty glass. That phrase became a touchstone for the entire design process.

The First Round: Finding the Visual Language

We commissioned initial concepts from three designers, each with a distinct aesthetic sensibility. This is a practice we follow for every lead title on our list. It costs more than working with a single designer, but we have learned that the creative tension between different approaches almost always produces a stronger result than convergence on a single vision too early.

Designer A submitted a photographic approach. She had sourced an image of an abandoned reading room in a Czech library, all peeling paint and tall windows, and overlaid it with a bold typographic treatment that obscured parts of the image. The effect was striking but felt too literal. It illustrated the setting without interpreting it.

Designer B went in an entirely different direction: an abstract composition of layered paper textures in muted tones, with the title embossed rather than printed. It was elegant and unusual, but in our experience, heavily abstract covers can struggle in the marketplace. Without a recognizable anchor point, a photograph, an illustration, a clear focal element, readers often pass over abstract designs. For a debut novel from an author without an established audience, that risk felt too high.

Designer C presented what would ultimately become the foundation of the final cover. She had created an illustration of a vaulted ceiling viewed from directly below, the architectural lines radiating outward like the ribs of a fan. Between the vaults, she placed fragments of handwritten text, barely legible, as if the documents in the story had somehow become part of the building itself. The color palette was warm: ochre, umber, faded gold, with deep shadows gathering in the corners. It captured the atmosphere, the intellectualism, and the tension all at once.

When I saw the ceiling concept, I felt the same vertigo I felt writing the book. That sense of looking up and realizing the architecture above you is not what it seems. That was the moment I knew we had the right image.

Catherine Voss, author of The Last Archive

Color Choices: The Language of Warmth and Decay

Color hits you before anything else on a cover. Before a reader registers the title, the author’s name, or the image, they perceive color. At ScrollWorks Media, we spend more time discussing color palettes than almost any other aspect of the design, because we know how much it determines a book’s shelf presence and emotional resonance.

For The Last Archive, the warm palette emerged naturally from the manuscript. The novel is set largely in interiors lit by aging incandescent bulbs and afternoon sunlight filtered through unwashed windows. There is a pervasive golden quality to the prose, a sense of light struggling through layers of dust and time. We needed the cover to evoke that warmth while also carrying the darker undercurrents of the story.

Our designer developed a palette built around four anchor colors. The primary background was a deep ochre, specifically Pantone 7510 C, that reads as warm and inviting without tipping into orange. The secondary tone was a rich umber, close to Pantone 4625 C, used for the deepest shadows in the illustration. For the highlights and the suggestion of aged paper, we used a pale gold, referencing Pantone 7527 C. And the title text was set in a warm ivory, just off-white enough to feel like it belonged to the same world as the image rather than sitting on top of it.

We went through three rounds of color refinement, printing proofs on the actual cover stock each time. What looks right on a calibrated monitor often shifts when printed on coated board, and those shifts can change the entire emotional register of a design. The ochre, for instance, looked slightly too yellow on our first proof, giving the cover an unintentionally cheerful quality. We pulled it back toward brown by five percent, and the mood shifted from welcoming to contemplative. Five percent. That kind of thing matters more than you’d think.

We also made a deliberate decision to avoid the cool-toned palettes that dominate the literary thriller market. Walk into any bookstore and look at the thriller table: you will see an ocean of blues, grays, and blacks. Our warm palette was a strategic differentiation as much as an aesthetic choice. We wanted The Last Archive to stand apart, literally, from the books it would be shelved alongside.

Typography: Setting the Tone Before a Word Is Read

Typography on a book cover serves two purposes that are often in tension with each other: it must be legible, and it must be expressive. The title needs to read clearly at thumbnail size on a website and at arm’s length in a bookstore, but it also needs to contribute to the visual mood. The wrong typeface can undermine even the most beautiful cover image.

For The Last Archive, we tested more than twenty typefaces before settling on our final choice. We began with the assumption that a serif face would be appropriate, given the novel’s literary register and historical themes. But as we tested options, we found that many traditional serifs, Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville, felt too polished, too classical for a book about institutional decay and buried secrets. They belonged to the world the archive was supposed to represent, not the world Catherine Voss had actually written, which is darker and more unsettled.

We ultimately chose a typeface from the transitional serif category, one that balances classical proportion with subtle irregularity. The letterforms have a slight unevenness that evokes hand-set type or worn engraving plates, as if the title itself has been through something. We set it in all capitals at a generous size, letterspaced more widely than usual to give the cover a sense of quiet authority rather than urgency. The author’s name, in contrast, was set in a clean sans-serif at a smaller scale, providing a contemporary counterpoint to the title’s historical weight.

The back cover typography followed a different logic. Here, legibility was paramount. We chose a highly readable serif for the synopsis text, set at eleven points on generous leading, and used the same warm ivory as the front cover title to maintain visual cohesion. The barcode area, often an afterthought, was integrated into the design with a tinted background panel that matched the overall palette. These details are invisible when done well, and glaring when done poorly.

Iterations and the Art of Saying No

The path from first concept to final cover is never a straight line. For The Last Archive, we went through five major iterations of the chosen concept, each one a refinement of the last, and at least a dozen minor adjustments in the final stages.

The most significant change came during the third iteration, when we decided to add a subtle human element to the illustration. The original ceiling composition was architecturally beautiful but felt slightly cold, like an illustration in an art history textbook. Our designer introduced the faintest suggestion of a figure standing below the ceiling, reduced almost to a silhouette, looking upward. It was barely there, more of an impression than a depiction, but it transformed the cover. Suddenly there was a point of identification for the reader. You were not just looking at a ceiling. You were standing in a room, looking up at something vast and overwhelming, and you were alone.

We also made difficult decisions about what to cut. One iteration included a band of archival text running along the bottom edge of the front cover, extracts from the fictional documents in the novel. It was a clever idea that tied the cover directly to the story’s content. But in testing, we found it made the design feel cluttered. The eye did not know where to land. We removed it, and the cover immediately improved.

Catherine was involved in every round of revisions, and her feedback was consistently valuable. She had a sharp eye for when a design choice contradicted the tone of her novel, and she was unafraid to push back. When we presented a version with a slightly warmer, more inviting palette, she told us it looked like a book about a pleasant afternoon in a European city, not a story about institutional corruption and moral compromise. She was right, and we cooled the palette by several degrees.

I have seen publishers treat authors as an obstacle in the design process. ScrollWorks treated me as a collaborator. Every concern I raised was taken seriously, and the cover is better for it. Authors know their books in a way that no brief can fully capture.

Catherine Voss

The Physical Finish: Texture as Storytelling

A printed book cover is not a flat image. It is a three-dimensional surface with texture, sheen, and weight. At ScrollWorks Media, we consider the physical finish to be an integral part of the design, and for The Last Archive, the finishing decisions were some of the most important we made.

We chose a soft-touch matte lamination for the base finish. Soft-touch laminate has a velvety quality that transforms the tactile experience of holding a book. Instead of the slick, slightly sticky feel of gloss lamination, soft-touch creates a surface that feels warm and almost organic under your fingertips. It also mutes colors slightly, which worked beautifully with our warm, muted palette, giving the entire cover the quality of something aged and precious.

Over the matte base, we applied spot UV varnish to the ceiling illustration. Spot UV creates a raised, glossy surface on selected areas of the cover while leaving the rest matte. When you tilt The Last Archive under a light source, the vaulted ceiling suddenly gleams, catching the light the way an actual varnished architectural surface would. It is a subtle effect, one that many readers may not consciously notice, but it adds a dimension of discovery. The book reveals itself differently depending on how you hold it and how the light falls across it.

The title was given a blind emboss, meaning it is pressed into the cover board without ink or foil. You can feel the letters under your thumb before you read them. This was a deliberate choice to reinforce one of the novel’s central themes: that the most important truths are not always visible on the surface but must be sought through patient attention. The spine received a small foil stamp in the same warm gold as the cover highlights, ensuring the book would be identifiable on a shelf even among larger volumes.

These finishing techniques add cost. A cover with soft-touch lamination, spot UV, embossing, and foil stamping is significantly more expensive to produce than a standard gloss-laminated cover. But we have consistently found that the investment pays for itself. Booksellers display premium-finished covers face-out more often, readers share photographs of them on social media, and the perceived value of the book increases. When a reader holds The Last Archive for the first time, they understand immediately that this is a book that was made with care.

What Readers Said

The true test of any book cover is how it performs in the world. We track cover-specific feedback through reader surveys, bookseller conversations, social media monitoring, and sales data. For The Last Archive, the response exceeded our expectations.

Within the first month of publication, we received more reader comments about the cover than about any other title in our catalog. The most frequent word used to describe it was “atmospheric,” which was exactly what we had aimed for. Several readers told us they had bought the book based on the cover alone, before reading the synopsis. One independent bookseller in Portland reported that The Last Archive was the most hand-sold title in her store during its first quarter, and she attributed much of that to the cover’s ability to start conversations.

On social media, the cover performed exceptionally well. The warm palette and textured finish photograph beautifully, and readers shared images of the book in reading nooks, on cafe tables, and alongside cups of coffee. These organic photographs became some of our most effective marketing assets, generating reach that no paid advertising could match. The soft-touch finish, in particular, drew repeated comments. Readers described the experience of holding the book as satisfying, luxurious, and unlike anything else on their shelf.

Sales data told a complementary story. The print edition of The Last Archive outsold the ebook by a wider margin than any of our previous titles, suggesting that the physical object itself was a significant driver of purchase decisions. We cannot attribute that entirely to the cover, of course, but the correlation is strong enough to reinforce what we already believed: investing in cover design and production quality is not an indulgence. It is sound publishing strategy.

Lessons for the Next Cover

Every cover design teaches us something, and The Last Archive taught us several things we have carried into subsequent projects. First, it confirmed the value of commissioning multiple designers for key titles. The winning concept came from a designer whose initial submission was the least polished of the three, but whose ideas had the most depth. Had we worked with only one designer, we might never have found that ceiling image.

Second, it reinforced the importance of author involvement. Catherine’s insistence on a particular emotional tone pushed us away from safer, more commercial choices and toward something that was truer to the book. The result was a cover that sells not because it follows trends but because it communicates something authentic.

Third — and this one keeps coming back to us — a cover is not packaging. It’s the outermost layer of the story. It begins the reader’s experience before the first word is read, and it lingers after the last page is turned. The care we put into designing The Last Archive was not separate from the care Catherine put into writing it. They are part of the same commitment, the same belief that books deserve to be made with intention, skill, and respect for the reader.

If you have not yet seen The Last Archive, we invite you to take a look. And the next time you pick up a book whose cover stops you in your tracks, take a moment to appreciate the months of work behind that single image. Somewhere, a designer, an editor, and an author sat around a table and argued about Pantone swatches and embossing depths, all because they believed the book in your hands deserved nothing less.

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Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Our design and production department has created covers for over two hundred titles across literary fiction, non-fiction, and specialty publishing. For inquiries about our design process or to discuss a publishing project, visit our contact page.

There is a moment that everyone in our office knows well. It happens when a new print run arrives at the warehouse and someone cracks open the first carton. The scent of fresh ink on uncoated stock fills the room, and for a few seconds, nobody speaks. After fifteen years of publishing books at ScrollWorks Media, that moment has never lost its power. In an era when digital reading platforms multiply by the month and audiobook subscriptions promise an entire library in your pocket, we still believe that the physical book remains a better piece of technology than we give it credit for.

We hear the nostalgia accusation a lot. It misses the point. What we see every day in our sales figures, our reader correspondence, and the broader market data tells a different story: print is doing fine. Better than fine, actually.. And the reasons have as much to do with neuroscience and human psychology as they do with aesthetics or tradition.

Over the course of this article, we want to share what we have learned from years on the publishing floor, from conversations with authors and booksellers, and from watching our own readers interact with the books we make. We believe the printed page still matters, and we think the evidence will persuade you, too.

The Numbers Tell a Surprising Story

If you listen only to the loudest voices in the technology press, you might assume that print books are a relic. The numbers say otherwise. According to the Association of American Publishers, print book revenue in the United States has held steady over the past decade, and in several recent years it has actually grown. The AAP reported that print format revenues increased by roughly four percent between 2021 and 2023, even as ebook revenues plateaued. Data from the Publishers Association in the United Kingdom shows a similar pattern, with physical book sales outperforming digital in total market share year after year.

At ScrollWorks Media, we have observed this firsthand. When we launched our first list in 2011, the conventional wisdom told us to prioritize digital-first releases. We did the opposite. We invested in high-quality paper, careful typography, and covers designed to be held, not just scrolled past. Our print editions consistently outsell their digital counterparts by a ratio of roughly three to one. That ratio has held steady since 2018, and if anything, it has widened slightly in the last two years.

These are not isolated trends. Nielsen BookScan data has repeatedly shown that print accounts for approximately seventy-five to eighty percent of all consumer book spending in the US market. Independent bookstores, which were once considered endangered, have staged one of the most impressive comebacks in American retail. The American Booksellers Association reported that its membership grew from roughly 1,400 stores in 2009 to more than 2,000 by 2024. Readers are not just buying print books online; they are seeking out physical spaces dedicated to them.

Every time someone predicts the death of the bookstore, another one opens down the street. Readers want curation, community, and something they can touch. That has not changed in five hundred years, and I doubt it will change in the next fifty.

Margaret Liu, owner of Ridgeline Books and former board member of the American Booksellers Association

We do not cite these numbers to dismiss digital reading. Ebooks and audiobooks serve important purposes, and we publish in those formats as well. But the claim that print is dying has been thoroughly debunked by a decade of market data. The more interesting question is why print endures, and that requires looking beyond the spreadsheet.

The Science of Reading on Paper

A strong argument for the printed page comes from cognitive science. Over the past fifteen years, researchers have conducted dozens of studies comparing reading comprehension on screens versus paper, and the results consistently favor print for long-form, attentive reading.

A widely cited meta-analysis published in 2018 by researchers at the Stavanger Reading Centre in Norway examined fifty-four studies involving more than 170,000 participants. The conclusion was clear: readers who engaged with printed text demonstrated significantly better comprehension than those who read the same material on screens. The effect was especially pronounced for expository texts, meaning non-fiction and informational writing, and it held true even when readers were given unlimited time.

Why does this happen? Researchers point to several factors. First, physical books provide what scientists call spatial-temporal markers. You know how far you are into a book by the weight of pages in each hand, by the position of a passage on a left or right page, by the physical memory of turning to a particular section. These cues help your brain construct a mental map of the text, which in turn supports comprehension and recall. On a screen, every page looks the same. The scroll bar is a poor substitute for the rich spatial information a physical book provides.

Second, screens invite distraction. Even dedicated e-readers, which lack the notification streams of tablets and phones, encourage a style of reading that researchers call shallow processing. Studies from the University of Maryland and San Jose State University have found that digital readers are more likely to skim, to jump between sections, and to spend less total time with a text. Print readers, by contrast, tend to adopt what psychologists call a slower, more deliberate reading posture. They underline, they annotate, they pause. The physical medium seems to signal to the brain that the content deserves sustained attention.

We have seen this play out in our reader surveys. When we ask customers how they engage with our books, print readers consistently report spending more time per session, re-reading favorite passages more often, and feeling a stronger emotional connection to the characters and ideas. One reader told us that she keeps our edition of Still Waters on her nightstand and returns to certain chapters the way someone might revisit a favorite walking trail. That kind of deep, repeated engagement is what every publisher hopes for, and it seems to come more naturally with a physical book.

The Craft Behind Every Page

There is a lot of engineering behind a book people don’t see. When we prepare a new title for print at ScrollWorks Media, dozens of decisions go into creating the object you eventually hold in your hands, and each one shapes your reading experience in ways you may not consciously notice but certainly feel.

Consider paper. We spend weeks evaluating stock for every new title. For literary fiction, we typically choose an uncoated, cream-toned stock with a weight between 70 and 80 GSM. The slight roughness under your fingertips slows you down, just a fraction, and that tactile feedback keeps you grounded in the physical act of reading. For The Last Archive, our debut literary thriller by Catherine Voss, we selected a 75 GSM Munken Pure stock with a warm ivory tone that complemented the novel’s atmospheric, archival setting. The paper choice was not incidental. It was a narrative decision.

Typography is another realm where the printed page distinguishes itself. On screen, font rendering varies by device, operating system, and user settings. In print, we control every detail. We choose typefaces based on the tone of the work: a humanist serif for a literary novel, a clean geometric sans for a technology guide. We set line lengths to between 60 and 72 characters, the range that typographic research has established as optimal for comfortable reading. We adjust leading, the space between lines, to give each page a sense of openness without wasting paper. These are small decisions that accumulate into something significant: a reading experience designed for the human eye.

And then there is the cover. We have written separately about the design process behind The Last Archive, but the principle applies to every title we publish. A book cover is the first promise a publisher makes to a reader. In a bookstore, that cover has to work from across the room, drawing the eye with color and composition. Up close, it has to reward a second look with texture, detail, and craftsmanship. We use soft-touch lamination, spot UV coating, embossing, and foil stamping not as gimmicks but as tools for storytelling. When you run your thumb across the raised title on one of our covers, you are already beginning to engage with the book. No thumbnail image on a screen can replicate that.

A well-made book is a piece of technology that has been refined for more than five centuries. It requires no battery, no software update, and no user manual. It is intuitive, durable, and beautiful. We should not be surprised that people still love it.

Robert Bringhurst, typographer and author of The Elements of Typographic Style

Books as Objects, Books as Gifts, Books as Identity

Physical books have presence. A book on a shelf says something about you. It says something about who you are, what you care about, and how you spend your time. A well-curated home library is a kind of autobiography, and visitors read those shelves the way they read art on the walls.

This is not a trivial observation. Research in consumer psychology has shown that physical objects carry emotional weight that digital equivalents do not. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people ascribe greater value to physical goods compared to their digital counterparts, a phenomenon researchers call the endowment effect. When you own a physical book, you feel a sense of possession that a license to access a digital file cannot match.

Books are also among the most popular gift items in the world, and for good reason. Giving someone a book is an intimate act. It says, “I know you. I know what moves you. I found this and thought of you.” At ScrollWorks Media, we see a pronounced spike in orders during the holiday season, and a significant portion of those orders include gift wrapping. When we surveyed gift buyers, eighty-three percent said they would never give an ebook as a present. The physical object is the gift. The story inside is the bonus.

We have also noticed a growing trend among younger readers, particularly those in their twenties and early thirties, who are embracing physical books with an enthusiasm that surprises those who assumed this generation was purely digital. The BookTok community on TikTok, which has driven millions of book sales worldwide, is overwhelmingly focused on physical editions. Readers film their shelves, their reading nooks, their annotated pages. They trade recommendations with a tactile, visual vocabulary that digital reading simply cannot provide. Our title Echoes of Iron saw a forty percent sales increase after BookTok creators featured its distinctive cover and interior design. That surge was almost entirely in print.

The Environmental Question, Honestly Addressed

We should probably talk about the environmental argument, which is often raised in favor of digital reading. It is true that paper production requires trees, water, and energy. It is also true that the environmental picture is more complex than it first appears.

Life-cycle analyses comparing print books to e-readers have produced mixed results, but several have concluded that a physical book has a lower carbon footprint than an e-reader unless the device is used to read a large number of titles. A study commissioned by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology found that the break-even point was roughly 30 to 50 books. If you read fewer than that on your e-reader before replacing it, and most people do, the print editions may actually be the greener choice.

Moreover, the publishing industry has made significant strides in sustainability. The majority of paper used in US book publishing now comes from certified sustainable forests managed under the Forest Stewardship Council or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. At ScrollWorks Media, we use FSC-certified paper for all of our titles. Our printing partners operate with soy-based inks, recycled wastewater systems, and carbon offset programs. We are transparent about these practices because we believe readers deserve to know how their books are made.

A physical book is also inherently circular. It can be shared, lent, donated, and resold. A single copy might be read by five, ten, or fifty people over its lifetime. It does not become obsolete when a platform shuts down or a company changes its licensing terms. There is no DRM on a paperback. You own it fully, and you can pass it on to anyone you choose. In a world increasingly concerned with the sustainability of our consumption, that durability and shareability count for a great deal.

What We Have Learned After Fifteen Years

Running a publishing house in the twenty-first century has taught us many things, but the biggest is that format is not neutral. The medium through which you encounter a story shapes the story itself. The weight of a book in your hands, the sound of a turning page, the visual rhythm of typeset prose on cream-colored paper: these are not incidental. They are part of the experience.

We have watched authors hold their finished books for the first time and weep. We have received letters from readers who tell us they keep our editions long after they have finished reading them because the objects themselves bring joy. We have seen booksellers hand-sell our titles with a passion that no algorithm can replicate, pressing a physical book into a customer’s hands and saying, “You need to read this.”

Those moments matter. They are part of a reading culture that has sustained human civilization for centuries. The scroll gave way to the codex, and the codex evolved into the mass-market paperback, and now we have ebooks and audiobooks as well. Each new format has found its audience without eliminating the ones that came before. The printed book is not competing with digital reading any more than painting competes with photography. They coexist, each offering something the other cannot.

At ScrollWorks Media, we will continue to invest in the physical book. We will continue to choose the right paper, the right typeface, the right cover treatment for every title. We will continue to believe that when you make something with care, people notice. And we will continue to crack open that first carton with the same quiet excitement we felt on day one, because the printed page is not a relic of the past. It is a living, breathing, essential part of how we share stories, ideas, and knowledge with one another.

If you have not held a truly well-made book in a while, we invite you to browse our catalog and see what we mean. Some things are better experienced than explained, and the power of the printed page is one of them.

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Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. With over fifteen years of experience in independent book publishing, our editors, designers, and production staff are dedicated to creating books that honor the craft of print. For questions about our publishing process or to discuss a project, visit our contact page.

I have a confession that might lose me some credibility in publishing circles: I don’t read during the day. Not really. I’ll skim articles at lunch, scan manuscripts between meetings, flip through galleys on the train. But genuine reading, the kind where the outside world goes soft and the words pull you somewhere else entirely, that only happens for me after dark. Specifically, it happens in the forty-five minutes between when I get into bed and when sleep finally takes over.

This habit started in childhood, obviously. My mother was strict about bedtimes but generous about reading lights. I could stay up as late as I wanted, provided I was turning pages. She understood something that I think a lot of parents instinctively know but rarely articulate: a child reading in bed is doing something qualitatively different from a child reading at a desk. The desk version is homework, obligation, performance. The bed version is freedom.

I’ve carried that distinction into adulthood without ever really questioning it until recently, when I started noticing how many of our authors at ScrollWorks Media mention bedtime reading in interviews. Not as a marketing talking point, but as something deeply personal. Catherine Voss told me once that she wrote most of The Last Archive between 10 PM and 1 AM because that was when her thinking got “loose enough to be honest.” Elena Marsh keeps a stack of poetry collections on her nightstand and reads exactly three poems before sleep, a ritual she says feeds directly into the prose rhythm of books like Still Waters.

There’s something going on here that I think deserves more attention than it gets.

The brain at the end of the day

During waking hours, your prefrontal cortex is running the show. It’s planning, evaluating, filtering, deciding. This is helpful when you’re crossing the street or negotiating a contract. It’s less helpful when you’re trying to let a novel do its work on you. Reading fiction, in particular, requires a kind of surrender that the daytime brain resists. You have to accept implausible premises, care about people who don’t exist, follow narrative threads without demanding they justify themselves immediately.

At night, though, the prefrontal cortex starts to relax its grip. Neuroscientists have documented this extensively. As the body prepares for sleep, the brain shifts away from its executive functions and toward a more associative, less linear mode of processing. The default mode network becomes more active. Your thoughts wander more freely. Connections form between ideas that would never have met during a focused afternoon.

This is exactly the state that good fiction wants you to be in. A novel doesn’t want your sharpest analytical mind. It wants the mind that daydreams, that makes leaps, that fills in gaps with personal experience rather than logic. When I read James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron during a busy workday, I found myself cataloging its historical details, checking them against what I knew. When I read the same book in bed at night, I felt the weight of the ironwork, the heat of the forge, the loneliness of the protagonist. Same book, same reader, completely different experience.

I don’t think this difference is trivial. I think it might be the whole point.

What screens have stolen from us

The conversation about screens and sleep has become so familiar that most people tune it out. Blue light bad. Melatonin disrupted. Put the phone down. We’ve heard it. And yet the average American spends the last 45 minutes before sleep staring at a screen, often doing something that produces anxiety: doom-scrolling news, comparing themselves to strangers on social media, answering one last work email that could easily wait until morning.

I’m not going to moralize about this because I do it too, sometimes. What I will say is that replacing even half of that screen time with a physical book produces effects that are noticeable within days. Not weeks or months. Days.

The first thing you notice is that you fall asleep faster. This isn’t placebo. A 2021 study from the University of Sussex found that reading for just six minutes reduced stress levels by 68 percent, more than listening to music, going for a walk, or having a cup of tea. The body responds to the act of reading physical text by slowing the heart rate, easing muscle tension, and lowering cortisol levels. Your phone does the opposite of all three.

The second thing you notice is that your sleep quality improves. Not just the falling-asleep part, but the staying-asleep part. The architecture of your sleep, the cycling between light, deep, and REM stages, seems to work more smoothly when you’ve spent the last conscious moments of your day engaged with narrative rather than notification.

The third thing, and this is the one nobody talks about, is that your dreams change. I started keeping a dream journal about three years ago, around the same time I got serious about protecting my bedtime reading. On nights when I read fiction before sleep, my dreams are more vivid, more narrative, more emotionally complex. On nights when I scroll my phone, my dreams are fragmented and anxious, when I remember them at all. I have no scientific citation for this. I have three years of journal entries.

Choosing the right bedtime book

Not every book works for this. I learned that the hard way after making the mistake of reading a particularly graphic true crime account at 11 PM on a Tuesday and then lying awake until 3 AM with every creak in the house sounding like an intruder. Lesson learned.

The ideal bedtime book, in my experience, has a few qualities. It should be absorbing enough to pull you away from your daily concerns but not so plot-driven that you can’t stop reading. It should have a certain warmth or texture to its prose, something that rewards slow reading rather than speed. And it should not, under any circumstances, be a book you’re reading for work.

This last point matters more than people realize. I work in publishing. I read manuscripts all day. If I bring a manuscript to bed, I’m not reading; I’m working in a different position. The mental shift never happens. The editorial brain stays on. I need a clear boundary between professional reading and personal reading, and the bed is where that boundary lives.

For me, the best bedtime books tend to be literary fiction with a contemplative pace, short story collections (because natural stopping points), poetry, and the kind of narrative nonfiction that doesn’t demand you retain specific facts. David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is actually a perfect bedtime book, despite being intellectually ambitious. Its structure invites you to read a chapter at a time, sit with the ideas, and come back the next night with fresh perspective.

Books I avoid before bed: anything involving financial anxiety, medical thrillers, productivity books (nothing kills sleep like feeling guilty about how unproductive you are), and any nonfiction about politics published after 2016.

The ritual matters as much as the reading

I’ve become a bit of a bore on this subject with friends, but I genuinely believe the physical ritual of bedtime reading is half the benefit. Here’s what my evening looks like, and I’m sharing this not because I think everyone should copy it, but because I think the specificity might be useful.

Around 9:30, I put my phone on its charger in the kitchen. Not the bedroom. The kitchen. This is the single most important change I’ve ever made to my sleep hygiene, and it has nothing to do with reading. The phone stays in the kitchen until morning. If there’s an emergency, people can call the landline. (Yes, I have a landline. I’m aware of what year it is.)

I make tea. Usually chamomile, sometimes rooibos, occasionally just hot water with lemon if I’m feeling austere. The tea isn’t about the tea. It’s about the signal. My body has learned that tea-making means the day is over.

Then I get into bed, turn on the reading lamp (warm light, not cool), and read for thirty to forty-five minutes. Sometimes more, if the book is particularly good and I don’t have an early morning. I use a physical book, not a Kindle, not because I have anything against e-readers but because the Kindle’s store is one tap away, and I know myself well enough to know that “just checking” what’s new on the Kindle store is a gateway to forty minutes of browsing.

When my eyes start to feel heavy, I put the book on the nightstand, turn off the lamp, and I’m usually asleep within ten minutes. On a good night, five.

This routine has been essentially unchanged for about four years. It is the most consistent thing in my life. More consistent than exercise, diet, meditation, or any other wellness practice I’ve attempted. And I think the reason it’s stuck when those other things haven’t is that it doesn’t feel like a practice. It feels like a pleasure.

What nighttime reading does for writers

Here’s something I’ve noticed after years of working with authors: the ones who read before bed tend to write prose with a different quality than the ones who don’t. This is entirely anecdotal and possibly confirmation bias, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Writers who read at night tend to produce work that has more subconscious resonance. Their metaphors feel less constructed and more discovered. Their dialogue has the slightly illogical quality of real speech rather than the tidied-up version that comes from too much conscious craft. Their plots take surprising turns that feel inevitable in retrospect, which is the hallmark of a writer whose unconscious mind is fully engaged in the creative process.

I think what’s happening is that reading before sleep allows the material to get processed during the night in ways that daytime reading doesn’t. Sleep researchers talk about memory consolidation, the process by which the brain sorts through the day’s input and decides what to keep and what to discard. When the last input of the day is a beautiful piece of writing, some of that beauty gets consolidated. It becomes part of the writer’s internal library, available for unconscious retrieval during the next day’s work.

Catherine Voss has talked about this in several interviews, and I think she puts it better than I can. She once said that she doesn’t read before bed to become a better writer; she reads before bed because that’s when books are honest with her. I think she means that the defenses are down, the performance is over, and what’s left is just a person and a story, meeting each other in the dark.

The social life of bedtime reading

My partner also reads before bed, and this has become one of the most intimate parts of our relationship. That probably sounds ridiculous. But there’s something about lying next to someone in silence, each of you in your own world but physically close, that creates a particular kind of connection. We’re not performing for each other. We’re not making conversation. We’re just being two people who love books, sharing space.

Sometimes one of us will read a passage aloud. Not often, maybe once a week. Just a paragraph that was too good not to share. These moments are, without exaggeration, some of my favorite moments. There’s a vulnerability in saying “listen to this” and then reading someone else’s words in your own voice to the person lying next to you.

We’ve introduced this habit to friends, with mixed results. Some couples take to it immediately. Others find the silence uncomfortable, which I think says something interesting about the relationship rather than about the habit. One friend told me that she and her husband tried it but kept interrupting each other to share what they were reading, which eventually turned into a nightly book discussion that they now consider essential to their marriage. That’s a perfectly valid variation.

For parents, bedtime reading takes on additional dimensions. Reading to children at bedtime is well-established as beneficial for development, literacy, bonding, all of that. But reading your own book after the kids are asleep is something else: it’s an act of reclaiming yourself. After a day of being someone’s parent, someone’s employee, someone’s partner, the bedtime book is just for you. No one else benefits from it. No one else even knows what you’re reading. That privacy is rare and, I think, necessary.

A few practical notes

If you want to start a bedtime reading practice and you haven’t been a regular reader, here are some things I’ve learned from talking to people who’ve made this transition successfully.

Start with something you genuinely want to read, not something you think you should read. The “should” books can come later, once the habit is established. If that means starting with genre fiction, romance novels, graphic novels, or whatever else you actually enjoy, that’s exactly right. The goal is to build the association between bed and book, not to improve yourself.

Keep the book on your nightstand, visible. If it’s on a shelf across the room, you won’t reach for it. If it’s right there, next to your water glass and your alarm clock, you will. Physical proximity matters more than motivation for habit formation. This is true for reading and for almost everything else.

Don’t set page count goals. “I’ll read 30 pages a night” turns reading into a task. Some nights you’ll read three pages and fall asleep. Some nights you’ll read fifty. Both are fine. The only failed bedtime reading session is the one where you pick up your phone instead.

If you find that you’re too tired to read, you might be going to bed too late. Most adults need seven to nine hours of sleep, and if you’re getting into bed with only six hours until your alarm, you probably don’t have room for a reading window. The solution isn’t to skip reading; it’s to go to bed earlier. I know this sounds obvious. I also know that most people don’t do it.

And finally, if you fall asleep while reading, that’s not failure. That’s the whole point. You were comfortable enough, relaxed enough, safe enough to let go. The book will be there tomorrow night, open to wherever you left off, waiting for you like a patient friend.

What I’m reading tonight

Since I’ve spent two thousand words telling you about my bedtime reading habit, it seems only fair to tell you what’s currently on my nightstand. Right now it’s a battered paperback copy of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I’ve read four times and which gets better every time. Robinson’s prose has exactly the quality I described earlier: it rewards slowness, it invites contemplation, and it doesn’t punish you for falling asleep mid-sentence because every sentence is complete in itself.

Next in the stack is a collection of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry in translation, which I’ve been rationing at two poems a night since January. After that, I’m planning to reread Still Waters because Elena’s prose has that same contemplative quality that I look for in a bedtime book, and because I suspect I missed things the first time through.

The stack never gets shorter. As soon as I finish one book, two more appear. My partner has started calling the nightstand “the accretion zone,” a geological term for where sediment piles up. She’s not wrong.

But that’s the thing about bedtime reading. It’s not a habit you need to motivate yourself to maintain. Once you start, the books themselves pull you back. The bed becomes associated not just with sleep but with story. The nightstand becomes a small library of promises. And the last thought of the day, instead of whatever anxiety your phone was feeding you, is a sentence someone wrote with care, received by you with openness, dissolving slowly into dream.

That’s worth protecting. I think it might be worth more than we know.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish books worth reading at any hour, but especially the late ones.

ScrollWorks Media is seven years old this month. I keep a framed copy of our first catalog on the wall behind my desk, and every few months I look at it and wince. Not because the books were bad. They weren’t. But almost everything else about how we operated in those first two years was, in hindsight, somewhere between naive and genuinely misguided.

I’m writing this because I think there’s a culture in publishing, and in business generally, that only tells origin stories as triumphs. The scrappy startup that did everything right. The visionary founder who saw what nobody else could see. That’s a comforting narrative, and it’s almost never true. The real story of most companies that survive their early years is a story of mistakes made, recognized, and slowly corrected. Ours is no different.

So here’s what we got wrong, in roughly chronological order, with the hope that other small publishers (or anyone starting a creative business) might find something useful in our missteps.

We tried to be everything at once

When I founded ScrollWorks, I had a vision that I now recognize was hopelessly broad. I wanted to publish literary fiction, genre fiction, narrative nonfiction, poetry, essay collections, and maybe even some children’s books. I’d come from a large publishing house where all of these lived under one roof, and I assumed that breadth was simply how a publisher operated.

What I didn’t account for was that large publishers have hundreds of employees, specialized editors for each category, dedicated marketing teams for each genre, and relationships with thousands of booksellers. I had me, one part-time editor, and an intern who was mostly there for college credit.

Our first catalog had a literary novel, a self-help book, a memoir, and a collection of flash fiction. We did all four of them adequately and none of them well. The literary novel needed another round of structural editing that we didn’t have time for. The self-help book needed a marketing strategy we didn’t know how to build. The memoir was actually quite good, but we had no idea how to get memoir readers to notice a book from a publisher they’d never heard of. The flash fiction collection was beautiful and sold about 200 copies, most of them to the author’s extended family.

It took us about eighteen months to figure out what should have been obvious from the start: a small publisher needs a clear identity. Readers need to know what to expect from you. Booksellers need to be able to describe your list in a sentence. Agents need to know what kind of manuscripts to send you. When you publish everything, you’re effectively publishing nothing, because nobody can find you in the noise.

The turning point came when I sat down and asked a genuinely uncomfortable question: of all the books we’d published, which ones made me proudest? The answer was clear. It was the literary fiction and the thoughtful narrative nonfiction. Those were the books where our editorial instincts were sharpest, where we had something real to offer authors, where the finished product felt like it couldn’t have existed without us.

So we narrowed. Painfully, reluctantly, but necessarily. We turned down manuscripts that were perfectly good but not in our lane. We said no to projects that would have been profitable but not aligned. And slowly, a recognizable ScrollWorks identity began to emerge.

We undervalued editing and over-prioritized speed

In our first year, we published eight books. Eight. For a team of essentially two and a half people. I’m still not entirely sure how we did it, and I’m very sure that we shouldn’t have.

The publishing industry has always had a pace problem. Large houses are under constant pressure to fill their catalogs, meet quarterly targets, and keep the pipeline moving. When I started ScrollWorks, I unconsciously imported that urgency without having any of the infrastructure that makes it manageable at scale.

Here’s what eight books in a year looks like at a tiny publisher: it looks like developmental edits that should have taken three months getting crammed into six weeks. It looks like copyediting done in a single pass instead of two. It looks like proofreading assigned to someone who’s simultaneously managing the social media accounts. It looks like books going to print with errors that make you sick to your stomach when a reader politely emails to point them out.

The worst part wasn’t the typos or the occasional formatting glitch. The worst part was the books that would have been genuinely excellent if we’d given them another two or three months of editorial work, but instead came out as merely good. “Merely good” is a devastating outcome in literary publishing. Nobody talks about merely good books. Nobody recommends them to friends. They sell their initial print run and then they disappear.

We now publish three to five books a year. That’s it. Each one gets the full editorial treatment: developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, proofreading, and a final review pass. The process takes nine to twelve months from accepted manuscript to publication. Some of our authors have found this pace frustrating at first, but every single one has thanked us when they held the finished book. That’s the metric I care about now.

We treated marketing as an afterthought

I came to publishing because I love books and editing. I did not come to publishing because I love marketing. This is true of approximately 95 percent of the people who start small presses, and it is the reason that approximately 80 percent of small press books sell fewer than 500 copies.

In our early years, our “marketing strategy” consisted of posting the cover on social media, sending a press release to a list of reviewers we’d found on the internet, and hoping. I’m using the word “strategy” very loosely here. It was more of a vague hope dressed up in a spreadsheet.

The problem with this approach is that it puts the entire burden of discoverability on the book itself. And while I believe strongly in the power of word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth needs a spark. Somebody has to read the book first before they can recommend it to someone else. If your entire print run is sitting in a warehouse because no one knows it exists, there’s no mouth for the word to come from.

Our wake-up call came with our third season’s lead title, a novel I genuinely believed was one of the best books I’d ever read. We did our usual minimal marketing. The book got two reviews, one in a small literary journal and one on a blog with about forty readers. It sold 340 copies in its first year. Three hundred and forty copies of a book that I still think is extraordinary.

That failure hurt enough to change us. We started studying how successful independent publishers actually moved books. We learned that marketing isn’t a single event at publication; it’s a six-month process that starts long before the book hits shelves. We learned about advance reader copies, about building relationships with independent booksellers, about the power of author events and partnerships with literary organizations. We learned, slowly and expensively, that making a great book is only half the job. The other half is making sure people know it exists.

Today, every ScrollWorks title has a marketing plan that’s written before the book enters its final edit. Not after. Before. Because if we can’t articulate who the audience is and how to reach them, maybe we need to rethink whether we’re the right publisher for that book.

We didn’t listen to booksellers early enough

Independent booksellers are the most underappreciated people in the literary ecosystem. They read more than anyone, they know their customers personally, and they have an almost supernatural ability to predict which books will find audiences. For our first three years, we basically ignored them.

Not intentionally. We just didn’t think of them as partners. We thought of them as retail outlets, places where our books would sit on shelves. This is a bit like thinking of a sommelier as someone who opens wine bottles. Technically accurate, spectacularly incomplete.

The shift happened when I spent a week visiting independent bookstores in the Pacific Northwest. I walked in with advance copies, introduced myself, and asked booksellers what they thought of our list. The feedback was honest and sometimes painful. One bookseller in Portland told me that our covers looked “like they were designed by someone’s nephew who has Photoshop.” She was right. Another told me that she’d never heard of us because we’d never introduced ourselves, and how exactly did we expect her to handsell books from a publisher she couldn’t vouch for?

That trip restructured how we think about distribution and relationships. We now send advance reading copies to about fifty independent booksellers, four months before publication. We call them. We visit when we can. We listen to their feedback and sometimes adjust our marketing based on it. When a bookseller tells me they love a book, I know it’s going to sell, because that bookseller is going to put it in customers’ hands with genuine enthusiasm. No amount of social media advertising matches a bookseller saying “you need to read this.”

We didn’t take care of our authors’ emotional needs

This one is hard to talk about because it involves recognizing that I was, at times, a bad publisher to people who trusted me with their most personal work.

In the early years, I treated the author-publisher relationship as primarily transactional. We acquired your book, we edited it, we published it, we tried to sell it. The contract specified responsibilities and timelines. Everything was professional and efficient.

What I missed was that publishing a book is one of the most emotionally exposing things a person can do. An author has spent years writing something that comes from the deepest part of themselves, and now they’re handing it to strangers to judge. The vulnerability involved is enormous. And when the publisher on the other end of that vulnerability is focused on schedules and deliverables rather than on the human being who wrote the words, something gets broken.

I had an author call me in tears two weeks before her publication date because she was terrified and I hadn’t checked in on her in a month. I had an author silently disengage during the editing process because he felt his concerns were being dismissed rather than heard. I had an author tell me, a year after publication, that the experience of being published by us had been “lonely.”

That word, “lonely,” changed everything for me. Because loneliness is exactly what a good publisher should prevent. An author should feel accompanied through the publishing process, not processed through it. They should feel that their publisher cares about their book as much as they do, even if that caring looks different from the publisher’s side.

These days, I check in with our authors weekly during active editorial phases and biweekly otherwise. Not about schedules. About how they’re feeling. About what worries them. About what they’re hoping for. This takes time I could be spending on other things. It is, without question, the best use of my time.

We assumed digital marketing would replace everything else

Around year three, we went through a phase where we believed that social media and email newsletters would solve all our marketing challenges. We hired a social media consultant. We built an email list. We posted Instagram photos of our books artfully arranged next to coffee cups and autumn leaves. We wrote newsletters with behind-the-scenes content and editor picks.

And our sales… barely changed. The social media following grew, the newsletter open rates were respectable, and none of it translated into book purchases in any measurable way. We were getting likes from people who would never buy a book from us, building an audience that was interested in the performance of literary culture rather than in actually reading.

I don’t think digital marketing is useless for publishers. But I think small publishers in particular tend to overestimate its impact because it’s cheap and measurable. You can see the follower count going up. You can track email opens. Those numbers feel like progress even when they aren’t.

What actually sells books for us, reliably, time after time? Author events at independent bookstores. Reviews in respected literary publications. Word of mouth from readers who loved the book enough to buy it for someone else. These are all old-fashioned, hard-to-scale, labor-intensive activities. They’re also the only ones that consistently work.

We still maintain our social media presence and our newsletter, but we no longer pretend they’re our primary marketing channels. They’re supporting players, not stars.

What we got right (eventually)

This essay has been relentlessly self-critical so far, and I want to balance that with honesty in the other direction: we also got some things right, even if it took us a while to understand why they mattered.

We always paid authors fairly. Even when our finances were precarious, we honored advances and paid royalties on time. This seems like a low bar, but in small publishing, it’s not. Plenty of small presses pay late, pay less than agreed, or structure contracts in ways that favor the publisher. We never did that, and the trust it built with our authors is probably the main reason we’re still here.

We always cared about the physical object. Our books have always been well-designed, well-printed, and nice to hold. Even in the early days when our covers were, as that Portland bookseller noted, less than professional, we cared about paper quality, binding, and typography. Readers notice these things even when they can’t articulate them. A book that feels good in your hands gets read differently than a book that feels disposable.

And we always, always chose books we believed in. We never published anything cynically. We never acquired a manuscript because we thought it would sell despite not being very good. Every book in the ScrollWorks catalog, including The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, Still Waters, and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, is a book we love. Some of them sell better than others. But we’re proud of all of them, and that pride is the foundation everything else is built on.

Seven years in, I’m still learning. I’ll probably write a sequel to this essay in another seven years, cataloging a whole new set of mistakes. If I’m not making mistakes, I’m not trying hard enough. But the mistakes should be new ones. That, I think, is the only reasonable definition of progress.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We’re still figuring it out, one book at a time.

Last Saturday I spent $187 at my local independent bookstore. This was not planned. I went in for one specific novel and came out with a tote bag full of books, a recommended reading list written on the back of a receipt, and an invitation to a poetry reading next Thursday. My credit card statement would call this a problem. I would call it the entire point.

I work in publishing, so I have a professional interest in the survival of bookstores. But my attachment to them goes well beyond professional. The independent bookstore is one of the last public spaces in American life that asks nothing of you except your attention. You don’t need a membership. You don’t need to buy anything. You can walk in, pick up a book, read thirty pages standing in the aisle, put it back, and leave. Nobody will bother you. Nobody will try to upsell you. Nobody will collect your data.

Try doing that at an Apple Store.

And yet independent bookstores are perpetually in danger. Not as endangered as they were in 2010, when Amazon seemed poised to eliminate them entirely, but still operating on margins so thin that a bad quarter can mean the difference between staying open and closing forever. According to the American Booksellers Association, there are about 2,500 independent bookstores in the United States. That’s up from the low point of about 1,650 in 2009, which is good news. But it’s still well below the 4,000-plus that existed before the big-box and online retail era.

So how do you actually support them? Not in the abstract, feel-good way that people mean when they post “support local!” on Instagram, but in concrete ways that make a material difference to a bookstore’s survival? I’ve spent the last few months talking to booksellers, store owners, and fellow publishers about this question, and the answers are more specific than you might expect.

Buy your books there (yes, even when Amazon is cheaper)

I know. You know. Everyone knows. And yet most people, including people who say they love bookstores, still buy the majority of their books online. The reasons are obvious: it’s cheaper, it’s easier, and the book shows up at your door. I’m not going to pretend those aren’t real advantages.

But here’s the math that most people don’t consider. When you buy a $28 hardcover from Amazon, the bookstore in your neighborhood gets nothing. When you buy that same book from your local store, roughly $8 to $10 of that purchase stays in your community. It pays the rent on a building in your town. It pays the wages of someone who lives near you. It funds author events and children’s story hours and book clubs that meet in your neighborhood.

The price difference between Amazon and an independent bookstore on a new release is typically about $3 to $5. That’s a coffee. That’s less than a coffee, actually, at most of the places people habitually buy coffee. If you can afford a $6 latte without thinking about it, you can afford to pay cover price for a book.

I buy roughly 60 books a year. About 50 of them come from independent bookstores. The other 10 are obscure titles that my local store can’t easily get, used books, or impulse purchases at airport shops. I’m not militant about it; I’m just deliberate. The difference in my annual spending is maybe $200. For that $200, I get a bookstore that knows my name, recommends books I actually like, and remains open for business.

That’s a bargain.

Pre-order through them

Pre-orders are the secret currency of publishing, and most readers have no idea how much power they hold. When you pre-order a book through an independent bookstore, several things happen simultaneously.

First, the store orders that book from its distributor, which signals demand. High pre-order numbers tell the distribution chain that a book is generating buzz, which leads to better placement, more marketing support from the publisher, and larger initial print runs. This benefits the author directly.

Second, the pre-order shows up in industry tracking data. Publishers, agents, and booksellers all watch pre-order numbers obsessively. A book with strong pre-orders from independent stores gets taken more seriously at every level of the industry. It’s more likely to get reviewed, more likely to get display space, more likely to get recommended by booksellers at other stores.

Third, and this is the part most people don’t know, many independent bookstores offer pre-order incentives that Amazon doesn’t. Signed copies. Exclusive bookmarks or bookplates. A personal note from the bookseller about why they’re excited about the book. My local store does a “blind date with a book” pre-order option where they wrap the book in brown paper with a few handwritten clues, and it’s genuinely one of my favorite things.

At ScrollWorks, we encourage all our readers to pre-order through their local store. When The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo was coming out, we partnered with about thirty independent bookstores for pre-order events, and those pre-orders accounted for nearly 40 percent of the book’s first-week sales. That number matters enormously for a small publisher.

Use their online ordering system

Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: most independent bookstores have online ordering. You can go to their website, search for a book, and have it shipped to your house. The experience is not as slick as Amazon’s. The website might look like it was built in 2012. The book might take four days instead of two. But the sale goes to your local store instead of to a trillion-dollar corporation, and the book still arrives at your door.

Many independent stores also use Bookshop.org, a platform specifically designed to support independents. When you buy through Bookshop.org and affiliate your account with a local store, that store gets a percentage of every sale. It’s not as much as they’d make on an in-store purchase, but it’s infinitely more than they make when you buy from Amazon.

I have Bookshop.org set as my default “buy books online” destination. My local store is my affiliate. The books arrive in about three to five days, the prices are comparable to Amazon, and I feel good about where the money goes. It took about two minutes to set up.

If your local store has its own online ordering system, use that instead of Bookshop.org, because the margins are better for them. But either way, there’s no longer any practical excuse for defaulting to Amazon when you want to buy a book without leaving your house.

Go to events

Author events at independent bookstores are one of the great underrated pleasures of literary life. They’re usually free. They’re intimate, typically 20 to 50 people in a room. The author reads, answers questions, and signs books. You meet other readers who share your taste. And you support the store, because events drive foot traffic and purchases.

But here’s the thing about bookstore events that I don’t think enough people appreciate: low turnout can kill them. If a store hosts an author event and only three people show up, the store loses money (staff time, setup costs, often wine or snacks), the author has a demoralizing experience, and the store becomes less likely to host events in the future. I’ve seen this happen. I’ve been the publisher whose author stood at a podium in front of four empty chairs. It’s awful for everyone.

Going to a bookstore event, even for an author you’ve never heard of, is one of the simplest and most effective ways to support the entire literary ecosystem. You’re supporting the store, the author, the publisher, and the practice of bringing readers and writers together in physical space. You might also discover your next favorite book, which is what happened to me the first time I heard Catherine Voss read from an early draft of The Last Archive at a small store in Brooklyn.

Check your local store’s event calendar. Go to one thing a month. Bring a friend.

Give books as gifts (and buy them locally)

I have become the person in my social circle who gives books for every occasion. Birthday? Book. Holiday? Book. Housewarming? Book. Baby shower? Three books (one for the baby, one for each parent, because new parents need books more than anyone and have less time to find them).

This habit supports bookstores directly, obviously. But it also does something more subtle: it normalizes book-buying as a regular activity. When your friends see you walking out of a bookstore with a bag of gifts, they think about the bookstore. When they receive a beautifully wrapped book from that store, they notice the store’s bookmark or sticker. Some of them start going themselves.

Most independent bookstores are better at gift-wrapping than you are, by the way. They’ll wrap the book for free or for a small fee, and it always looks better than what I could do at home with a roll of wrapping paper and too much tape. Ask for a gift receipt. Ask for a recommendation if you’re not sure what to buy. Booksellers love being asked for recommendations. It is literally their favorite part of the job.

A word about gift cards: they’re fine, but they’re not as good as actual books. A gift card says “I know you like to read.” An actual book says “I know what you like to read, and I thought about you specifically when I chose this.” The second message is better. If you’re not confident in your ability to choose, ask the bookseller. Tell them about the person. They’ll find the right book.

Talk about your bookstore

Word of mouth works for bookstores just like it works for books. When someone asks where you got something, tell them. When a friend mentions wanting to read a certain book, don’t say “check Amazon”; say “check [your store’s name].” When you finish a great book, post about it and mention where you bought it. Tag the store. Not in a performative way, but in a natural, conversational way.

I realize this sounds like marketing advice, and I suppose it is. But it’s also just being a good neighbor. If you had a great meal at a local restaurant, you’d tell people. If your local hardware store gave you excellent advice, you’d mention it. Bookstores deserve the same casual, ongoing advocacy that we give to every other local business we love.

Online reviews matter here too. Many independent bookstores have Google Business profiles, Yelp pages, and Facebook pages that are woefully under-reviewed. A thoughtful five-star review on Google takes three minutes to write and can genuinely influence whether someone walks through that door for the first time. Algorithms favor businesses with more reviews, which means more visibility, which means more customers, which means the store stays open.

Join (or start) their book club

Many independent bookstores run book clubs, and they’re consistently one of the best things about the literary community in any given town. The store selects the book, usually offers a discount on it to club members, and hosts a monthly discussion. The quality of conversation is almost always better than online book discussions because you’re talking to real people, face to face, who live near you and have different perspectives.

From the store’s perspective, a book club with 15 members means 15 guaranteed sales every month, plus those members are coming into the store regularly, which means they’re browsing, buying other things, and deepening their relationship with the space. A few active book clubs can make a meaningful difference to a store’s bottom line.

If your store doesn’t have a book club, ask about starting one. Most booksellers would love to run a club but don’t have the bandwidth to organize it alone. Offer to help. Handle the logistics, the emails, the meeting reminders, and let the bookseller do what they do best: pick great books and lead great discussions.

Buy things that aren’t books

This might sound counterintuitive, but many independent bookstores survive partly on non-book revenue. Cards, stationery, candles, tote bags, bookmarks, journals, puzzles, games. The margins on these items are often better than the margins on books, and they help the store weather slow periods.

When I need a birthday card, I buy it at my bookstore. When I need a journal, same. When I need a gift for someone who doesn’t read (they exist, apparently), I find something at the bookstore. Is this always the most convenient option? No. But it’s one more reason to walk through the door, one more way to keep money flowing to a business I care about.

Some bookstores also sell coffee, which is honestly genius. My local store installed a small espresso bar two years ago, and it transformed the space. People come in for coffee and leave with books. People come in for books and stay for coffee. The store went from being a place you visited intentionally to a place you hung out. And people who hang out in bookstores buy books. Every time.

Think about who you’re supporting when you choose where to buy

I want to end with something that might sound preachy, and I’ll try to keep it brief. Where you spend money is a vote. This isn’t a new observation, but it’s one that I think about almost every day.

When you buy from Amazon, you’re voting for a world where books are commodities, interchangeable with paper towels and phone chargers, processed through a logistics machine that treats every product identically. The book gets to you fast and cheap, and nobody along the way has to care about what’s inside it.

When you buy from an independent bookstore, you’re voting for something different. You’re voting for a world where books are chosen by people who read them, recommended by people who love them, and sold by people who believe that a good book can change a person’s life. You’re voting for a physical space in your community where ideas are valued, where strangers become friends over shared taste, and where the act of reading is treated as something worth protecting.

I know which world I want to live in. It costs me about $200 a year more than the alternative. I cannot imagine a better use of $200.

Your local bookstore is open right now, probably. Go spend some time there. Buy something. Ask for a recommendation. Tell the bookseller what you’re in the mood for and let them surprise you. Then come back next week. And the week after that. The store will remember you. The booksellers will start setting things aside for you. And slowly, without planning it, you’ll have become part of a community that exists for no other reason than the shared belief that books matter.

They do. And so does the place where you buy them.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Find our books at independent bookstores near you, or order through our catalog.

Open any book. Flip past the cover, past the title page, past the copyright information with its tiny forest of ISBNs and Library of Congress data. There, before the story begins, you’ll often find a few words set apart in italic. Sometimes it’s a name. Sometimes it’s a sentence. Sometimes it’s an entire paragraph that reads like a love letter written by someone who isn’t sure the recipient will ever see it.

This is the dedication page, and it is, in my opinion, the most emotionally honest part of any book.

I’ve been in publishing long enough to have seen hundreds of dedication pages go through our editorial process. Most readers skip them. I never do. Because the dedication is where the author steps out from behind the curtain of craft and says, plainly, who this book is for. Not the audience, not the market, not the demographic. The person. The actual human being without whom this particular pile of words would not exist.

That directness is rare in literature, and I find it almost unbearably moving every time.

A brief history of dedicating books

Book dedications have been around almost as long as books themselves, though they didn’t always work the way they do now. In the ancient and medieval periods, dedications were primarily commercial transactions. An author would dedicate their book to a wealthy patron, and in return, the patron would provide financial support. This wasn’t sentimental; it was transactional. The dedication was essentially a receipt.

Roman poets were particularly skilled at this. Virgil dedicated the Georgics to Maecenas, his patron, who was essentially the arts council of Augustan Rome. The dedication wasn’t “To Maecenas, with love.” It was more like “To Maecenas, who made this possible and to whom I am contractually and socially obligated.” Renaissance writers continued this tradition with even more elaborate flattery. Dedicating your book to a duke or a prince was a job application wrapped in poetry.

The shift from patron-dedication to personal dedication happened gradually over the 18th and 19th centuries, as the publishing industry professionalized and authors became less dependent on individual patrons. Once you could make a living from book sales rather than from aristocratic generosity, you were free to dedicate your book to whoever you actually wanted to dedicate it to. This was a radical change. For the first time, the dedication became a space for genuine emotion rather than strategic flattery.

Some of the earliest personal dedications are startlingly intimate. Walter Scott dedicated Ivanhoe in 1820 to an anonymous friend with a warmth that feels almost confessional. By the Victorian era, dedications to spouses, children, and beloved friends had become common, and the convention we recognize today was firmly established: a few words, set apart from the text, acknowledging someone who mattered to the author in ways that the book itself might not make clear.

The dedication as compression

What I find most interesting about dedications is how much they compress. A novel might be 80,000 words. The dedication is usually fewer than twenty. And yet those twenty words often carry more emotional weight per syllable than anything else in the book.

Consider E.B. White’s dedication of Charlotte’s Web: “To Garth Williams, whose pictures are full of wonder.” Twelve words. They acknowledge a collaborator, describe his work, and implicitly argue that illustration is a form of wonder-making. That’s a lot of meaning in a very small space.

Or Toni Morrison’s dedication of Beloved: “Sixty Million and more.” Four words. They refer to the estimated number of Africans who died during the Middle Passage. The dedication transforms the novel from a story about one woman into a memorial for millions. It reframes everything you’re about to read before you’ve read a single sentence of the actual text.

This compression is a literary form in its own right, and I don’t think we give it enough credit. Writing a good dedication requires the same skills as writing a good poem: precision, economy, emotional clarity, and the willingness to be vulnerable without being sentimental. Many authors who can write beautiful 300-page novels struggle with the dedication because it demands a different kind of honesty.

Types of dedications (an informal taxonomy)

After years of collecting dedications that move me, I’ve started to notice patterns. These aren’t rigid categories, more like family resemblances. But I find the taxonomy useful for thinking about what dedications do.

The first type is what I call the Direct Address. This is the simplest form: “For [Name].” No explanation, no context, just a name. The reader doesn’t know who this person is or why they matter, and the dedication doesn’t explain. There’s something powerful about this privacy. The author is saying: I know who this is for, and they know who they are, and that’s enough. The reader is witnessing an act of love without being invited to understand it fully.

The second type is the Explanation. “For my mother, who read to me.” “For Sarah, who waited.” “For Tom, who said I could.” These dedications offer a small window into the relationship between the author and the dedicatee. They turn the dedication into a micro-story: something happened between these two people, and this book is the result.

The third type is the Memorial. “For my father, 1932-2019.” “In memory of James.” These dedications transform the book into an act of remembrance. The person cannot read the dedication, which gives it a quality of address that is almost prayer-like. You’re speaking to someone who cannot hear you, and yet you speak anyway, because the alternative, saying nothing, is unthinkable.

The fourth type is the Universal. “For everyone who has ever been told they’re not enough.” “For the dreamers.” These dedications expand the circle of address from one person to a group, often a marginalized or overlooked group. They’re less intimate than personal dedications but can be just as powerful, because they tell certain readers: this book sees you.

The fifth type is the Cryptic. “You know why.” “For M.” “To the one who understands.” These dedications are private conversations masquerading as public text. They’re the literary equivalent of an inside joke, except that the inside is often deeply emotional rather than funny. As a reader, you feel like you’ve intercepted a message meant for someone else. There’s a voyeuristic thrill to it, followed by a recognition that some things between people are simply not for you to know.

Dedications I’ve loved in our catalog

I won’t share the exact text of our authors’ dedications here, because I think those words belong on the page, in the context of the book, where the reader encounters them in the right moment. But I can talk about what they meant to me as a publisher.

When Catherine Voss turned in the final manuscript of The Last Archive, the dedication wasn’t there yet. She sent it separately, two days later, in an email with no subject line and no body text. Just an attachment with the dedication. I opened it, read it, and sat at my desk for about five minutes without doing anything. It was that kind of dedication, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve accidentally opened someone’s diary and found something so true that you can’t look away.

I called her and said, “This is perfect. Don’t change a word.” She said she’d rewritten it about forty times. Forty drafts of a single sentence. That’s how seriously some authors take the dedication, and that’s how seriously I think we should take it as readers.

James Whitfield’s dedication for Echoes of Iron took a different approach. It was historical, referencing a specific community rather than a specific person. It connected the fiction of the novel to a real place and real people in a way that gave the whole book additional gravity. When I read that dedication at the book’s launch event, I noticed that several people in the audience had tears in their eyes. These were people from that community. They recognized themselves in those few words, and the recognition mattered to them in a way that no Amazon review ever could.

Elena Marsh, who wrote Still Waters, told me that she writes the dedication before she writes the book. Not after. Before. She says that knowing who the book is for helps her write it, gives her a specific reader to aim toward when the work gets hard. I’ve never heard another author describe the process this way, and I find it beautiful. The dedication isn’t an afterthought; it’s a compass.

The anxiety of dedication

Not all dedication stories are heartwarming. The decision of who to dedicate a book to can be genuinely stressful, particularly for authors who have many important people in their lives and only one dedication page.

I’ve had authors agonize for weeks over whether to dedicate their debut novel to their spouse or their parents. The spouse has lived with the writing process, endured the late nights and the mood swings and the financial uncertainty. The parents raised the author, instilled the love of reading, possibly paid for the MFA. Both parties have legitimate claims, and choosing one feels like a betrayal of the other.

Some authors solve this by dedicating their first book to their parents and their second to their spouse. Others use a compound dedication: “For Mom and Dad, and for Michael.” Others avoid the issue entirely by dedicating the book to a concept, a place, or a dead person who won’t have feelings about being second choice.

I’ve also seen dedications become a source of real conflict. One author dedicated their memoir to a sibling who was barely mentioned in the text, and another sibling, who featured prominently, was hurt by the omission. Another author changed their dedication at the last minute after a breakup, requiring us to redo the interior layout days before it went to the printer. (We did it without complaint. Dedications are too important to get wrong.)

The most difficult dedication conversation I’ve ever had was with an author who wanted to dedicate their novel to a parent who had been abusive. The dedication acknowledged the parent not with love but with a kind of fierce, complicated gratitude that was, the author explained, both honest and intentionally uncomfortable. We talked about it for a long time. I asked if they were sure. They were sure. The dedication stands, and I think it’s one of the bravest things I’ve ever published, even though it’s just one line.

Do readers even notice?

This is the question that haunts dedication-obsessives like me. The honest answer is: most don’t. Studies of reading behavior (yes, these exist) suggest that the majority of readers skip directly from the title page to the first chapter. The dedication, the epigraph, the table of contents, all of these paratextual elements get bypassed in the rush to start the story.

I think this is a shame, and I’ll tell you why. The dedication sets an emotional context for everything that follows. It tells you something about the author’s state of mind, their relationships, their priorities. It tells you who they were thinking about while they wrote, which subtly shapes how you understand the book’s themes of love, loss, family, belonging, and memory.

A book dedicated “For my children, so they’ll understand” reads differently from a book dedicated “For Anna.” Both are valid. Both change the lens through which you encounter the opening pages. Skipping the dedication is like walking into a movie five minutes late: you’ll follow the plot, but you’ve missed the establishing shot.

My advice, which I offer with full awareness that I am a person professionally invested in every part of a book: slow down. Read the dedication. Read the epigraph. Read the acknowledgments at the back, too. These are the places where the author speaks in their own voice rather than through the constructed voice of the narrative. They’re the places where the book becomes a human artifact rather than just a text.

Writing your own

If you’re a writer working on a book, here’s my unsolicited advice about dedications, drawn from years of watching authors navigate this tiny, fraught space.

Write it last. I know Elena Marsh does the opposite, and it works for her. For most authors, though, the dedication should come after the book is finished, when you can see the whole thing and understand what it became, which is almost never what you planned.

Keep it short. The best dedications are between three and fifteen words. Once you go beyond that, you’re writing an acknowledgment, not a dedication. The dedication should feel like a line of poetry, compressed and resonant, not like a paragraph of prose.

Be specific. “For everyone” means no one. “For Jane” means Jane. If the book is for a specific person, name them. If it’s for a group, identify the group. Vagueness in a dedication reads as timidity, and timidity has no place in a space this small.

Don’t explain too much. The best dedications leave a gap that the reader’s imagination fills. “For my brother, who knows” is more powerful than “For my brother, who supported me during the difficult period after my divorce when I wasn’t sure I’d ever write again.” The first one trusts the reader. The second one overwhelms them.

And finally, mean it. A dedication is a promise, of sorts. It says: I made this thing, and it belongs to you. Make sure that promise is one you’re willing to keep, because the book will outlast many other things in your life, and the dedication will be there on page v long after the circumstances that inspired it have changed.

There’s a line I come back to often, though I can’t remember where I first heard it: every book is a letter that someone was brave enough to send. If that’s true, then the dedication is the envelope. It says who the letter is for. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to be true.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Every book we publish begins with someone brave enough to write a dedication.

I got an email last week from a literary agent asking if we could “speed up” the publication timeline for a manuscript we’d just acquired. She wanted the book out in six months. I said no. She asked about eight months. I said no again. She paused, recalculated whatever mental arithmetic agents do, and asked what our timeline actually was. I told her twelve to fourteen months. She sighed.

I understand the sigh. I understand the pressure behind it. In a publishing industry that increasingly values speed, that watches Amazon rankings in real time, that measures success by first-week sales numbers, a fourteen-month production timeline looks like a luxury. Maybe even an indulgence. Why would a small publisher voluntarily give itself less time to capitalize on whatever buzz exists around an acquisition?

The answer is simple, and it’s the same answer I’ve been giving for years: because the book needs it. Not the market. Not the marketing plan. Not the agent’s quarterly targets. The book.

What actually happens during those fourteen months

People outside publishing tend to imagine that once a manuscript is acquired, it’s basically done. The author wrote it, an editor reads it and makes some notes, and then someone designs a cover and sends it to the printer. This is like imagining that building a house consists of drawing a floor plan and then hiring a contractor to put up some walls. Technically, those steps are involved. But the space between them is where the real work happens.

Here’s what a typical ScrollWorks production timeline actually looks like.

Months one through three are devoted to developmental editing. This is the big-picture work: story structure, character development, pacing, thematic coherence, point-of-view consistency, and the thousand other architectural questions that determine whether a book works as a whole. Our developmental editor reads the full manuscript, writes a detailed editorial letter (usually 10 to 15 pages), and then works with the author over multiple conversations to plan the revision.

The revision itself usually takes another six to eight weeks. During this time, the author is rewriting, sometimes substantially. I’ve seen entire chapters disappear and new ones take their place. I’ve seen point-of-view shifts that transformed a good book into a great one. I’ve seen an author realize, during this phase, that the book was actually about something different than they thought, and watched the whole manuscript reorganize itself around that new understanding.

This cannot be rushed. An author who is pressured to revise quickly will make surface changes instead of structural ones. They’ll fix the sentences when what needs fixing is the architecture. The result will be a book that reads smoothly but feels hollow, like a renovated house with a cracked foundation.

Months four and five bring line editing. This is the sentence-level work: rhythm, clarity, precision, voice. A good line editor goes through the manuscript sentence by sentence, asking whether each one is doing the work it needs to do and whether it’s doing it in the best possible way. This is painstaking, slow, and indispensable. It’s also where books that are “good enough” become books that people remember.

Line editing for a full-length novel takes four to six weeks if done properly. Many publishers compress this into two weeks. We don’t. The difference shows up in the prose, in the way a sentence lands, in whether a reader feels that every word earned its place on the page.

Month six is copyediting and fact-checking. Grammar, spelling, consistency, factual accuracy. This is less glamorous than developmental or line editing, but errors here can undermine reader trust in ways that are hard to recover from. A misspelled name on page 47 might seem minor, but it tells the reader that nobody was paying close enough attention, and once that seed of doubt is planted, the reader starts looking for other errors instead of losing themselves in the story.

Months seven through nine handle design and typesetting. Cover design, interior layout, font selection, chapter openings, and the hundred small decisions that determine how the book will look and feel in a reader’s hands. We go through multiple cover concepts, usually three to five, before landing on the right one. Interior design involves test pages, sample chapters, and careful consideration of how the physical book will complement the writing.

Month ten is proofreading. A fresh set of eyes reads the typeset pages, catching anything that slipped through earlier rounds. Ideally, there’s almost nothing to catch at this stage. In practice, there are always a few things: a hyphenation inconsistency, a widow on page 203, a running head that somehow picked up the wrong chapter title.

Months eleven through fourteen are advance reader copies, marketing preparation, distribution setup, and the slow build toward publication day. ARCs go out to booksellers, reviewers, and book clubs. Marketing materials are finalized. The author does pre-publication interviews and events. By the time the book officially publishes, there should already be a community of readers waiting for it.

Why compression hurts

Every step I just described can be done faster. I know because I’ve done it faster, in my early years at ScrollWorks and in my previous life at a large publishing house. You can compress fourteen months into six. The book will come out. It will look fine. It might even sell reasonably well.

But it won’t be the best version of itself. And I think publishing a book that isn’t the best version of itself is a betrayal of the author’s work. Strong word, I know. I mean it anyway.

When you compress the developmental editing phase, the author doesn’t have time to sit with the editorial feedback and let it percolate. Writing is not entirely a conscious process. Some of the best revisions happen when an author is ostensibly not working, when they’re walking the dog or doing the dishes and suddenly understand what the developmental editor meant about the third act. That understanding requires time and mental space, two things that a rushed schedule eliminates.

When you compress line editing, sentences that need three passes get one. The prose comes out clean but not refined. There’s a difference between prose that is free of errors and prose that sings, and that difference is measured in the hours a line editor spends with each paragraph.

When you compress the design phase, you end up with a cover that’s “good enough” rather than right. The cover is the first thing a reader sees, the thing that makes them pick the book up or keep scrolling. A good-enough cover for The Last Archive by Catherine Voss would have been fine. The cover we actually ended up with, after three months of iteration, is beautiful. I believe it’s responsible for a significant portion of the book’s sales, because people who see it want to hold it.

And when you compress the marketing runway, you’re publishing a book that nobody knows about. Booksellers haven’t had time to read the ARC. Reviewers haven’t had time to review it. Book clubs haven’t had time to consider it. The book arrives into a vacuum of attention, and most books that arrive into a vacuum stay there.

The economics of patience

The obvious counterargument is financial. Time is money, literally. Every month a book spends in production is a month where the publisher has invested in it but isn’t recouping that investment. For a small publisher with limited cash flow, an extra six months of production time represents a real financial strain.

I won’t pretend this isn’t a concern. It is. Our cash flow situation in the early years was sometimes precarious precisely because we were investing more time in each book than our budget comfortably allowed. There were moments when accelerating a publication date would have solved an immediate financial problem.

We didn’t do it. And I think that decision, repeated over many books and many years, is one of the reasons we’re still here while other small publishers who prioritized speed have closed. Because a well-edited, well-designed, well-marketed book sells more copies over its lifetime than a rushed one. Not just in the first week, but over years. A book that booksellers love stays on shelves. A book that reviewers praise gets recommended. A book that readers adore gets given as gifts and discussed in book clubs and passed from friend to friend.

The backlist is where publishers make their money, and backlist sales are driven by quality. A book published in a hurry might have a fine first month and then disappear. A book published with care might have a modest first month but then build steadily, selling copies year after year because it’s the kind of book that people recommend.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is a good example. Its first-month sales were solid but not spectacular. But it kept selling. Booksellers kept recommending it. Reviews kept appearing. A year after publication, it was selling more copies per month than it had in its launch month. That kind of long-tail success doesn’t happen with rushed books. It happens with books that were given enough time to be as good as they could be.

What authors think about this

Authors, understandably, have mixed feelings about long production timelines. On one hand, most authors want their book to be the best possible version of itself, and they appreciate the editorial investment that a longer timeline represents. On the other hand, they’ve been working on this book for years already, and the prospect of waiting another fourteen months to see it in print can feel excruciating.

I’ve learned to address this directly during the acquisition conversation. I tell every author what our timeline is, why it’s what it is, and what each phase involves. I show them examples of how books changed during our editorial process. And I’m honest about the fact that the waiting is hard. I don’t pretend it isn’t. I just ask them to trust that the waiting is worth it.

Most of our authors, once they’ve been through the process, become advocates for it. Elena Marsh told me that the developmental editing process for Still Waters “saved the book,” that the version she originally submitted was fundamentally different from, and less good than, the version that was eventually published. That transformation required time she initially resented and later was grateful for.

James Whitfield, who wrote Echoes of Iron, initially pushed back on our timeline. He’d had previous experience with a publisher that moved faster, and he was accustomed to a different pace. By the time the line editing phase was complete, he told me it was the most thorough editorial experience he’d ever had, and that he couldn’t imagine publishing under a compressed schedule again.

These aren’t just polite compliments from authors who feel obligated to be nice. I’ve received these kinds of comments consistently enough to believe that the investment of time is felt by the people whose work is most affected by it.

The industry is going the wrong direction

I’ll end with something that worries me. The broader publishing industry is moving toward faster timelines, not slower ones. Large publishers are under pressure from corporate owners to increase output, reduce costs, and respond more quickly to market trends. This pressure filters down to editors who have less time per book, designers who are expected to produce covers in days rather than weeks, and marketing teams that are stretched across so many titles that none of them gets adequate attention.

The result is a lot of books that are competently produced but not lovingly made. They’re fine. They do the job. They hit the market on time and on budget. But “fine” is not what I got into publishing to produce, and I don’t think it’s what readers are looking for when they walk into a bookstore or browse an online catalog.

Readers can tell the difference between a book that was made with care and a book that was made with efficiency. They might not be able to articulate exactly what the difference is, but they feel it. It’s in the way the prose flows, the way the cover catches the eye, the way the pages feel between the fingers, the way the whole thing coheres into something that feels intentional rather than assembled.

At ScrollWorks, we will continue to take our time. We will continue to say no to agents who want us to hurry. We will continue to give our authors the space they need to revise properly and our editors the space they need to do their best work. This is not a luxury. It is our entire editorial philosophy, compressed into a single decision: the book comes first, and the book needs time.

If that means we publish fewer books per year than other publishers our size, that’s fine. If it means some agents stop sending us manuscripts because we’re too slow, that’s a trade we’re willing to make. Because the books we do publish are books we’re proud of. Every single one. And that pride is not something we’re willing to trade for speed, no matter how loudly the market insists that speed is what matters.

It isn’t. The book is what matters. The book is always what matters.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Our next title will be ready when it’s ready, and not a day sooner.

About three years ago, I received an email from a reader named Margaret. She was 74 years old, lived in rural Vermont, and had just finished reading one of our titles. Her email was four paragraphs long, carefully written, and contained a sentence that I’ve thought about nearly every day since: “I don’t think you realize what this book did for me, and I’m writing because I think you should.”

That email changed how I think about publishing. Not because it was flattering (though it was), but because it made me confront a blind spot I didn’t know I had. I had been thinking about readers as an abstraction, a market segment, a demographic. Margaret wasn’t a demographic. She was a person in Vermont with arthritis in her hands and a reading light that she had to replace every six months because she read so much at night. She had specific opinions about font size, paper quality, and whether a book’s spine would survive being passed between friends. She had been reading for seventy years and had extremely clear ideas about what made a book worth her time.

I wrote back. We started corresponding. Over the next year, Margaret sent me notes on three of our books, and each note contained observations that our entire editorial team found valuable. She noticed things we’d missed. She articulated reactions that our focus groups had never surfaced. She was, without trying to be, one of the best readers I’d ever encountered.

Margaret was the first, but she wasn’t the last. Over the past three years, reader feedback has fundamentally reshaped how ScrollWorks operates, and I want to tell that story because I think it matters for anyone who cares about the relationship between publishers and the people they publish for.

The feedback we weren’t getting

For our first four years, our primary feedback channels were the ones every publisher uses: sales data, reviews in professional publications, and the occasional reader email or social media mention. These are useful, but they have significant blind spots.

Sales data tells you whether people bought the book. It tells you nothing about whether they finished it, what they thought about it, or whether they’d buy the next one. A book can sell well on the strength of its cover and marketing and still be a disappointment to the people who actually read it. Conversely, a book can sell modestly and be adored by every person who reads it. Sales data can’t distinguish between these two outcomes.

Professional reviews tell you what professional reviewers think, which is valuable but narrow. Reviewers are not representative of the general reading public. They read hundreds of books a year, which means they approach each one with a set of expectations and references that most readers don’t share. A reviewer might praise a book for its “formal innovation,” while an actual reader in Michigan just wants to know if the characters feel real and if the ending is satisfying.

Social media is noisy and self-selecting. The people who post about books online skew younger, more urban, and more interested in performative literary culture than the average reader. BookTok and Bookstagram are useful for certain kinds of books, but they represent a small fraction of the reading public, and their aesthetic preferences don’t always align with what works on the page.

What we were missing was direct, thoughtful, sustained feedback from actual readers. Not influencers, not reviewers, not the algorithmically amplified voices. Regular people who bought our books, read them, and had opinions about them.

Starting the reader panel

After my experience with Margaret, I started thinking about how to create a more structured way of gathering reader feedback. The result was what we now call the ScrollWorks Reader Panel, which is essentially a group of about sixty readers who receive advance copies of our books and provide detailed feedback before and after publication.

The panel isn’t a focus group in the traditional sense. We don’t give people surveys with Likert scales and multiple-choice questions. Instead, we send them the book, ask them to read it at their own pace, and then invite them to write to us about whatever struck them. No prompts, no structure, no minimum word count. Just: read this, and tell us what you think.

The responses we get are extraordinary. They range from single-paragraph emails to ten-page letters. Some readers focus on the prose. Others focus on the characters. Some talk about how the book made them feel. Others talk about how it connects to their own experiences. A retired teacher in Ohio wrote three pages about how one of our novels reminded her of a student she’d taught thirty years ago. A truck driver in Texas sent a voice memo (not an email, a voice memo) describing the scene that made him pull over at a rest stop because he couldn’t see the road through his tears.

This kind of feedback is not available through any other channel. It’s not quantifiable, it’s not scalable, and it’s not efficient. It is, however, real. And real feedback from real readers has changed our publishing decisions in ways that I want to describe specifically, because I think the specifics are what matter.

How reader feedback changed our editorial process

The first major change came with font size. I know this sounds mundane, but it’s a good example of how reader feedback can surface issues that publishers are blind to. Several panel members, independently, mentioned that our books were printed in a font size that strained their eyes. These weren’t elderly readers with failing vision (well, some were, but not all). They were readers in their 40s and 50s who did a lot of their reading at night and found our 10-point type exhausting after thirty minutes.

We looked at our books with fresh eyes and realized they were right. Our standard body text was 10 on 13 (10-point type with 13-point leading), which is on the small side for trade fiction. We’d been using that spec because it reduced page counts, which reduced printing costs. The savings were real but small: maybe 30 to 40 pages per book, translating to about 15 cents per copy in production cost.

We switched to 11 on 14.5. The books got slightly longer and slightly more expensive to print. They also became significantly more comfortable to read, especially for sustained reading sessions. Multiple panel members noticed the change immediately and thanked us for it. One wrote: “I finished the whole book in two sittings instead of my usual five. My eyes didn’t get tired.” That single change probably did more for reader satisfaction than any editorial decision we’ve ever made.

The second major change involved pacing. Multiple readers told us, in various ways, that the middle sections of our literary novels tended to “sag.” They used different words for it: “slow,” “heavy,” “where I put the book down for a few days.” This was consistent enough across different books and different readers that we couldn’t dismiss it as individual preference.

We took this feedback to our developmental editors and asked them to pay specific attention to mid-book pacing in future projects. Not to make our books faster, necessarily, but to ensure that the middle sections were doing active work, progressing the emotional or thematic argument rather than merely filling space between the beginning and the end. This became a formal part of our developmental editing checklist, and I believe it’s improved our books noticeably.

When Catherine Voss was revising The Last Archive, we shared (with her permission) some of the pacing feedback we’d received on earlier books. She restructured her third act in response, moving a revelation earlier and adding a subplot that maintained tension through what had been a quiet section. The finished book is better for it, and that improvement traces directly back to readers who cared enough to tell us what wasn’t working.

The cover conversation

Book covers are traditionally designed without much reader input. The publisher, the author, and the designer collaborate, sometimes with input from the sales team, and the result is whatever emerges from that conversation. Readers see the cover for the first time when the book is published. By then, it’s too late to change anything.

We started showing cover concepts to our reader panel about two years ago, and the results have been illuminating. Readers see covers differently than publishing professionals do. We tend to evaluate covers aesthetically: Is it well-designed? Does it communicate the genre? Is it distinctive on a shelf? Readers evaluate covers emotionally: Does it make me want to pick this up? Does it feel like a book I’d enjoy? Would I be comfortable reading this in public?

That last question, “Would I be comfortable reading this in public,” was one I’d never considered before a panel member raised it. She explained that she read on the subway during her commute and was self-conscious about the covers of her books. A cover that was too obviously “literary” made her feel pretentious. A cover that was too commercial made her feel embarrassed. She wanted covers that were beautiful but not trying too hard, which is actually an excellent design brief.

We’ve adjusted our cover process to incorporate reader feedback at the concept stage. This doesn’t mean readers make the final decision, because design is a professional skill and I trust our designers’ expertise. But reader input has eliminated some covers that looked great on a computer screen but would have been problematic in the real world, and it has confirmed other covers that our team was uncertain about.

What readers taught us about marketing

One of the most valuable things our reader panel has taught us is how people actually discover books. The publishing industry spends an enormous amount of time and money trying to answer this question through market research and data analysis. Our panel gave us the answer for free: people discover books through other people.

Not algorithms. Not social media ads. Not email newsletters. People. Specifically, people they trust. A friend who says “you have to read this.” A bookseller who puts a book in their hands. A family member who gives it as a gift. A book club member who champions it at a meeting.

This finding, which we’ve heard from our panel members so consistently that I consider it essentially proven, reshaped our marketing strategy. We shifted resources away from digital advertising (which was expensive and produced mediocre results) and toward activities that put books into the hands of people who would recommend them. More advance reader copies. More bookseller outreach. More book club partnerships. More author events at stores where people could meet the writer, hear them read, and leave feeling personally connected to the book.

We also started what we call “reading ambassador” kits: packages we send to enthusiastic readers (identified through our panel and through organic outreach) that include a finished copy of an upcoming book, a few extra copies to share, and a handwritten note from the editor explaining why we’re excited about the book. The recipients aren’t obligated to do anything. We don’t ask them to post reviews or share on social media. We just give them books and trust that if the book is good enough, they’ll talk about it.

They do. Consistently. Our reading ambassador program is, by a significant margin, the most cost-effective marketing activity we’ve ever done. And it only works because we trust readers to be honest advocates rather than treating them as marketing channels to be optimized.

When reader feedback is wrong

I want to be honest about something: reader feedback is not always right. Or, more precisely, reader feedback is always honest but not always useful. Sometimes a reader’s reaction to a book is deeply personal and doesn’t generalize. Sometimes what a reader wants is not what a reader needs. Sometimes the thing that makes a book uncomfortable or challenging is exactly the thing that makes it important.

We had a panel member who consistently found our literary fiction “too slow.” She wanted more plot, more action, more forward momentum. Her feedback was sincere, and I appreciated it, but acting on it would have meant abandoning the kind of books we exist to publish. She was the wrong reader for our list, and that’s okay. Not every book is for every person.

We also received feedback on Echoes of Iron suggesting that certain historical sections were “too depressing” and should be softened. James Whitfield and I discussed this, and we both felt strongly that softening those sections would be a form of historical dishonesty. The book is about hard things, and representing those hard things truthfully is part of its moral purpose. We kept the sections as written.

The skill, which I’m still developing, is knowing when to listen and when to hold firm. I listen when feedback points to a craft issue, something that could be done better without compromising the book’s vision. I hold firm when feedback asks a book to be something other than what it is. The line between those two responses isn’t always clear, and I get it wrong sometimes. But having the feedback at all, having real readers’ voices in the conversation, makes every decision better-informed.

Margaret’s legacy

Margaret, the reader from Vermont who started all of this, passed away last spring. Her daughter emailed me, which was how I found out. The daughter mentioned that Margaret had told her about our correspondence and said it was one of the things that made her last years richer. She asked if I would send a copy of our next book to her mother’s reading group at the library, because the group intended to keep meeting in Margaret’s memory.

I sent them all of our books. Every title in the catalog. With a letter that I wrote and rewrote about six times before I was satisfied that it said what I needed it to say.

Publishing is a business. I don’t lose sight of that. We have budgets, cash flow targets, distribution agreements, and all the other machinery of commerce. But the reason the machinery exists, the fuel that makes it run, is the connection between a writer’s mind and a reader’s heart. Every decision we make should serve that connection. And the people best positioned to tell us whether we’re succeeding are not critics, not algorithms, not industry analysts. They’re people like Margaret. People who read because reading is how they make sense of being alive.

We owe them more than a good product. We owe them our attention, our respect, and our willingness to change when they show us a better way. That’s what I’ve learned from three years of listening to readers, and it’s what I intend to keep learning for as long as ScrollWorks exists.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Our readers are our best editors, and we’re grateful for every word they share with us.

I reread Middlemarch last winter for the fourth time. The first time was in college, where I found it long and occasionally dull and got through it mostly on the strength of stubbornness and a grade requirement. The second time was in my late twenties, and I remember being startled by how much better it was than I’d remembered. The third time was at thirty-seven, and I wept at the ending, which had never happened before. The fourth time, this past January, I read it slowly, about twenty pages a night, and I noticed the architecture of every chapter for the first time, the way George Eliot builds arguments within scenes, layering observation upon observation until the reader’s understanding shifts without the reader quite realizing it happened.

Four readings of the same book, and I had four distinct experiences. The book didn’t change. I did. That, in a sentence, is why some books are worth rereading.

But not all books are. Most books, honestly, aren’t. I read about sixty books a year and I’ll reread maybe two or three of them at some point in my life. The rest I enjoyed (or didn’t), absorbed what they had to offer, and moved on. This isn’t a failure of those books. It’s simply a recognition that rereading is a different activity from reading, with different requirements and different rewards, and most books are designed for the first experience only.

I’ve been thinking about what separates the rereadable from the merely readable, and I don’t think the answer is as simple as “quality.” Some technically brilliant books hold no rereading interest for me. Some flawed, messy books pull me back again and again. The quality that makes a book rereadable is something more specific than general excellence, and I want to try to name it.

Depth that reveals itself gradually

The most rereadable books contain more meaning than a single reading can extract. This isn’t the same as being dense or difficult. A book can be a pleasure to read on the surface, totally accessible, engaging, even entertaining, while simultaneously operating on levels that only become visible with repetition.

Consider what happens when you reread a novel whose ending you already know. The entire experience changes. Foreshadowing becomes visible. Minor characters gain significance. Throwaway lines turn out to be the thematic spine of the whole book. You’re reading forward through the plot but backward through the meaning, and the intersection of those two movements creates something that didn’t exist the first time through.

This is why mystery novels are rarely rereadable despite being compulsively readable. The mystery novel’s primary engine is the question “what happens next?” Once you know what happens next, the engine has no fuel. But a novel whose primary engine is “what does this mean?” gets more fuel with every reading, because meaning is not a puzzle to be solved but a territory to be explored. You can walk the same path through a forest a hundred times and notice different things each time. You can only solve a jigsaw puzzle once.

I think this is one of the things that makes The Last Archive by Catherine Voss a rereadable book. The plot is compelling on first reading, but it’s the thematic structure underneath, the questions about memory, loss, and what we choose to preserve, that rewards return visits. Every time I go back to it, I find a passage I’d skimmed over that now seems like the key to the whole novel. And the next time I reread it, a different passage will be the key. The book contains multiple valid readings, and each one illuminates something the others missed.

Prose that works on the sentence level

This is maybe the most straightforward quality of rereadable books: the sentences themselves are worth savoring. Not in a showy, look-at-me way, but in a way that rewards slow, attentive reading. A well-crafted sentence is a small machine for generating meaning, and like any well-made machine, it’s satisfying to watch it work.

On first reading, you typically move through sentences quickly, propelled by narrative momentum. You’re processing content, not form. But on rereading, with the content already known, you slow down and start to notice how the sentences are built. The rhythm. The word choices. The way a paragraph builds toward its final sentence and how that sentence reframes everything that came before it.

This is why I reread writers like Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, and W.G. Sebald. Their sentences are experiences in themselves, not just delivery mechanisms for plot information. Reading a Robinson sentence twice is like hearing a piece of music twice: you hear the same notes, but you hear more of the harmony the second time.

It’s also why certain poets are infinitely rereadable. A great poem is never fully received in a single reading. Each return strips away another layer of the obvious and reveals something that was always there but hidden by your previous assumptions. I can read the same Elizabeth Bishop poem once a year for twenty years and have it surprise me every time.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters has this quality. Her prose has a surface simplicity that conceals considerable technical sophistication. On first reading, you’re absorbed by the story. On rereading, you start to see the engineering beneath the surface, how she controls pacing through sentence length, how she uses repeated images to build emotional meaning, how a single metaphor in chapter three pays off in chapter twelve in a way you completely missed the first time.

Emotional complexity that ages with you

Here’s the quality I find hardest to describe and most interesting to think about. The best rereadable books change meaning as you age. Not because the words change, but because you bring different experiences to them each time.

When I first read Anna Karenina at twenty-two, I read it as a love story. When I reread it at thirty-two, I read it as a marriage story. When I reread it at forty, I read it as a parenting story. The novel accommodates all three readings because Tolstoy wrote about human experience with such breadth that the book essentially contains multiple novels, and which one you read depends on who you are when you pick it up.

This is the quality I mean by “emotional complexity,” and it’s different from narrative complexity (having a complicated plot) or intellectual complexity (engaging with difficult ideas). Emotional complexity means that the book contains a range of emotional truths wide enough to meet you wherever you are in your life. It means the book is about more than one thing, emotionally, and that different readers, or the same reader at different ages, will find different emotional centers of gravity in it.

Books with this quality become lifelong companions. You carry them with you not because they’re your “favorite” in any static sense but because they keep changing. They grow with you. Or, more accurately, they stay still while you grow around them, and each new layer of experience you bring to the book reveals a new layer of what the book had to say all along.

I think Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield has this quality. It’s a book about many things at once: labor, legacy, community, change, the way the physical work of one generation becomes the memory of the next. A young reader might find the coming-of-age elements most resonant. A middle-aged reader might connect with the protagonist’s ambivalence about his inheritance. An older reader might focus on the elegiac quality of the book’s treatment of vanishing trades. All of these readings are valid and present in the text.

A world you want to inhabit

Some books I reread not for their literary qualities but because they create a world I want to spend time in. This is the comfort-rereading impulse, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate even though it sometimes gets dismissed as unsophisticated.

When I reread Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, I’m not doing literary analysis. I’m going to sea. I want the salt air, the taut rigging, the dinner conversations, the friendship between two men who couldn’t be more different. The world O’Brian built is so complete and so absorbing that returning to it feels like visiting a place rather than reading a text.

The same is true of certain fantasy and science fiction. People reread Tolkien not because they’ve forgotten what happens in The Lord of the Rings but because Middle-earth is a place they want to visit. The rereadable world is one that has been constructed with enough detail and consistency that it rewards exploration, one where you notice new things in the background on each visit, like revisiting a city you love.

This quality isn’t limited to genre fiction. Any novel that creates a sufficiently vivid and complete sense of place can become a destination for rereaders. Novels set in specific, richly described locations, whether real or imagined, tend to be more rereadable than novels set in generic or interchangeable spaces. The setting becomes a character, and like any good character, it’s someone you want to see again.

Structural ambiguity

The books I find most rereadable tend to contain at least one significant ambiguity that resists resolution. Not confusion or vagueness, which are flaws. Ambiguity, which is a feature. Something in the book that can be read two or more ways, with the text supporting each interpretation equally.

The ambiguity might be about a character’s motivation. Did they do what they did out of love or out of self-interest? The text provides evidence for both readings. The ambiguity might be about the ending. Is it hopeful or devastating? The language supports both. The ambiguity might be thematic. Is the book ultimately arguing for tradition or for change? For connection or for independence? Yes, and yes.

Ambiguity gives the reader something to argue with, and that argument is the engine of rereading. You finish the book with one interpretation. A year later, something in your own life shifts your perspective, and you reread the book and find that it now supports a different interpretation. The book hasn’t changed. Your interpretive lens has. And the fact that the book accommodates both lenses is a sign of its depth.

This is, incidentally, one of the things that separates literary fiction from genre fiction in terms of rereading patterns. Genre fiction tends to resolve its ambiguities: the mystery is solved, the romance is consummated, the battle is won. Literary fiction tends to preserve its ambiguities, leaving the reader with questions that can be revisited but never definitively answered. Both approaches are valid for their purposes, but only one creates a book that sustains repeated readings over a lifetime.

The practical case for rereading

In a world that produces more new books every year than any person could read in a lifetime, rereading might seem like a waste of time. Why go back to something you’ve already read when there are thousands of new books waiting? This is the argument I hear most often from people who don’t reread, and it’s reasonable on its face.

But I think it misunderstands what reading is for. If reading is primarily about the intake of new information or new stories, then rereading is indeed inefficient. But if reading is about the development of understanding, about deepening your relationship with language, narrative, and the complexity of human experience, then rereading is not just efficient but essential.

Consider the analogy of travel. You could spend your life visiting new places, never returning to any of them, and accumulate an impressive list of destinations. Or you could return to certain places, get to know them deeply, understand their rhythms and seasons, build relationships with their people, and develop a kind of knowledge that a single visit can never provide. Both approaches have value, but the second one creates something the first one can’t: a sense of belonging.

Rereading creates a sense of literary belonging. The books you reread become part of your mental architecture, shaping how you think and feel about the world. They become reference points, shared vocabularies, touchstones. When I say “it’s like the scene in Middlemarch where…” to a friend who’s also read Middlemarch four times, we have a shorthand that no amount of new-book reading could create.

My advice, for whatever it’s worth: read widely, but reread deeply. For every ten new books you read, go back to one old one. Not out of nostalgia, but with fresh eyes and whatever new experiences life has handed you since the last reading. Let the book be different this time, because you are different. And pay attention to the moment when you notice something you’d never noticed before, because that moment is the proof that reading is not a transaction but a relationship, one that grows and changes and deepens over time, just like every other relationship that matters.

Some books are worth reading once. A precious few are worth reading forever. Learning to tell the difference is one of the great skills of a reading life, and it’s a skill that only develops through practice. So practice. Pick up something you loved five years ago and read it again. I promise it will have changed.

It hasn’t, of course. You have.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish books built to last, the kind you reach for again.

Every editor I know has a secret list. Not a list they keep on paper or in a spreadsheet, but a list that lives in the back of their mind, slightly embarrassing and completely sincere: the books they wish they had written. Not edited, not published. Written. As in, put every word on the page themselves, from the first sentence to the last.

I asked our editorial team to share theirs. The conversation lasted three hours, involved two bottles of wine, and produced what I think is one of the most revealing pictures of who we are as a publishing house. Because the books an editor wishes they’d written tell you everything about what they value in literature, what moves them, and what they’re chasing, consciously or not, every time they pick up a new manuscript.

Here are their answers, lightly edited and arranged in no particular order.

Rachel, Senior Editor: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rachel has been with ScrollWorks since year two. She edited Still Waters by Elena Marsh and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo. She reads more than anyone else on our team, averaging about ninety books a year, and her editorial instincts are the sharpest I’ve encountered in twenty years of publishing.

“I’ve thought about this question for years,” she told me, “and the answer has never changed. It’s always The Remains of the Day. And it’s not because I think it’s the best novel ever written, though I think it might be. It’s because Ishiguro does something in that book that I’ve never seen anyone else do: he writes an entire novel about a man who is wrong about everything and makes you love him for it.”

She went on: “Stevens, the butler, has organized his entire life around a set of principles that the book slowly, gently reveals to be a defense mechanism against emotional vulnerability. He’s not a tragic figure in the traditional sense. He doesn’t fall from a great height. He’s been on the ground his whole life and has convinced himself that the ground is where dignity lives. And Ishiguro never judges him for it. The prose has this extraordinary restraint, this refusal to point at the character and say ‘look how deluded he is.’ Instead, you arrive at that understanding yourself, gradually, and the understanding brings compassion rather than condemnation.”

“What I wish I could replicate as a writer is Ishiguro’s control of irony. The gap between what Stevens says and what he means, between what he claims to feel and what he actually feels, is the entire emotional engine of the book. It’s irony used not for comedy or superiority but for heartbreak. I’ve never read another novel that does this as well.”

Rachel paused, then added: “Also, it’s 245 pages. He does all of that in 245 pages. I edit novels that are twice as long and accomplish half as much.”

Marcus, Developmental Editor: “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson

Marcus joined us three years ago after a decade at a university press. He handles the early-stage structural work on our manuscripts, the big questions about what a book is about and how it should be organized. He’s the person who tells authors, diplomatically but firmly, that their chapter three should be chapter one, or that the subplot about the aunt needs to be either expanded or removed.

“Housekeeping,” he said, without hesitation. “Robinson wrote it in her early forties, as her first novel, after years of writing nonfiction. It reads like the work of someone who spent decades thinking about what a novel could be and then sat down and wrote exactly that.”

“The thing about Housekeeping that I find almost impossible to understand, from a craft perspective, is how Robinson maintains two registers simultaneously throughout the entire book. On one level, it’s a story about two girls being raised by their eccentric aunt in a small Idaho town. On another level, it’s a meditation on impermanence, on the impossibility of keeping anything, houses, families, memories, from falling apart. Both of these registers operate in every sentence. Not alternating, not switching back and forth. Simultaneously.”

“As a developmental editor, I spend a lot of time helping authors find their book’s thematic center. With Housekeeping, the thematic center is the texture of the prose itself. You can’t separate the theme from the sentences because the sentences ARE the theme. The language enacts what the book is about. I’ve never been able to articulate how she does this, and I’ve tried many times. I think it might be the kind of thing that can only be felt, not analyzed.”

“If I could write one book in my life, it would be a book where the form and the content were that perfectly married. Where you couldn’t summarize what the book was about without quoting the actual sentences.”

Dana, Line Editor: “The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis”

Dana is our sentence-level person. She reads every manuscript word by word, out loud, listening for rhythm, precision, and clarity. She’s the editor who will circle a comma and write in the margin: “This comma is doing too much work. Give it an em dash.” (She’s the only person at ScrollWorks allowed to use em dashes; the rest of us have been instructed to find other solutions.)

“Lydia Davis,” she said. “All of it, but if I had to pick one book, The Collected Stories. Because Davis writes sentences that are so precisely calibrated that changing a single word would collapse the entire meaning. She’s working with ordinary language, nothing fancy, no pyrotechnics. But every word is exactly the right word in exactly the right place, and the effect is something like hearing a tuning fork: this one perfect tone that clears away all the noise.”

“Some of her stories are one paragraph long. Some are one sentence. And they’re as complete and as complex as novels. She proves that the unit of literary meaning isn’t the chapter or the scene or even the paragraph. It’s the sentence. If you get the sentences right, everything else follows.”

“What I admire most is her willingness to be strange. Her stories don’t behave the way stories are supposed to behave. They don’t have plots, necessarily, or characters in the traditional sense. They’re more like observations that have been compressed until they become art. And because she’s working at such a small scale, every decision is visible. You can see the writer thinking on the page. There’s nowhere to hide in a one-paragraph story.”

“As a line editor, I’m always pushing authors toward precision. Davis is the ultimate example of what precision looks like when it’s achieved. She’s the standard I hold in my mind, even when I’m editing books that are nothing like hers.”

James, Associate Editor: “Austerlitz” by W.G. Sebald

James is our newest team member, hired last year after an internship that we extended three times because we couldn’t imagine working without him. He handles a mix of editorial and marketing work, which gives him an unusual perspective on how books move from manuscript to reader.

“Austerlitz,” he said. “I’ve read it three times and I still don’t fully understand how it works, which is part of why I want to have written it. It’s a novel that operates by accumulation. There’s no traditional plot structure, no rising action, no climax. Instead, Sebald builds meaning the way coral builds a reef: slowly, organically, one tiny accretion at a time, until you realize you’re surrounded by something enormous and you can’t see the shore anymore.”

“The book is about memory, specifically about how traumatic memory hides itself and then resurfaces in unexpected ways. And the form of the book mirrors that process. Sebald buries information inside nested narratives, digressions, descriptions of architecture and photography, so that when a revelation arrives, it feels like it’s emerging from beneath layers of sediment. It feels like memory itself.”

“What I wish I could do, as a writer, is what Sebald does with images. The photographs embedded in the text, the descriptions of buildings and landscapes, the way he uses visual detail to carry emotional meaning. Most writers describe things to create setting. Sebald describes things to create feeling. A train station in his prose isn’t a place; it’s an emotional state.”

“I also admire that Austerlitz is uncategorizable. It’s not a novel in any conventional sense, but it’s not nonfiction either. It exists in a space that Sebald essentially invented, and that space is, I think, closer to how consciousness actually works than anything the traditional novel form can achieve.”

My answer: “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson

I promised the team I’d share my own answer if they shared theirs. So here it is. My book, the one I wish I’d written, is Gilead.

I know. Two Robinson picks from the same editorial team. Make of that what you will about our aesthetic preferences. But Gilead is a different book from Housekeeping, and I love it for different reasons.

Gilead is written as a letter from an old minister to his young son, a letter that the father knows the son won’t read until after the father has died. This framing device is so simple that it almost disappears, and yet it controls everything. Every sentence is weighted with the knowledge that this is a person who will not be around to explain himself later. The stakes of every observation, every memory, every piece of advice are absolute, because there will be no second chance to get it right.

Robinson writes about ordinary things, light on a wall, water in a baptismal font, the way a child runs, with a kind of attentiveness that transforms them. Reading Gilead makes the world look different afterward. Colors are more vivid. Silence is more present. The ordinary becomes, for a while, astonishing. No other book has ever done this to me as consistently or as powerfully.

And the prose. I could talk about Robinson’s prose for hours and never capture what makes it special. It’s clean without being plain. It’s theological without being preachy. It moves slowly, but every sentence earns its place so completely that the slowness never feels like a fault. It feels like generosity, like the author is giving you time to absorb each thought before offering the next one.

If I could write one book, it would be a book that made ordinary life feel as miraculous as Gilead makes it feel. I don’t think I could. I don’t think many people could. But that’s the standard, and I’m grateful to have it.

What these choices reveal

Looking at our answers collectively, a few patterns emerge that I think say something about ScrollWorks as a publishing house, even though that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

All five choices prioritize prose quality over plot. None of us picked a thriller, a page-turner, or a book whose primary virtue is its story. We all picked books where the language itself is a source of meaning and pleasure. This makes sense for a literary publisher, but it’s worth naming explicitly because it informs every acquisition decision we make. When we read a manuscript, the first question we ask is: does this prose reward attention? If it doesn’t, no amount of plot will save it. Not for us.

Four of the five choices involve some form of emotional restraint. Ishiguro, Robinson (both books), and Sebald are all writers who achieve emotional power through understatement rather than direct expression. They trust the reader to feel what the prose implies rather than stating it outright. This, too, informs our editorial sensibility. We tend to be suspicious of manuscripts that tell the reader how to feel. We prefer books that create the conditions for feeling and then step back.

And all five choices are books that reward rereading, which connects to something I wrote about recently: our belief that the best books are not consumed but inhabited. We publish books that we hope readers will return to. Our editors’ personal choices reflect that same value at the level of individual taste.

I share this not because I think our taste is better than anyone else’s. Taste is personal and not really subject to argument. I share it because I think readers deserve to know who is making the editorial decisions at the publishers they support. When you pick up a ScrollWorks book, whether it’s The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron or Still Waters or The Cartographer’s Dilemma, the editorial sensibility behind it was shaped by the books you’ve just read about. That lineage matters. It’s the DNA of every book we publish, and I think it’s worth making visible.

Next time you pick up one of our titles, you’ll know a little more about the people who chose it, edited it, and sent it into the world. We hope that knowledge adds something to the reading. At the very least, it adds context. And context, as any good editor will tell you, changes everything.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. The books we love shape the books we make. We hope the connection shows.