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

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

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

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

The first read is fast, and that’s okay

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

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

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

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

What we mean when we talk about voice

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

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

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

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

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

The question we keep coming back to

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

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

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

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

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

The role of market thinking (and its limits)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What agents do (and don’t) matter for

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

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

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

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

The editorial meeting where it all comes together

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

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

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

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

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

Red flags in submissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green flags, or what makes us lean forward

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

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

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

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

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

The books that got away

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

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

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

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

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

How diversity fits into our selection process

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

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

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

The financial calculation

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

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

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

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

What we wish more writers knew

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

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

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

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

The part that still surprises us

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

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

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

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

That’s the best promise we can make.

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