We signed a first-time novelist last year whose manuscript arrived in the slush pile on a Tuesday and was in contract by Friday. That almost never happens. Our average time from manuscript submission to offer is about four months, and most submissions never reach the offer stage at all. But this one was different. I read the first thirty pages during my lunch break, cancelled my afternoon meetings, read the rest by dinner, and called our acquisitions team from my car on the way home. By Friday, we had an offer on the table.

That’s the dramatic version of the story. The real version is more instructive, because it reveals what “building a relationship with an author” actually means at a publisher like ScrollWorks, and why it matters so much more than the initial acquisition.

Publishing culture talks a lot about “discovering” authors, as if the publisher is an explorer and the author is an uncharted island. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that framing. It puts the publisher at the center of the story, when really the author is the one who did the work. We didn’t discover anyone. A writer spent three years of her life producing a manuscript. We were lucky enough to read it and smart enough to recognize what it was. Discovery is the wrong word. Recognition is better. And recognition is just the beginning of a relationship that, if it works well, lasts decades.

Let me describe how that relationship typically develops at ScrollWorks, because I think our approach is different from the industry norm in ways that matter.

The first stage is editorial. After we sign an author, their manuscript enters our editorial process, which is intense and collaborative. We assign a developmental editor who reads the manuscript at least three times before writing a single editorial note. The first read is for pleasure. The second is for structure. The third is for language. Only after those three reads does the editor produce a comprehensive editorial letter, usually 10 to 20 pages long, addressing everything from the book’s overall architecture to specific line-level concerns. This letter isn’t a list of commands. It’s a conversation starter. The editor is saying, “Here’s what I see in your book. Here’s what I think is working. Here’s where I think the book isn’t yet doing what you want it to do. Let’s talk.”

That “let’s talk” part is where the relationship begins to form. Some authors want detailed guidance. Others bristle at even the gentlest suggestions. Some are open to restructuring entire sections of their book. Others will defend every comma with their lives. A good editor learns quickly which kind of writer they’re working with and adapts accordingly. This isn’t about being accommodating to the point of uselessness. It’s about finding the editorial approach that helps this particular writer produce the best version of this particular book.

I’ve watched editors at other publishers push writers into shapes that don’t fit them, insisting on structural changes that serve the editor’s vision rather than the author’s. I’ve watched the opposite too: editors who are so hands-off that the writer never gets the feedback they need to reach the next level. Both failures stem from the same root cause, which is treating the editorial relationship as transactional rather than personal. If you think of editing as “fixing the manuscript,” you’ll either fix too much or too little. If you think of it as “helping the writer realize their vision,” you’ll ask the right questions.

The editorial phase typically takes six to twelve months, depending on the book. For The Last Archive, it took nearly fourteen months, because the manuscript required significant restructuring and the author, understandably, needed time to process and implement major changes. For Echoes of Iron, the editorial phase was closer to seven months, because the manuscript arrived in strong shape and the changes were more about refinement than reconstruction. In both cases, the editor and the author emerged from the process with a relationship built on trust, mutual respect, and a shared understanding of what the book was trying to be.

That trust matters enormously when you move into the second stage: production and design. Authors care about what their books look like. They should. A book’s cover is the first thing a reader sees, and it communicates something about the work before a single word is read. At ScrollWorks, we involve our authors in the cover design process from the beginning. Our designer produces three to five initial concepts, and we present them to the author along with the reasoning behind each one. What is the cover trying to communicate? What genre signals is it sending? How will it look as a thumbnail on a screen? How will it look on a bookshelf? The author’s input is genuine, not performative. We’ve killed covers that the design team loved because the author felt they misrepresented the book. We’ve gone back to the drawing board multiple times. The process takes longer this way, but the result is a cover that both the publisher and the author feel good about.

I know this isn’t universal. Many authors at larger publishers have told me they had no meaningful input on their covers. They saw the design after it was finalized, and their options were to accept it or accept it. That approach is efficient, and sometimes the publisher’s design instincts are better than the author’s. But it also sends a message about the relationship: the publisher makes the decisions, and the author provides the content. At ScrollWorks, we’re trying to build a different kind of relationship, one where the author is a partner in every stage of the book’s journey from manuscript to finished product.

The third stage is marketing and publicity. This is where publisher-author relationships most commonly break down, and I understand why. Authors have unrealistic expectations about marketing (they want their book on the front table of every bookstore, a multi-city tour, and a feature in the New York Times). Publishers have limited budgets and have to make hard choices about where to allocate resources. The result is that many authors feel unsupported, while many publishers feel that authors don’t appreciate the marketing work that does happen.

We try to short-circuit this problem through transparency. Before a book launches, we sit down with the author (or get on a call, for authors who don’t live nearby) and walk them through our marketing plan in detail. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what we can’t do. Here’s why. Here’s what we think will be effective. Here’s what we’d like the author to do. These conversations are sometimes uncomfortable. An author might have their heart set on a review in a major publication, and we have to explain that we’ve pitched the book to that publication and they passed. An author might expect a print advertising budget, and we have to explain that we’ve found digital advertising to be more cost-effective for our kinds of books. But honesty up front prevents resentment later. Our authors know what to expect, and they know that our marketing plans are based on experience and data, not indifference.

The marketing stage is also where we ask the most of our authors in terms of their personal involvement. I believe strongly that the most effective book marketing, especially for a mid-size publisher without a massive advertising budget, is author-driven. The author’s personality, their story, their genuine connection with readers. That’s what sells books at our scale. So we work with our authors to develop their public presence in whatever way feels authentic to them. Some authors thrive on social media. Others are natural public speakers. Others are introverts who would rather write guest essays than appear on podcasts. We don’t push anyone to do things that feel wrong. We find the intersection between what the author is comfortable with and what will be effective, and we build the plan around that.

One thing we do that I’m particularly proud of is what we call the “long game” meeting. About six months after a book’s publication, after the launch buzz has faded and the first royalty statement has arrived, we meet with the author again. Not to discuss the next book (though that often comes up naturally) but to talk about the long-term trajectory of their career. Where do they want to be in five years? What kind of books do they want to write next? Are they building an audience? Is there a community of readers forming around their work? What can we do to support them between books? These conversations are the most important ones we have, because they demonstrate that we’re invested in the author as a person with a career, not just as the producer of a single product.

I’ll give you a concrete example. One of our nonfiction authors published a book that sold decently but not spectacularly. By most industry standards, it was a moderate success. The author was discouraged. She’d hoped for more and was questioning whether to write another book. In our long-game meeting, we talked about what had worked, what hadn’t, and what we could learn. We identified a specific audience, teachers of a particular subject, who had responded enthusiastically to the book. We worked with the author to develop a presence in that community: speaking at conferences, contributing to professional journals, building an email list. Over the next two years, backlist sales of the first book tripled. When she published her second book, it had a ready-made audience that the first book hadn’t had. The second book sold three times as many copies in its first year as the first book had. That’s the long game.

The relationship between publisher and author is, at its best, a creative partnership. I know that sounds like a corporate platitude, but I mean it literally. The publisher brings skills and resources that the author doesn’t have: editorial expertise, design capability, distribution networks, marketing infrastructure, industry relationships. The author brings the thing without which none of that matters: the work itself. Neither party can succeed without the other. When both parties recognize this and invest accordingly, the result is a relationship that produces better books and sustains careers.

I should acknowledge that we don’t always get this right. We’ve lost authors to larger publishers who offered more money. We’ve had relationships break down over creative disagreements. We’ve made marketing promises we couldn’t keep. Publishing is a business, and business relationships are inherently complicated by competing interests. The author wants the highest advance and the most marketing support. The publisher wants to manage financial risk and allocate resources efficiently. Those interests don’t always align, and when they don’t, the relationship gets strained.

The advance question is particularly fraught. At ScrollWorks, our advances are modest by industry standards. We can’t compete with the big five publishers for a hotly contested manuscript. What we can offer is attention. We can offer an editorial process that’s thorough and personalized. We can offer a design process that values the author’s input. We can offer a marketing plan that’s tailored to the book rather than templated. We can offer the long-game meeting and the career-level investment that comes with it. For some authors, that’s worth more than a larger advance from a publisher where their book will be one of two hundred titles per year and their editor will be juggling twenty projects simultaneously.

For other authors, the money matters more, and I respect that. Writing is work. Work should be compensated. I’d love to pay higher advances, and we raise them incrementally as our revenue grows. But I’d rather offer a smaller advance and invest the difference in editorial quality and marketing than offer a large advance and cut corners elsewhere. The advance is one payment. The quality of the publisher-author relationship lasts for the life of the book and, ideally, the life of the career.

Multi-book relationships are where all of this pays off most visibly. When we publish an author’s second or third book, the institutional knowledge we’ve accumulated makes everything more efficient. We know the author’s writing process. We know their editorial preferences. We know their audience. We know what marketing tactics work for them. The second book benefits from everything we learned publishing the first. The third book benefits from everything we learned publishing the first two. There’s a compound effect. Each book in the relationship is better than it would have been if published by a different house, because each book builds on the accumulated understanding of the author and their work.

I think about the great editor-author relationships in publishing history. Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robert Gottlieb and Joseph Heller. Toni Morrison and her editor at Knopf, Erroll McDonald. These relationships produced some of the best books of the twentieth century, and they were built on exactly the qualities I’ve been describing: trust, honesty, creative collaboration, and a long-term commitment to the author’s vision. Those relationships didn’t happen overnight. They were built book by book, draft by draft, conversation by conversation. They required patience and investment from both sides. The contemporary publishing industry, with its emphasis on speed, scale, and quarterly results, makes these kinds of relationships harder to build. But not impossible. Not if you’re willing to do the work.

At ScrollWorks, we publish about twelve to fifteen books per year. That’s tiny compared to the big five publishers, who each put out thousands of titles annually. But our size is an advantage for author relationships. Our editors work on four to six books per year, which gives them time to engage deeply with each project. Our marketing team knows every title on the list personally, not as a line item on a spreadsheet. Our publisher (that’s me) reads every manuscript we acquire. I can tell you the name of every author on our list, what their book is about, what their writing process looks like, and what they ate for lunch the last time we met. You can’t do that at a company publishing 500 titles a year. Scale has its advantages, but intimacy isn’t one of them.

The authors who are happiest with us are the ones who value that intimacy. They want to know their editor personally. They want to be involved in decisions about their book. They want a publisher who will take their call on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re stuck on chapter twelve and need to talk through it. They want the long-game meeting. They want a partner, not a vendor. We built ScrollWorks to be that partner. It’s the reason we exist, and it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. The books are wonderful. The business is interesting. But the relationships are the thing that makes all of it worth doing.