ScrollWorks Media is seven years old this month. I keep a framed copy of our first catalog on the wall behind my desk, and every few months I look at it and wince. Not because the books were bad. They weren’t. But almost everything else about how we operated in those first two years was, in hindsight, somewhere between naive and genuinely misguided.

I’m writing this because I think there’s a culture in publishing, and in business generally, that only tells origin stories as triumphs. The scrappy startup that did everything right. The visionary founder who saw what nobody else could see. That’s a comforting narrative, and it’s almost never true. The real story of most companies that survive their early years is a story of mistakes made, recognized, and slowly corrected. Ours is no different.

So here’s what we got wrong, in roughly chronological order, with the hope that other small publishers (or anyone starting a creative business) might find something useful in our missteps.

We tried to be everything at once

When I founded ScrollWorks, I had a vision that I now recognize was hopelessly broad. I wanted to publish literary fiction, genre fiction, narrative nonfiction, poetry, essay collections, and maybe even some children’s books. I’d come from a large publishing house where all of these lived under one roof, and I assumed that breadth was simply how a publisher operated.

What I didn’t account for was that large publishers have hundreds of employees, specialized editors for each category, dedicated marketing teams for each genre, and relationships with thousands of booksellers. I had me, one part-time editor, and an intern who was mostly there for college credit.

Our first catalog had a literary novel, a self-help book, a memoir, and a collection of flash fiction. We did all four of them adequately and none of them well. The literary novel needed another round of structural editing that we didn’t have time for. The self-help book needed a marketing strategy we didn’t know how to build. The memoir was actually quite good, but we had no idea how to get memoir readers to notice a book from a publisher they’d never heard of. The flash fiction collection was beautiful and sold about 200 copies, most of them to the author’s extended family.

It took us about eighteen months to figure out what should have been obvious from the start: a small publisher needs a clear identity. Readers need to know what to expect from you. Booksellers need to be able to describe your list in a sentence. Agents need to know what kind of manuscripts to send you. When you publish everything, you’re effectively publishing nothing, because nobody can find you in the noise.

The turning point came when I sat down and asked a genuinely uncomfortable question: of all the books we’d published, which ones made me proudest? The answer was clear. It was the literary fiction and the thoughtful narrative nonfiction. Those were the books where our editorial instincts were sharpest, where we had something real to offer authors, where the finished product felt like it couldn’t have existed without us.

So we narrowed. Painfully, reluctantly, but necessarily. We turned down manuscripts that were perfectly good but not in our lane. We said no to projects that would have been profitable but not aligned. And slowly, a recognizable ScrollWorks identity began to emerge.

We undervalued editing and over-prioritized speed

In our first year, we published eight books. Eight. For a team of essentially two and a half people. I’m still not entirely sure how we did it, and I’m very sure that we shouldn’t have.

The publishing industry has always had a pace problem. Large houses are under constant pressure to fill their catalogs, meet quarterly targets, and keep the pipeline moving. When I started ScrollWorks, I unconsciously imported that urgency without having any of the infrastructure that makes it manageable at scale.

Here’s what eight books in a year looks like at a tiny publisher: it looks like developmental edits that should have taken three months getting crammed into six weeks. It looks like copyediting done in a single pass instead of two. It looks like proofreading assigned to someone who’s simultaneously managing the social media accounts. It looks like books going to print with errors that make you sick to your stomach when a reader politely emails to point them out.

The worst part wasn’t the typos or the occasional formatting glitch. The worst part was the books that would have been genuinely excellent if we’d given them another two or three months of editorial work, but instead came out as merely good. “Merely good” is a devastating outcome in literary publishing. Nobody talks about merely good books. Nobody recommends them to friends. They sell their initial print run and then they disappear.

We now publish three to five books a year. That’s it. Each one gets the full editorial treatment: developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, proofreading, and a final review pass. The process takes nine to twelve months from accepted manuscript to publication. Some of our authors have found this pace frustrating at first, but every single one has thanked us when they held the finished book. That’s the metric I care about now.

We treated marketing as an afterthought

I came to publishing because I love books and editing. I did not come to publishing because I love marketing. This is true of approximately 95 percent of the people who start small presses, and it is the reason that approximately 80 percent of small press books sell fewer than 500 copies.

In our early years, our “marketing strategy” consisted of posting the cover on social media, sending a press release to a list of reviewers we’d found on the internet, and hoping. I’m using the word “strategy” very loosely here. It was more of a vague hope dressed up in a spreadsheet.

The problem with this approach is that it puts the entire burden of discoverability on the book itself. And while I believe strongly in the power of word-of-mouth, word-of-mouth needs a spark. Somebody has to read the book first before they can recommend it to someone else. If your entire print run is sitting in a warehouse because no one knows it exists, there’s no mouth for the word to come from.

Our wake-up call came with our third season’s lead title, a novel I genuinely believed was one of the best books I’d ever read. We did our usual minimal marketing. The book got two reviews, one in a small literary journal and one on a blog with about forty readers. It sold 340 copies in its first year. Three hundred and forty copies of a book that I still think is extraordinary.

That failure hurt enough to change us. We started studying how successful independent publishers actually moved books. We learned that marketing isn’t a single event at publication; it’s a six-month process that starts long before the book hits shelves. We learned about advance reader copies, about building relationships with independent booksellers, about the power of author events and partnerships with literary organizations. We learned, slowly and expensively, that making a great book is only half the job. The other half is making sure people know it exists.

Today, every ScrollWorks title has a marketing plan that’s written before the book enters its final edit. Not after. Before. Because if we can’t articulate who the audience is and how to reach them, maybe we need to rethink whether we’re the right publisher for that book.

We didn’t listen to booksellers early enough

Independent booksellers are the most underappreciated people in the literary ecosystem. They read more than anyone, they know their customers personally, and they have an almost supernatural ability to predict which books will find audiences. For our first three years, we basically ignored them.

Not intentionally. We just didn’t think of them as partners. We thought of them as retail outlets, places where our books would sit on shelves. This is a bit like thinking of a sommelier as someone who opens wine bottles. Technically accurate, spectacularly incomplete.

The shift happened when I spent a week visiting independent bookstores in the Pacific Northwest. I walked in with advance copies, introduced myself, and asked booksellers what they thought of our list. The feedback was honest and sometimes painful. One bookseller in Portland told me that our covers looked “like they were designed by someone’s nephew who has Photoshop.” She was right. Another told me that she’d never heard of us because we’d never introduced ourselves, and how exactly did we expect her to handsell books from a publisher she couldn’t vouch for?

That trip restructured how we think about distribution and relationships. We now send advance reading copies to about fifty independent booksellers, four months before publication. We call them. We visit when we can. We listen to their feedback and sometimes adjust our marketing based on it. When a bookseller tells me they love a book, I know it’s going to sell, because that bookseller is going to put it in customers’ hands with genuine enthusiasm. No amount of social media advertising matches a bookseller saying “you need to read this.”

We didn’t take care of our authors’ emotional needs

This one is hard to talk about because it involves recognizing that I was, at times, a bad publisher to people who trusted me with their most personal work.

In the early years, I treated the author-publisher relationship as primarily transactional. We acquired your book, we edited it, we published it, we tried to sell it. The contract specified responsibilities and timelines. Everything was professional and efficient.

What I missed was that publishing a book is one of the most emotionally exposing things a person can do. An author has spent years writing something that comes from the deepest part of themselves, and now they’re handing it to strangers to judge. The vulnerability involved is enormous. And when the publisher on the other end of that vulnerability is focused on schedules and deliverables rather than on the human being who wrote the words, something gets broken.

I had an author call me in tears two weeks before her publication date because she was terrified and I hadn’t checked in on her in a month. I had an author silently disengage during the editing process because he felt his concerns were being dismissed rather than heard. I had an author tell me, a year after publication, that the experience of being published by us had been “lonely.”

That word, “lonely,” changed everything for me. Because loneliness is exactly what a good publisher should prevent. An author should feel accompanied through the publishing process, not processed through it. They should feel that their publisher cares about their book as much as they do, even if that caring looks different from the publisher’s side.

These days, I check in with our authors weekly during active editorial phases and biweekly otherwise. Not about schedules. About how they’re feeling. About what worries them. About what they’re hoping for. This takes time I could be spending on other things. It is, without question, the best use of my time.

We assumed digital marketing would replace everything else

Around year three, we went through a phase where we believed that social media and email newsletters would solve all our marketing challenges. We hired a social media consultant. We built an email list. We posted Instagram photos of our books artfully arranged next to coffee cups and autumn leaves. We wrote newsletters with behind-the-scenes content and editor picks.

And our sales… barely changed. The social media following grew, the newsletter open rates were respectable, and none of it translated into book purchases in any measurable way. We were getting likes from people who would never buy a book from us, building an audience that was interested in the performance of literary culture rather than in actually reading.

I don’t think digital marketing is useless for publishers. But I think small publishers in particular tend to overestimate its impact because it’s cheap and measurable. You can see the follower count going up. You can track email opens. Those numbers feel like progress even when they aren’t.

What actually sells books for us, reliably, time after time? Author events at independent bookstores. Reviews in respected literary publications. Word of mouth from readers who loved the book enough to buy it for someone else. These are all old-fashioned, hard-to-scale, labor-intensive activities. They’re also the only ones that consistently work.

We still maintain our social media presence and our newsletter, but we no longer pretend they’re our primary marketing channels. They’re supporting players, not stars.

What we got right (eventually)

This essay has been relentlessly self-critical so far, and I want to balance that with honesty in the other direction: we also got some things right, even if it took us a while to understand why they mattered.

We always paid authors fairly. Even when our finances were precarious, we honored advances and paid royalties on time. This seems like a low bar, but in small publishing, it’s not. Plenty of small presses pay late, pay less than agreed, or structure contracts in ways that favor the publisher. We never did that, and the trust it built with our authors is probably the main reason we’re still here.

We always cared about the physical object. Our books have always been well-designed, well-printed, and nice to hold. Even in the early days when our covers were, as that Portland bookseller noted, less than professional, we cared about paper quality, binding, and typography. Readers notice these things even when they can’t articulate them. A book that feels good in your hands gets read differently than a book that feels disposable.

And we always, always chose books we believed in. We never published anything cynically. We never acquired a manuscript because we thought it would sell despite not being very good. Every book in the ScrollWorks catalog, including The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, Still Waters, and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, is a book we love. Some of them sell better than others. But we’re proud of all of them, and that pride is the foundation everything else is built on.

Seven years in, I’m still learning. I’ll probably write a sequel to this essay in another seven years, cataloging a whole new set of mistakes. If I’m not making mistakes, I’m not trying hard enough. But the mistakes should be new ones. That, I think, is the only reasonable definition of progress.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We’re still figuring it out, one book at a time.