Most people have never heard of a manuscript auction, and even among writers, the details are surprisingly murky. I’ve participated in a handful from the publishing side, and the experience is nothing like what the word “auction” conjures. There’s no gavel. No one shouts bids across a crowded room. It happens over the phone and via email, stretched across hours or days, and it’s simultaneously one of the most exciting and most agonizing processes in publishing.

Here’s how it works, roughly. An author writes a book, or more commonly, writes a proposal and sample chapters. Their literary agent submits the manuscript or proposal to editors at multiple publishing houses simultaneously. This is called going “on submission” or “on sub,” and it’s the point where the manuscript leaves the agent’s hands and enters the wild. The agent typically targets 10 to 20 editors who they believe are a good fit for the book, based on the editor’s taste, their publisher’s strengths, and what they’ve acquired recently.

If only one editor wants the book, there’s no auction. The agent and the editor negotiate a deal directly. Simple enough. But if two or more editors want the book, the agent has leverage, and they can initiate an auction. This is where things get interesting.

The agent sets the rules. There are several auction formats, and the agent chooses whichever one they think will maximize the outcome for their client. The most common formats are the “best bids” auction, the “round” auction, and the preempt. Each has its own dynamics, and understanding them reveals a lot about how publishing really works behind the scenes.

In a best bids auction, the agent tells all interested editors to submit their best offer by a certain deadline. Each editor submits a package: an advance amount, a royalty rate, rights included, marketing commitments, and sometimes a personal letter explaining their vision for the book. The agent and author review all the bids and choose the one they like best. It’s not always the highest number. An editor who offers a smaller advance but has a brilliant marketing plan and a track record of bestsellers might win over someone who offers more money but less enthusiasm. The relationship matters. The author is going to work with this editor for months or years. Chemistry counts.

Round auctions are more structured. The agent sets a floor price (the minimum bid) and asks editors to submit opening offers. After the first round, the agent goes back to each bidder and tells them (in vague terms) where they stand. Bidders can raise their offers, hold, or drop out. This continues for as many rounds as necessary until one bidder remains. Round auctions can drag on for days. I’ve been in auctions that went seven or eight rounds, with incremental increases each time, and the emotional toll on everyone involved is significant. Each round requires going back to your publisher and asking for more money, which means justifying why this book is worth the escalating price. It’s stressful for editors, who are essentially gambling their reputation on each bid.

The preempt is the most dramatic option. A preempt happens when one editor sees a manuscript they want so badly that they offer a large sum to take it off the table before an auction can happen. The agent brings the preemptive offer to the author and says, essentially, “someone is offering you a lot of money right now, but if you turn it down and go to auction, you might get more. Or you might not.” It’s a bird-in-hand calculation. A $200,000 preempt is concrete. The possibility of a $300,000 auction is theoretical. Some authors take the sure thing. Others roll the dice. I’ve seen both decisions pay off and both blow up.

The advance amounts in these auctions span an almost absurd range. For a debut literary novel, a competitive auction might push the advance from $25,000 to $75,000 or $100,000. For a celebrity memoir, we’re talking millions. Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” reportedly commanded a $65 million deal. That’s an extreme outlier, but it illustrates the ceiling. Most auctions settle in the low six figures, which sounds like a lot until you remember that the author’s agent takes 15 percent, taxes take another 25 to 35 percent, and the remaining amount is typically paid in installments over two to three years. A $100,000 advance might net the author $15,000 to $20,000 per year after agent commission and taxes. It’s a living, but barely.

What fascinates me about manuscript auctions is how subjective the bidding is. Editors aren’t bidding on a product with a known market value, like a house or a painting at Sotheby’s. They’re bidding on potential. They’re looking at an unfinished or recently finished manuscript and trying to predict whether it will resonate with readers a year and a half from now, when the book actually hits shelves. That prediction is based on gut instinct, market analysis, comparable titles (“comps”), and the editor’s personal taste. It’s an educated guess, but it’s still a guess. The history of publishing is littered with expensive manuscripts that flopped and cheap acquisitions that became phenomena. Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman famously said about Hollywood. The same is true for publishing.

The emotional dynamics of an auction are worth examining. For the author, it’s validation. After months or years of writing, often in isolation, someone is fighting to publish your work. Multiple someones, competing against each other, throwing money at the chance to put your words into the world. It’s intoxicating. I’ve watched first-time authors go through auctions, and the transformation is visible. They go from anxious and self-doubting to giddy within hours. The danger is that the giddiness can cloud judgment. A high advance creates high expectations. If your book got a $200,000 advance, the publisher needs it to sell enough copies to justify that investment. If it doesn’t, your next book will be a harder sell, regardless of its quality. In publishing, you’re only as good as your last sales figures.

For editors, auctions are a mix of excitement and dread. Excitement because they’ve found a manuscript they love, dread because winning the auction means they’ve spent their publisher’s money on a promise. Every editor has a budget, and every dollar spent on one book is a dollar not spent on another. Acquiring an expensive book means taking a risk, and if the risk doesn’t pay off, it affects the editor’s ability to acquire future books. Senior editors at major houses have been fired over expensive acquisitions that tanked. The stakes are real.

I want to talk about what happens after the auction, because the money is only the beginning. Once a deal is struck, the author and editor begin what can be an intense revision process. The editor who won the auction might have very specific ideas about how the manuscript should change. Sometimes those ideas align with the author’s vision. Sometimes they don’t. The auction’s romantic glow can fade quickly when you’re on your third round of structural revisions and your editor wants you to cut a character you love. The advance check is long since deposited. Now comes the actual work.

The auction process also has a dark side that’s worth acknowledging. It can create a hype machine that the book can’t sustain. Publishing is an industry that runs on buzz. A big auction generates trade press coverage (in outlets like Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace), which generates excitement among booksellers, which generates pre-orders, which generates more coverage. This feedback loop can propel a book to success based partly on the perception that it must be good because so many publishers wanted it. But sometimes a book gets overhyped in the auction phase and underdelivers on publication. The readers don’t care how much the publisher paid. They care whether the book is good. And a highly anticipated book that disappoints readers gets punished harder than a book nobody expected anything from.

Small presses like ours rarely participate in auctions for the simple reason that we can’t compete on advance size with the Big Five. Our acquisitions process is more straightforward: we find manuscripts we love, we make offers we can afford, and we trust that our editorial attention and care will compensate for smaller advances. Some authors prefer this model. They’d rather have a publisher who’s deeply invested in their specific book than a large publisher where they’re one title among hundreds. Others want the resources and distribution that only a large publisher can provide. Both are reasonable positions.

For aspiring authors, the takeaway from all of this is that the auction is the exception, not the rule. Most books are not auctioned. Most books are sold in quiet, bilateral negotiations between one agent and one editor. The goal should be writing a book good enough to attract a great editor, not engineering a bidding war. If a bidding war happens, wonderful. Your agent will handle it. But chasing the auction as an end in itself leads to writing for the market rather than writing the book only you can write, and market-chasing almost always produces worse books.

I also want to mention what auction culture does to the books that don’t get auctioned. When publishing media covers a big auction, the implicit message is that the value of a book can be measured in dollars. A $500,000 acquisition gets trade press coverage. A $15,000 acquisition does not. This creates a false hierarchy where expensive books seem more important than cheap ones, which is obviously nonsense. Some of the best books published in any given year were acquired for small advances with no auction at all. The editor saw something they loved, made a fair offer, and the agent accepted. No drama. No headlines. Just two people agreeing that a book was worth publishing. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’d argue it’s healthier than the frenzy of a competitive auction, because the expectations are realistic and the pressure is manageable.

The auction also affects what kinds of books get written, in ways that aren’t always positive. Agents know that certain types of books are more likely to generate competitive interest. High-concept thrillers, celebrity memoirs, narrative nonfiction with a “hook” that can be described in one sentence: these are auction-friendly. Quiet literary fiction, experimental work, poetry, essay collections: these almost never go to auction. If agents are steering their clients toward auction-friendly work (and some agents definitely do this), then the auction system is subtly shaping the literary ecosystem, favoring certain kinds of books over others and making it harder for less commercially obvious work to find a home.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve built our list almost entirely outside the auction system. The books we publish, works like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are books we found through direct relationships with authors and agents, acquired at prices we could afford, and published with the kind of attention that a small press can provide. They didn’t arrive with six-figure price tags or bidding wars. They arrived because someone believed in them, and that belief turned out to be enough.

The manuscript auction is one of publishing’s more theatrical rituals. It’s where art meets commerce in the most explicit way, where a manuscript’s value is determined not by its literary merit but by how many people want to bet on it. It can launch careers, generate life-changing money, and create the kind of industry buzz that keeps booksellers and reviewers paying attention. It can also create unrealistic expectations, inflate advances beyond what the market will bear, and set up authors for a disappointment that has nothing to do with the quality of their writing. Like most things in publishing, it’s complicated. The money is real. The excitement is real. The risk is also real. And the only thing that matters in the end, long after the auction is forgotten and the checks are cashed, is whether the book was worth reading. That part has nothing to do with auctions at all.