People in publishing love to categorize. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll see the evidence: Fiction over here, Non-Fiction over there. Biography in one aisle, Science Fiction in another. Literary Fiction separated from Genre Fiction by an invisible wall that both sides pretend doesn’t exist. The industry runs on categories because categories make books easier to sell, easier to shelve, easier to pitch to reviewers and booksellers and awards committees. I understand why it works this way. But I’ve never been comfortable with it.

When we started ScrollWorks Media, one of the first decisions we made was that we’d publish both fiction and non-fiction. This confused people. Literary agents would ask which side of the house they should submit to. Booksellers wanted to know if we were “primarily” a fiction publisher or a non-fiction publisher. Industry peers told us we were diluting our brand. Pick a lane, they said. You can’t be good at everything.

They weren’t wrong about the difficulty. Running a cross-genre list is harder than specializing. It requires editors who can work across different kinds of texts, marketing strategies that can’t rely on a single audience, and a catalog identity that has to be defined by something other than subject matter. But I believe the difficulty is worth it, and after several years of doing this, I’m more convinced than ever that our cross-genre approach produces better books.

The False Binary

Let me start with what I think is a fundamentally wrong assumption that underlies most of publishing’s organizational structure: the idea that fiction and non-fiction are different kinds of writing that appeal to different kinds of readers. In my experience, this is simply untrue. Most serious readers move between fiction and non-fiction freely. They read a novel in the evening and a history of the Ottoman Empire on the weekend. They don’t think of themselves as “fiction readers” or “non-fiction readers.” They think of themselves as readers, full stop.

The writers we work with tend to be similarly omnivorous. Catherine Voss, whose novel The Last Archive is one of the most research-intensive books on our list, reads more non-fiction than fiction. Her novel is deeply informed by her engagement with archival science, memory studies, and institutional history. David Okonkwo, who wrote The Cartographer’s Dilemma (a work of narrative non-fiction), told me that his biggest influences were fiction writers: W.G. Sebald, Javier Marias, Geoff Dyer. The border between fiction and non-fiction, for the writers and readers who interest me most, is porous.

I think about this every time I walk through a bookstore and see the rigid separation between sections. A reader browsing the fiction shelves might love Okonkwo’s book if they encountered it, but they never will because it’s three aisles away in “Geography/Travel.” A non-fiction reader might discover Voss’s novel and be completely captivated by its intellectual ambitions, but they’re over in “Current Affairs” and don’t make it to “Literary Fiction.” The categorization system that’s supposed to help readers find books actually prevents them from finding some of the books they’d like most.

What Cross-Genre Publishing Teaches Us

There’s a practical benefit to working across genres that I didn’t fully appreciate until we’d been doing it for a while. Editing fiction makes you a better editor of non-fiction, and vice versa. The skills transfer in ways that might not be obvious from the outside.

Fiction teaches you about narrative structure, pacing, and character. These are things that non-fiction desperately needs and often lacks. How many non-fiction books have you read that were packed with interesting information but felt like a slog to get through? Usually the problem is structural. The author organized their material logically rather than narratively, which means the book makes sense as an argument but doesn’t work as an experience. An editor trained in fiction instinctively thinks about the reader’s experience: where is the momentum? Where does the reader’s interest peak, and where does it flag? What does each chapter accomplish in terms of the book’s forward movement?

Non-fiction, on the other hand, teaches you about precision, evidence, and intellectual honesty. These are qualities that fiction benefits from enormously but doesn’t always get from editors who work only within the fiction world. A novel that’s sloppy about historical details, or that misrepresents how a profession actually works, or that hand-waves its way through the mechanics of its plot, can be improved by an editorial sensibility trained on non-fiction’s demand for accuracy.

When our editors move between a novel and a work of narrative non-fiction in the same week, they bring the lessons of each to the other. I’ve watched this happen in real time. An editor will work on a fiction manuscript and spend a week thinking about scene construction and emotional arc, then switch to a non-fiction project and find themselves pushing the author to think in scenes rather than summaries. Or they’ll come off a non-fiction project where they spent days verifying claims and checking sources, and then approach a novel with heightened attention to whether the world-building actually holds up to scrutiny.

The Books Between Categories

Some of the most interesting writing being done right now doesn’t fit comfortably into either the fiction or the non-fiction bucket. Autofiction, which blends autobiography with fictional technique. Narrative non-fiction that reads like a novel. Essay collections that incorporate memoir, criticism, and reportage in the same volume. Hybrid texts that combine images with text, or that move between prose and poetry.

These books are a nightmare for a publisher that only does one thing. Where do you shelve a book that’s part memoir, part literary criticism, part cultural history? If you’re a fiction-only publisher, you either have to refuse it (losing a potentially wonderful book) or try to market it as fiction (confusing readers who expect a conventional novel). If you’re a non-fiction-only publisher, the same problem applies in reverse.

At ScrollWorks, we can just publish it. We don’t have to pretend it’s something it isn’t. We can market it to readers of fiction and non-fiction simultaneously, because our audience already expects us to publish both. The Cartographer’s Dilemma is a good example. It’s technically non-fiction, but it uses techniques borrowed from fiction: scenic recreation, interior monologue, a fragmented chronology that serves an emotional rather than a strictly informational purpose. Okonkwo didn’t have to choose between writing the book he wanted to write and fitting into a publisher’s pre-existing category. He could just write the book.

I think we’re going to see more of these hybrid books in the coming years, and publishers who can’t accommodate them are going to miss out on some of the most original work being produced. The rigid fiction/non-fiction divide is a product of 20th-century publishing infrastructure, of bookstore layouts and review sections and awards categories that were designed for a simpler literary landscape. The landscape is changing. Publishing should change with it.

How It Affects the Books We Choose

Our cross-genre approach influences our acquisitions in specific ways. When we’re considering a new fiction title, we ask whether it has intellectual ambitions that go beyond the personal. We love character-driven fiction, but we’re particularly drawn to novels that are also about something larger: a period in history, a philosophical question, a social phenomenon. This doesn’t mean we want fiction with a message. God, no. Message fiction is almost always terrible. But we want fiction that engages with the world of ideas, fiction that a non-fiction reader could enjoy for its thinking as well as its storytelling.

Similarly, when we consider non-fiction, we look for the qualities we value in fiction: strong voice, narrative momentum, emotional depth, and a willingness to go beyond the purely informational. Alexander Hawthorne’s Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners is an explanatory book about cryptocurrency, but it works because Hawthorne brings a storyteller’s instinct to the material. He understands that even readers seeking practical information want to be engaged, want to feel like they’re on a journey from confusion to understanding rather than just absorbing a series of facts.

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron represents the fiction side of this equation. It’s a novel, unambiguously, but it’s a novel deeply engaged with history, with the material culture of industrialization, with questions about how economic systems shape human relationships. A reader who normally gravitates toward non-fiction might pick it up and find themselves absorbed, because the intellectual substance is there alongside the narrative pleasures.

The Catalog as Conversation

Here’s something I find exciting about a mixed catalog that I don’t think publishers talk about enough: the books can talk to each other. When fiction and non-fiction titles sit side by side on a publisher’s list, unexpected connections emerge. A novel about memory and a work of popular science about neurology illuminate each other in ways that wouldn’t be visible if they were published by different houses with different audiences.

I think about our catalog as an ongoing conversation. Each book we publish is a voice in that conversation, contributing a perspective that interacts with and enriches the other voices on our list. Still Waters by Elena Marsh is a novel about grief and landscape. The Cartographer’s Dilemma is a work of non-fiction about how we represent landscape on maps. These books weren’t planned as companions, but they rhyme. A reader who encounters both of them gets more from each than they would in isolation.

This kind of cross-pollination happens naturally when a publisher’s list has intellectual coherence without genre restriction. We’re not trying to force connections between our books. We’re choosing books that interest us, and because our interests span fiction and non-fiction, the connections emerge organically. It’s one of the most satisfying aspects of what we do.

The Business Case (Such As It Is)

I’d be lying if I said our cross-genre approach was purely an artistic decision. There’s a business logic to it, too, even if it’s not the most conventional business logic.

Fiction and non-fiction have different sales patterns. Fiction tends to spike at publication and then taper off. Non-fiction, especially the kind of evergreen non-fiction we publish, often sells steadily over a longer period. Having both on our list gives us a more balanced revenue stream than either alone would provide. When a novel doesn’t find its audience immediately, a non-fiction title might be keeping the lights on. When a non-fiction book has a slow start, a well-reviewed novel might be generating the attention that keeps our name in front of booksellers and readers.

There’s also a practical advantage in terms of relationships. Because we work across genres, we have relationships with a wider range of agents, reviewers, bookstores, and media outlets than a single-genre publisher typically does. This gives us more options when it comes to marketing and publicity, and it means we can reach readers in places where a specialized publisher might not have connections.

But I want to be honest: the business case for cross-genre publishing is not overwhelming. A publisher that specializes in, say, literary fiction can build a deeper reputation in that specific niche than we can. They can become the go-to publisher for that kind of book, which attracts the best agents and the best manuscripts. There’s real value in specialization, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. We’ve chosen a harder path because we believe it produces more interesting results, not because it’s the smart financial play.

What We’re Looking For, Regardless of Category

If there’s a single quality that unites everything on our list, across fiction and non-fiction, it’s this: we publish books that make you think differently about something. Not books that confirm what you already believe. Not books that provide easy answers to hard questions. Books that shift your perspective, even slightly, so that you see some aspect of the world a little differently after reading them than you did before.

This is a high bar, and we don’t always clear it. We’ve published books that I thought would change minds and that turned out to be more conventional than I’d hoped. That’s the nature of publishing: you’re making bets on manuscripts that won’t be finished books for another year or more, and sometimes those bets don’t pay off the way you expected. But the aspiration remains. When I’m reading submissions, whether they’re fiction or non-fiction, memoir or history, novel or essay collection, I’m asking the same question: does this change how I think? Does it show me something I haven’t seen before?

That question doesn’t respect genre boundaries. A novel can change how you think about loneliness. A work of history can change how you think about technology. A memoir can change how you think about family. The form matters less than the ambition, and the ambition we’re looking for is the same regardless of what shelf the finished book will sit on.

So when people ask me why ScrollWorks publishes both fiction and non-fiction, I suppose my real answer is: because the distinction doesn’t seem as important to me as it does to the rest of the industry. Good writing is good writing. Smart thinking is smart thinking. An honest account of human experience can take the form of a novel or a reported piece of journalism or a philosophical argument. We’re interested in all of it. And I think our books are better for it.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.