It’s the last week of December and the office is quiet. Half the team is on vacation. The other half is here in body but drifting mentally, that pleasant end-of-year state where the urgency drains out of everything and you can finally think about something other than deadlines. I’m sitting at my desk with a cup of tea that went cold twenty minutes ago, looking at the stack of books we published this year, and trying to figure out what I actually feel about the past twelve months.

Gratitude, mostly. Also exhaustion. Also the specific satisfaction of having done hard things reasonably well, tempered by the awareness that we could have done some of them better. It’s been a year. Not our best or our worst, but one with its own character and its own lessons. Here’s some of what we learned.

The Books

We published four books this year, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that each one required roughly eighteen months of work from acquisition to finished copies. A book you hold in January was being edited in the previous spring and acquired the year before that. Publishing operates on timelines that make geological processes look hasty.

Of the four books, two performed more or less as expected. One significantly exceeded our projections, which was wonderful and slightly destabilizing because it meant scrambling to reprint faster than we’d planned. One underperformed, and I’ll talk about that honestly because I think transparency about failures is more useful than pretending everything goes according to plan.

The underperforming book was one we believed in deeply. The writing was strong. The reviews were positive, though fewer than we’d hoped. The cover was beautiful. The problem, as near as I can diagnose it, was timing. We released it in September, which seemed like a good idea at the time because the fall publishing season is when reader attention peaks. But September was unusually crowded this year, with several high-profile releases from major publishers dominating the conversation. Our book got lost in the noise. It deserved better, and I wish we’d released it in a quieter month where it would have had more room to breathe.

The lesson here is one I’ve learned before and apparently need to keep learning: the fall publishing season is not automatically the best time to release a book. Conventional wisdom says it is, because book sales peak in the fourth quarter. But peak sales also mean peak competition, and for a small publisher, getting noticed during a crowded season is much harder than getting noticed during a quieter one. Next year, I’m going to be more willing to publish in unconventional windows, January, March, August, and let the book find its audience without competing against every marquee title in publishing.

The Team

We added two people to the team this year, bringing our total headcount to a number that still fits comfortably around a single conference table. One is an editor who came to us from a larger publisher where she’d been working on commercial fiction. She’s brought a perspective on pacing and structure that has already improved our editorial process. She reads differently from the rest of us, faster and with a keener eye for narrative momentum, and the tension between her commercial instincts and our literary ones has been productive in ways I didn’t fully anticipate.

The other hire is a marketing coordinator, our first dedicated marketing person. Before this year, marketing was something everyone did as part of their other job, which is another way of saying nobody did it consistently or well. Having someone whose sole focus is connecting our books with readers has made an immediate difference. She built email lists, redesigned our social media approach, and developed relationships with bookstagrammers and BookTok creators that are already driving sales. I should have made this hire two years ago.

The rest of the team is the same group of people who have been doing this work for years, and I want to say something about them that I don’t say often enough: they’re extraordinary. Not in a promotional, website-bio kind of way. In the specific way that people are extraordinary when they care about their work and show up every day with the intention of doing it well. Our lead editor flagged a structural problem in a manuscript last month that would have been a serious issue if it had made it to print. Our production manager negotiated a paper price that saved us enough money to fund an additional print run of a backlist title. These aren’t the kinds of things that generate press releases, but they’re the things that keep a publishing company alive.

The Industry

This was a strange year for book publishing. Supply chain issues, which had been a persistent headache since 2020, finally eased. Print costs, which had been rising steadily, stabilized. These were welcome developments. Less welcome was the continued consolidation of the industry, with major publishers acquiring smaller ones and retail channels becoming increasingly concentrated. The gap between the biggest publishers and everyone else continues to widen, which makes life harder for independents like us.

I’m not going to pretend I have a macro-level analysis of the publishing industry that’s worth reading. I’m a small publisher, not an industry analyst. What I can tell you is what the macro trends feel like from where I sit, which is this: it’s getting harder to be small but it’s also getting easier to be good. The tools for producing high-quality books have improved. Print-on-demand technology has gotten better, which reduces the financial risk of publishing. Digital marketing allows us to reach readers directly without the intermediaries that large publishers depend on. If we can keep making good books and finding the people who want to read them, the size disadvantage matters less than it used to.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the independent publishing space, and “cautiously” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. We’re not going to become a major publisher. We’re not trying to. What we’re trying to do is sustain a small, financially viable operation that publishes books we believe in and finds them readers. This year, we managed it. Whether we can keep managing it depends on decisions we haven’t made yet and market conditions we can’t predict. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that uncertainty is the permanent condition of independent publishing, and you either make peace with it or you find a different career.

The Readers

Every year at this time, I look through the reader emails we’ve received over the past twelve months. We get more of these than you might expect for a small publisher, and I read every one. Some are brief: “I loved the book, thank you.” Some are long and detailed, describing what the book meant to them, how it connected to their life, what it made them think about. A few are critical, pointing out things they didn’t like or asking why we made certain editorial choices. All of them remind me why I do this work.

This year’s standout email came from a retired teacher in Wisconsin who read The Last Archive and wrote us a four-page letter (an actual letter, on paper, sent through the mail) about how the book connected to her experience of watching her local library close. She described specific scenes that resonated with her and asked if the author had been through something similar. I forwarded the letter to the author, who was moved to tears. That letter is, for me, the most important thing that happened in our publishing program this year, more important than any sales figure or review.

We also noticed this year that our reader demographics are shifting. Our audience is getting younger, which is encouraging and slightly surprising. Books that we expected would appeal primarily to readers in their forties and fifties are being picked up by readers in their twenties and thirties, often through social media discovery. I think this says something positive about the appetite for literary fiction among younger readers, and it challenges the narrative that young people only want commercial genre fiction. Some of them do, and that’s fine. But others are looking for something more contemplative and more challenging, and they’re finding it.

What We Got Wrong

I want to talk about this because I think the tendency, especially in end-of-year reflections, is to focus on what went well and gloss over what didn’t. Here’s an honest accounting of our mistakes.

We were too slow to adapt to changes in social media. By the time we had a real strategy for engaging with BookTok and Bookstagram, we’d missed months of potential audience-building. Our new marketing coordinator is fixing this, but we lost time that we shouldn’t have lost.

We underestimated the audiobook market for one of our titles. We produced a solid audiobook, but we didn’t invest in it the way we should have. The narrator was good but not great. The marketing push for the audio edition was an afterthought. Looking at the sales data, I believe we left significant revenue on the table by treating audio as secondary. This changes next year.

We had a communication breakdown with one of our authors over cover design that could have been handled much better. The author had a strong vision for the cover that differed from our designer’s approach. Instead of having an honest, early conversation about the disagreement, we went through several rounds of revision that pleased no one. The final cover is good, but the process of getting there was frustrating for everyone involved, and it strained a relationship that I value. I take responsibility for that. I should have facilitated the conversation earlier and more directly.

And we didn’t take enough risks with our acquisitions. Looking back at the manuscripts we considered this year, I think we were too conservative, too focused on books that felt safe and marketable, not adventurous enough in pursuing the weird, difficult, genre-defying projects that are often the most rewarding to publish. I’ve talked to the team about this, and we’ve agreed to be braver next year. What “braver” looks like in practice remains to be seen, but the intention is there.

Looking Ahead

We have three books in the pipeline for next year, with a possible fourth if an acquisition I’m working on comes together. I can’t say much about them yet, but I’m excited about all three in different ways. One is a novel that does something structurally interesting that I’ve never seen done before. One is a nonfiction book on a subject that I think a lot of people are hungry to read about but that hasn’t been well-served by existing publishing. And one is a second book by an author we published last year, which is always a privilege because it means they chose to come back to us.

On the business side, we’re investing in our infrastructure. Better project management tools (we’ve been using a combination of spreadsheets and hope for too long). A more professional approach to rights management. An updated website that better reflects who we are and what we’re doing. These aren’t exciting changes, but they’re necessary ones. A publishing company that can’t manage its own operations can’t serve its authors well, and serving our authors well is the whole point.

I also want to do more events next year. We’ve been largely absent from the conference and festival circuit, partly because of cost and partly because of the time commitment. But I’ve come to believe that in-person connections with readers, booksellers, and other industry people are worth the investment. We’ll be at a few book festivals in the spring, and I’m hoping to organize some author events in partnership with independent bookshops. If you’re in the business and want to collaborate, get in touch through our contact page.

The Gratitude Part

I know I said I’d mostly avoid generic conclusions, and I’ll try. But I do want to express some specific gratitude.

Thank you to the independent booksellers who stock our books, especially the ones who hand-sell them to customers with a genuine recommendation. That personal touch sells more books than any ad campaign, and we don’t take it for granted.

Thank you to the reviewers, both professional and amateur, who take the time to write thoughtful responses to our books. Even the negative reviews. Especially the negative reviews that teach us something.

Thank you to our authors, who trust us with their work and their careers. Publishing is a relationship built on trust, and the trust our authors place in us is something we try to earn every day.

And thank you to the readers. You’re the reason any of this exists. Every book we publish is, ultimately, a bet that someone out there wants to read it. Every time you buy one of our books, borrow it from a library, or recommend it to a friend, you validate that bet. We’re grateful for your attention and your time, and we’ll keep trying to be worthy of both.

The tea is definitely cold now. I’m going to reheat it, look at the stack of books one more time, and go home. It’s been a year. Next year will be different, because they always are. But the work continues, and I’m glad to be doing it.

Happy reading, and happy new year from everyone at ScrollWorks. You can find everything we’ve published at scrollworksmedia.com/books.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. See you in the new year.