ScrollWorks Media turns ten this year. We thought about throwing a party. Instead, we decided to write something honest about what the last decade has been like. Parties are fun. Honesty is more useful, and harder.

Ten years ago, we were two people in a rented office above a sandwich shop in a part of town that wasn’t yet gentrified. (It is now. We can no longer afford that office.) We had a business plan that was mostly optimism, a line of credit we were terrified to use, and three manuscripts we believed in. That was the whole company.

Today we’re eight full-time people, we’ve published seventy-something titles, and we’re still here. That last part is the one that surprises us most. The failure rate for independent publishers is high. We know people who started presses around the same time we did and have since closed them. We came close ourselves, more than once.

What follows is not a triumph narrative. It’s a collection of things we’ve learned, including the things we learned by getting them wrong.

Year one was mostly terror

Nothing prepares you for the gap between having an idea for a publishing company and actually running one. The idea is exciting. The reality is invoices, distribution agreements, insurance policies, and long conversations with printers about paper weight.

Our first season was three books. We were proud of all three. Two of them sold reasonably well for debut titles from an unknown press. The third sold poorly. Really poorly. We printed 2,500 copies and sold maybe 600. The rest sat in a warehouse for two years before we remaindered them.

That third book taught us something we should have already known: believing in a book is not the same as understanding how to sell it. We believed in that book. We still think it’s good. But we had no plan for reaching its audience, because we hadn’t really identified its audience in the first place. “People who like good writing” is not a target market. It’s a wish.

The distribution lesson

Getting a distribution deal was the single most important business decision we made in our first three years. Before we had distribution, we were selling books out of the back of our car at literary events and shipping individual orders from our office. It was romantic for about two weeks, then it was just exhausting.

A distributor gives you access to the bookstore supply chain. Orders from stores come through a centralized system. Books are warehoused and shipped by professionals. Returns are processed without you personally carrying boxes to the post office.

The cost is significant: our distributor takes a percentage that, combined with the bookstore discount, means we receive less than half the cover price of every book. But the alternative, self-distribution – is untenable at any real scale. You can’t run a publishing company and a logistics company simultaneously. Not with two people.

What we wish we’d known earlier: the distributor relationship is not just logistical, it’s editorial. Our distributor’s sales team presents our books to bookstore buyers months before publication. If the sales reps are excited about a book, it gets better placement. If they’re not, it languishes. Learning to work with our distributor’s sales team, giving them the information and enthusiasm they needed to sell our books effectively, was a skill we developed slowly and at some cost.

The hire that changed everything

For the first four years, the two of us did everything. Acquisition, editing, design direction, marketing, publicity, bookkeeping, website management, social media. We were decent at some of these things and terrible at others.

Our third hire (after an office manager and a part-time publicist) was a marketing director. This was the hire that changed the trajectory of the company. Not because she was a magician who suddenly made all our books bestsellers. She didn’t. But she brought systematic thinking to an area where we’d been operating on instinct and hope.

She built a marketing calendar. She created templates for launch plans. She established relationships with book bloggers and podcasters. She figured out which social media channels actually drove sales for the kinds of books we publish (Instagram, it turns out, more than Twitter or Facebook). She did the boring, methodical work that neither of us, as editors, was inclined to do.

The lesson: hire for your weaknesses, not your strengths. We were good editors. We didn’t need another editor. We needed someone who understood the commercial side of publishing, who could take the books we loved editing and help them find readers. That hire was four years overdue when we finally made it.

The book that almost broke us

In year five, we acquired a book we were enormously excited about. Big concept, strong writer, timely subject. We paid the largest advance we’d ever paid. We committed to a bigger print run than usual. We hired an outside publicist. We were sure this was the book that would put ScrollWorks on the map.

It didn’t. The book got decent reviews but failed to break through commercially. Sales were about a third of what we’d projected. The returns were devastating. By the time the dust settled, we’d lost more money on that single title than we’d made on the previous three seasons combined.

The financial damage was bad. The psychological damage was worse. We questioned everything. Our editorial judgment. Our business model. Our decision to start a publishing company in the first place. There were conversations that fall that involved the phrase “maybe we should just.”

We didn’t quit. Partly out of stubbornness, partly because we had contractual obligations to the authors on our upcoming list, and partly because the books on that upcoming list were good enough to remind us why we do this.

What we learned: never bet the company on a single title. Diversify your risk across the list. Keep advances modest. Keep print runs conservative. You can always go back to press if a book takes off. You can’t un-print 10,000 copies that nobody wants.

What we got right

In the interest of balance, here are some things we’re glad we did.

We built the list around editorial conviction rather than market trends. This has cost us some short-term revenue, but it’s created a backlist that continues to sell. Books published by presses with a coherent editorial identity tend to have longer commercial lives than trend-chasing titles, because the press’s reputation becomes a recommendation in itself. Readers who like one ScrollWorks book are likely to try another, because they trust the taste behind the list.

We invested in relationships with independent bookstores from the beginning. When Still Waters by Elena Marsh was published, it was bookseller enthusiasm that built its readership over months and years. That kind of slow-building success is only possible when you’ve cultivated genuine relationships with the people who sell your books face to face.

We treated authors as partners rather than content providers. This sounds like a platitude, but it has real implications. We consult authors on cover design, marketing strategy, and pricing. We don’t always agree (cover design meetings can be tense), but the collaborative approach means authors feel invested in the process, not just the product. Catherine Voss has said that her experience publishing The Last Archive with us was qualitatively different from friends’ experiences at larger houses. We take that seriously.

We kept our overhead low, even when it was tempting to grow faster. There were moments, particularly after a good sales year, when we considered moving to a bigger office, hiring more staff, expanding the list. Each time, we held back. This conservatism meant slower growth, but it also meant we survived the bad years without laying anyone off.

What we got wrong

We were too slow to embrace digital marketing. For the first several years, we relied almost entirely on traditional publicity: review copies, author tours, print advertising. These methods still work, but they’re not sufficient on their own. By the time we got serious about email newsletters, social media strategy, and online community-building, we’d ceded years of potential audience development.

We didn’t invest in data early enough. For the first five years, our sales data was a mess. We knew roughly how many copies we’d sold, but we couldn’t tell you which marketing efforts drove sales, which geographic regions were strongest, or which channels were most efficient. When we finally hired someone to build a proper data infrastructure, the insights were immediately useful. We should have done it sooner.

We passed on books we shouldn’t have passed on. I mentioned this in our piece about editorial selection, but it bears repeating here. There are at least three books we declined that went on to significant commercial and critical success at other houses. In each case, our reasoning was defensible at the time. But defensible isn’t the same as right, and those misses still bother us.

We didn’t take care of ourselves. Publishing attracts people who work too hard, and small-press publishing attracts the hardest-working of those people. For the first several years, the founders worked sixty- to seventy-hour weeks routinely. Vacations were rare. Burnout was real. We eventually realized that running ourselves into the ground wasn’t heroic; it was counterproductive. Tired people make bad decisions. We’ve gotten better about boundaries, but it’s an ongoing effort.

The surprises

Some things we genuinely didn’t see coming.

The resurgence of independent bookstores surprised us. When we started in 2016, the narrative was that physical bookstores were dying. Amazon was eating the world. Indie stores were closing. That narrative turned out to be wrong, or at least incomplete. Independent bookstores have grown steadily over the past decade, and their growth has been directly beneficial to small publishers like us.

The power of backlist surprised us. In our first few years, we focused almost entirely on frontlist titles, the new books we published each season. Gradually, we realized that our backlist (previously published books that continue to sell) was becoming a significant revenue source. Backlist sales now account for roughly 40 percent of our total revenue. These are books that require almost no marketing investment because they’ve already found their audience, and new readers discover them through recommendations, course adoptions, and bookstore hand-selling.

The importance of saying no surprised us. In the early years, we were inclined to say yes to any promising manuscript, partly because we were hungry for titles and partly because rejection felt inhospitable. Over time, we learned that saying no to a book that isn’t right for our list, even if it’s well-written, is one of the most important things we do. Every yes is a commitment of limited resources. An undisciplined yes can crowd out a better project.

The community surprised us. We didn’t expect to feel so connected to a network of other small publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers. Publishing can feel lonely when you’re staring at a spreadsheet at midnight, but the broader community of people who care about books is large and generous. We’ve received advice, referrals, and moral support from people who are technically our competitors, and we’ve tried to give the same in return.

What we’d do differently

If we could start over with what we know now, here’s what we’d change.

We’d start with a clearer editorial identity. Our first few seasons were eclectic to a fault. We published literary fiction, a cookbook, a book of essays, and a children’s picture book. This wasn’t a list; it was a grab bag. It took us several years to figure out what ScrollWorks actually is: a publisher of literary fiction, memoir, and idea-driven nonfiction for curious, engaged readers. Knowing that from the start would have saved us time, money, and a few awkward catalog pages.

We’d hire a marketing person on day one, even part-time. The editorial side of publishing is what attracts most people to the business, including us. But the commercial side is what keeps the business alive. Having someone focused on marketing from the beginning would have changed our trajectory.

We’d build our email list from the very first book. An email list is the most reliable direct channel to your readers, and it takes years to build one of meaningful size. We started too late. If we’d been collecting email addresses from our first event, our first website visit, our first book sale, we’d be in a much stronger position today.

We’d be more aggressive about rights sales, particularly foreign rights and audio rights. For the first several years, we left money on the table because we didn’t have the bandwidth or the knowledge to pursue subsidiary rights effectively. These revenue streams don’t require additional inventory or distribution; they’re pure margin once the deals are done. We’ve gotten better at this, but we started late.

What the next ten years look like

We don’t know. That’s the honest answer. Publishing is changing fast enough that ten-year predictions are foolish. The rise of AI in creative fields, the continued evolution of retail channels, changes in reader behavior, all of these will shape the landscape in ways we can’t foresee.

What we can say is what won’t change. We’ll keep publishing books we believe in. We’ll keep working closely with our authors. We’ll keep investing in the independent bookstore channel. We’ll keep taking risks on unusual projects that bigger publishers won’t touch.

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron and David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma are the kinds of books we started this company to publish: ambitious, distinctive, difficult to categorize, and worth the effort of producing them well. As long as writers keep writing books like these, we’ll keep finding ways to bring them to readers.

Ten years is a long time. We’re grateful to have made it this far. We’re grateful to the authors who trusted us with their work, the booksellers who championed our books, and the readers who took chances on titles from a press they’d never heard of. None of this happens without all of those people.

Here’s to the next ten. We’ll try to make fewer mistakes. We’ll certainly make different ones.

Written by Marcus Rivera and the founding team at ScrollWorks Media.