Last week, one of our authors received a box of finished copies of her new book. She posted a photo of herself holding it, beaming. The comments flooded in: congratulations, how exciting, you must be so proud. And she should be proud. But I noticed, as I always notice, that every comment was directed at the author. Not one mentioned the dozens of other people whose work made that book possible.

This is normal. It’s how publishing works, at least from the outside. The author gets the credit and the blame. Their name is on the cover. They do the interviews. They accept the awards. Behind them, invisible to almost everyone, is an army of people whose skills and labor turned a manuscript into a book. I want to talk about those people, because I work with them every day and I think what they do is remarkable and almost never acknowledged.

Copyeditors: The Last Line of Defense

I’ll start with copyeditors because they’re the people I feel most passionately about. A copyeditor’s job is to read the manuscript line by line, checking for errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency, and fact. This sounds mechanical, and some people treat it as if it is. It isn’t. Good copyediting requires a rare combination of precision and sensitivity. You need to catch every misplaced comma and every factual error, but you also need to recognize the difference between a mistake and a stylistic choice. If an author consistently uses sentence fragments for effect, a good copyeditor doesn’t “fix” them. A bad copyeditor does.

The best copyeditor I’ve ever worked with is a woman in her sixties who works from her home in Vermont. She doesn’t use social media. She doesn’t have a website. I’m not going to name her because she’d be mortified. What she does is read manuscripts with an attention to detail that borders on supernatural. She once caught a continuity error where a character’s eye color changed between chapter four and chapter seventeen. The developmental editor missed it. The author missed it. The proofreader, working after the copyeditor, would have missed it. She caught it, noted it in the margin with a gentle query, and moved on to the next page.

Copyeditors are typically paid per word or per page, and the rates have not kept up with inflation. A typical copyediting job for a full-length novel might pay between $1,500 and $3,000, depending on the length and complexity of the text. For work that takes two to three weeks of full-time effort and requires a skill set that takes years to develop, that’s not a lot of money. It bothers me, and I try to pay above market rates when our budget allows, but the economics of small publishing are what they are.

Book Designers: Making the First Impression

People absolutely do judge books by their covers. This isn’t shallow; it’s human nature. A book cover needs to communicate genre, tone, and quality in about two seconds, because that’s how long a potential reader spends looking at it on a shelf or a screen. The people who design those covers are doing one of the hardest jobs in graphic design, and most readers have no idea they exist.

Cover design is a strange discipline because the success criteria are so specific. A cover doesn’t just need to look good. It needs to look good at thumbnail size on a phone screen. It needs to communicate the right genre signals (a literary novel should not look like a thriller, even if the story has thriller elements). It needs to stand out on a shelf next to dozens of competing titles. And it needs to do all of this while satisfying the author, the publisher, the sales team, and the marketing department, all of whom may have different opinions about what the cover should look like.

I’ve sat in cover design meetings that lasted three hours. Three hours of looking at mockups, debating font choices, arguing about whether the color palette says “literary fiction” or “women’s fiction” (a distinction that is itself problematic, but that’s a different article). The designer sits through all of this, takes notes, goes back to their desk, and produces another round of options. And another. And another. The cover of The Cartographer’s Dilemma went through eleven rounds of revision before everyone was happy. The designer handled it with grace and professionalism, which is more than I can say for everyone else in the room.

Interior design is even less visible than cover design, but it matters just as much. The choice of typeface, the size of the margins, the spacing between lines, the way chapter openings are formatted: all of these affect the reading experience in ways that are felt even if they’re not consciously noticed. A well-designed interior makes reading feel effortless. A poorly designed one makes you vaguely uncomfortable without knowing why. The people who do this work are typographers and book designers, and they possess a body of knowledge about text and readability that goes back centuries.

Proofreaders: Catching What Everyone Else Missed

After the manuscript has been edited, copyedited, and laid out in its final design, a proofreader goes through it one more time. Their job is to catch anything that slipped through the previous rounds: typos that were introduced during the layout process, formatting inconsistencies, widows and orphans (those single lines of text stranded at the top or bottom of a page that look wrong even if you don’t know the technical terms for them).

Proofreading is the last quality check before a book goes to the printer, which means the proofreader carries an enormous responsibility. Every error they miss will be immortalized in print, potentially thousands of copies’ worth. I’ve worked with proofreaders who took this responsibility so seriously that they would read the same page three times, once for content errors, once for formatting, and once for visual consistency. It’s painstaking work that requires immense concentration, and it pays even less than copyediting, which is saying something.

One thing that non-publishing people don’t realize is that even with a copyeditor and a proofreader, published books still contain errors. It’s almost impossible to produce a completely error-free book. The human eye, no matter how trained, will occasionally skip over something. When a reader finds a typo in a published book and posts about it on social media, the comments always follow the same pattern: “How did nobody catch this?” The answer is that somebody probably did catch fifty other errors, and this one slipped through. Perfection in publishing is aspirational, not achievable.

Production Managers: The Logistics Wizards

Every physical book you’ve ever held went through a production process that involved dozens of decisions about paper, printing, binding, and distribution. The person who manages that process is the production manager, and their job is a bizarre combination of artistic sensibility and logistical precision.

A production manager has to know things like: What kind of paper should we use for a book with full-color photographs? (Coated stock, probably, but which weight?) How will the paper choice affect the book’s spine width, which affects the cover design, which is already finalized? If we use a matte laminate on the cover instead of a gloss laminate, how will that affect the print cost per unit? Can we afford to use a French flap format (those elegant folded edges on a paperback cover), or will the added cost push us over budget?

These sound like minor details, and individually they are. But collectively, they determine the physical experience of holding and reading the book. A great production manager makes choices that you never consciously notice but that contribute to the feeling that this is a well-made object worth owning. A bad production manager (or more commonly, a production process driven entirely by cost-cutting) produces books that feel cheap and disposable, regardless of the quality of the writing inside.

I once watched our production manager spend twenty minutes holding different paper samples up to a window, checking how the light passed through them. She was looking for show-through, the degree to which text on one side of the page is visible from the other side. She rejected three paper options before settling on one that was slightly more expensive but produced a much cleaner reading experience. Nobody will ever thank her for this. Nobody will ever know it happened. But every person who reads that book benefits from those twenty minutes at the window.

Indexers: Organizing the World

I’m going to talk about indexers even though most fiction publishers don’t use them, because I think they’re one of the most underappreciated specialists in the entire book industry. An indexer reads a completed, laid-out nonfiction book and creates the index at the back, that dense block of terms and page numbers that most readers barely glance at but that researchers, students, and serious readers rely on constantly.

Good indexing is an intellectual act, not a clerical one. The indexer has to read the book, understand its arguments and structure, anticipate what a reader might look for, and organize that information in a way that’s useful. They have to make judgment calls constantly. If a chapter discusses climate change’s effect on agriculture without using the phrase “food security,” should “food security” appear in the index with a see-also reference? A skilled indexer says yes, because that’s what the reader is likely to look up. An algorithm-generated index says no, because the exact phrase doesn’t appear in the text.

This is why computer-generated indexes are still inferior to human-created ones, and probably will be for a while. Indexing requires understanding meaning, not just recognizing words. The best indexers I’ve worked with have a gift for thinking like a reader, anticipating questions before they’re asked and providing answers in the index.

Sales Reps: The Bridge to Bookshops

Between a publisher and a bookshop sits a sales representative, a person whose job is to convince booksellers that a book is worth stocking. For small publishers like us, the sales rep is often the difference between a book being available in independent bookshops and a book being available only online.

Good sales reps actually read the books they’re selling, which might seem obvious but isn’t universal. They visit bookshops in person, talk to the buyers, learn what kinds of books sell in each store, and tailor their pitch accordingly. A book that would fly off the shelves in a college-town bookshop might sit unsold in a tourist-area shop, and vice versa. The sales rep knows these differences and adjusts their approach store by store.

We use a commission sales group that represents several small publishers, and our rep, a man named Dave who has been doing this for over twenty years, knows the independent bookshop ecosystem better than anyone I’ve met. He knows which bookshop owners are passionate about literary fiction, which ones have a customer base that skews toward history and biography, which ones are willing to take a chance on an unknown author if the pitch is good. This knowledge is invaluable, and it exists entirely in Dave’s head and in the heads of reps like him across the country.

Publicists: Getting the Word Out

Book publicity is a grind, and I mean that with genuine respect. A publicist’s job is to get media coverage for a book, which means sending advance copies to reviewers, pitching stories to journalists, arranging author interviews, coordinating events, and following up relentlessly with people who are bombarded with hundreds of pitches a week. The success rate for any individual pitch is low, which means a publicist has to be comfortable with rejection on a daily basis and still show up the next morning with enthusiasm.

The good publicists I’ve worked with have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the media ecosystem. They know which reviewer at which publication is most likely to be interested in a particular kind of book. They know which podcasts are worth pitching and which ones aren’t worth the time. They know the rhythms of the media calendar, when to pitch and when to hold off, which seasons are crowded and which have openings.

I think publicity is one of the hardest jobs in publishing because the results are so uncertain and so visible. When a publicist lands a big review or a major interview, everyone notices and the author is thrilled. When weeks of pitching produce nothing, the publicist absorbs the disappointment while already working on the next campaign. It’s emotionally demanding work, and the people who do it well are tougher than they get credit for.

The Collective Effort

I’ve left out many people: literary agents, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, bookshop staff, librarians, foreign rights managers, translators, audio engineers, narrators. Every one of them plays a role in getting a book from an author’s imagination to a reader’s hands. The process is longer, more complex, and more human-intensive than most people realize.

I wrote this piece because I think the romantic image of the solitary author producing a masterpiece in isolation, while appealing, obscures the reality that books are collaborative products. The author’s contribution is the most important one, sure. Without the writing, there’s nothing. But without the editing, the design, the production, the sales, and the publicity, the writing stays on the author’s hard drive and never reaches anyone.

Next time you finish a book you loved, flip to the acknowledgments page. Most authors thank their editor, their agent, and their family. The really thoughtful ones also thank their copyeditor, their designer, their publicist, and their production team. These are the unsung heroes of book production, the people who do exceptional work that is, by design, invisible. If they’ve done their jobs well, you’ll never notice they were there. That’s the point, and it’s a strange kind of excellence: the better you are at it, the less anyone knows.

To everyone who works behind the scenes on ScrollWorks books, including our titles like The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, and Still Waters: thank you. The books are better because of you.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We know who makes the books, even if most people don’t.