We printed the second run of one of our titles last month. It had been out of print for almost eight months. During that time, I received eleven emails from readers asking when it would be available again, three from booksellers wondering about restocking, and one from a book club in Portland that had apparently built their entire spring reading schedule around it.

I felt bad about every one of those emails. I also believe we made the right decision in waiting.

Small publishers operate under different constraints than large ones, and one of those constraints is that we cannot afford to keep titles in continuous print the way a major house can. Our print runs are small, typically between 1,500 and 3,000 copies. When a run sells out, we face a decision: reprint immediately or wait. Most of the time, we wait. And I want to explain why, because from the outside it probably looks like incompetence or indifference, when it is actually a deliberate strategy rooted in the economics and philosophy of how we publish.

The Math of Small Print Runs

To understand why we take our time between printings, you first need to understand the economics of book printing at small scale.

Printing books has enormous economies of scale. The setup costs for an offset print run, creating plates, calibrating colors, running test sheets, are roughly the same whether you are printing 500 copies or 50,000. This means the per-unit cost drops dramatically as the quantity increases. A major publisher printing 50,000 copies of a novel might pay $1.50 per book. We might pay $4.50 per book for a run of 2,000.

That per-unit cost difference cascades through every other financial calculation. Our margins are thinner. Our break-even point is higher as a percentage of the run. We have less room for error. A large publisher can absorb the cost of pulping a few thousand unsold copies. For us, pulping 500 copies could wipe out the profit from the entire title.

So when a first printing sells out and we need to decide about a second, we are making a consequential financial decision. Print too many and we are stuck with inventory we cannot move. Print too few and we are spending nearly as much on setup costs for an uneconomically small run. The sweet spot requires us to have good data about likely demand, and getting that data takes time.

We typically wait three to six months after a first printing sells out before committing to a reprint. During that period, we track several indicators. How many direct inquiries are we getting from readers and booksellers? How is the book performing on the secondary market? (If used copies are selling for significantly above cover price, that is a strong signal of unmet demand.) Are there upcoming events, such as a festival appearance by the author or a paperback rights sale, that might generate new interest? Is the book being assigned in any courses?

All of this information helps us size the second printing accurately. And accuracy matters far more to us than speed.

The Print-on-Demand Question

The obvious response to everything I have just said is: why not use print-on-demand to keep titles continuously available?

We do use print-on-demand for some titles, particularly backlist titles with low but steady demand. It is a useful technology and it has improved enormously in recent years. But it has limitations that matter to us, and I think they matter to readers too, even if readers do not always know how to articulate them.

The quality of print-on-demand books is good. It is not great. The paper stock is limited to a few standard options. The color reproduction is adequate for text-heavy covers but often disappointing for complex artwork. The binding, particularly on paperbacks, tends to be stiffer and less pleasant to handle than offset-printed books. These differences are subtle enough that many readers will not consciously notice them. But I believe they affect the reading experience at a level below conscious awareness, in the same way that a well-designed room feels different from a poorly designed one even if you cannot identify which specific elements are creating that feeling.

There is also a question of editorial integrity. When we do a new printing, we have the opportunity to correct errors. Every first printing contains mistakes. Typos that survived three rounds of proofreading. A hyphenation error introduced by the layout software. A factual claim that turned out to be slightly inaccurate. The gap between printings gives us time to compile an errata list and incorporate corrections into the new edition. If we were simply printing on demand from the same files, those errors would persist indefinitely.

I realize this sounds like a minor point. Who cares about a couple of typos? I care. Our authors care. And I think serious readers care more than they let on. A book that has been through multiple corrected printings is a more finished object than a first printing, and I take pride in the fact that our second and third printings are better than our firsts.

Scarcity and Value

I am going to say something that might sound cynical, though I do not intend it that way: temporary scarcity can be good for a book.

When a book is constantly available, there is no urgency to buy it. It will be there tomorrow. It will be there next month. You add it to your wish list and forget about it. But when a book goes out of print, something changes. The people who want it start talking about it more. They post on social media asking if anyone has a copy. They check used bookstores. The book acquires a mystique that it did not have when it was sitting in a warehouse waiting to be ordered.

I am not suggesting that we deliberately manufacture scarcity as a marketing tactic. That would be dishonest. What I am saying is that the natural rhythm of small-press publishing, where books go in and out of print as editions sell through, creates a dynamic that is actually healthy for the long-term life of the book. It creates moments of renewed attention. It rewards the readers who bought early. It gives the publisher a chance to refresh the cover design or add a new introduction for the reprint. Each printing becomes a small event rather than an unnoticed continuation.

Think about how wine works. Vintages sell out and new ones replace them. Each vintage is slightly different. The scarcity of past vintages adds to their perceived value and creates a culture of collecting and discussion that benefits the entire winery. I think book publishing could learn from this model rather than trying to keep everything available in identical form forever.

What We Do During the Gap

The period between printings is not idle time for us. It is when we do some of our most important work on a title.

First, as I mentioned, we compile corrections. I keep a running file for every title we publish, and whenever someone reports an error (readers, reviewers, the author, our own team), I log it with the page number and the correction. By the time we are ready to reprint, we often have twenty or thirty corrections to incorporate. Some of these are trivial (a missing comma, a misspelled foreign word) and some are significant (a factual error, a passage that could be read as unintentionally offensive). The corrections file is one of the most important quality documents we maintain.

Second, we evaluate the cover design. Does it need refreshing? Has feedback from booksellers or readers suggested that the cover is not communicating the book’s genre or tone effectively? Sometimes a minor adjustment, changing a subtitle, tweaking the color palette, using a different author photo, can significantly improve how the book performs on its second time around. We also consider whether to add review quotes or prize nominations to the cover, which were not available when the first printing went to press.

Third, we look at the book’s metadata. The keywords and categories we assigned when the book launched may not be the ones that are actually driving discovery. We analyze sales data and search traffic to see what terms readers are using to find the book, and we update the metadata accordingly. This is tedious, unglamorous work, but it has a real impact on discoverability, especially on online retail platforms where the right category placement can double or triple a book’s visibility.

Fourth, we reconsider the book’s positioning in our catalog. How does it relate to our newer titles? Are there cross-promotion opportunities that did not exist when the book first came out? Can we bundle it with a more recent title for a themed promotion? The gap between printings gives us the space to think strategically about the book’s role in our overall list.

The Patience Problem

The hardest part of this approach is managing expectations, both our own and everyone else’s.

Authors understandably want their books to be available at all times. When a reader cannot buy your book, it feels like a failure. I have had uncomfortable conversations with authors who see the gap between printings as a sign that we are not committed to their work. I have to explain that the opposite is true: we are waiting because we care enough to get the reprint right rather than rushing out an identical copy of the first printing.

Booksellers, especially independent ones, also find the gap frustrating. They have customers asking for the book and they cannot get copies. Some booksellers lose patience and stop stocking the title even after it becomes available again. This is a real cost of our approach, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Every gap in availability risks permanently losing some bookseller relationships.

And then there is the internal pressure. Every month a title is out of print is a month of lost revenue. For a small publisher operating on thin margins, that is not abstract. It is real money that is not coming in, money we need to fund new acquisitions and pay our team. The temptation to rush a reprint is constant, and it takes discipline to resist it.

What sustains my conviction is the evidence from our own catalog. The titles we have reprinted carefully, with corrections and updated covers, consistently outperform the ones we rushed back into print. They get better reviews. They sell more steadily. They have longer lifespans. The short-term cost of waiting is real, but the long-term benefit is larger.

A Different Rhythm

I think this approach reflects something broader about our philosophy at ScrollWorks. We are not trying to maximize the velocity of our publishing. We are trying to maximize the quality and longevity of each title we publish. Those are different goals, and they lead to different decisions.

A velocity-focused publisher would reprint immediately, accept the errors in the first printing, use print-on-demand to fill any gaps, and move on to the next title. That is a perfectly valid approach. Many successful publishers operate that way. But it is not our approach, because we believe that each printing of a book is an opportunity to make it better, and we do not want to waste that opportunity by rushing.

This philosophy extends beyond reprints. We take our time between acquisitions, too. We would rather publish six books a year that we are deeply proud of than twelve that we feel lukewarm about. We take our time with editing, often going through four or five rounds of revision with an author before we are satisfied. We take our time with design, working with our cover designers on multiple concepts before committing to one.

All of this slowness has costs. We publish fewer titles than we could. We miss trend waves that faster publishers catch. We lose authors who want a publisher that can move quicker. I accept these costs because I believe the alternative costs are higher: publishing books we are not proud of, or publishing them in a form that we know is not their best.

If you are a reader waiting for a ScrollWorks title to come back into print, I understand your frustration, and I appreciate your patience. Know that when the book does return, it will be better than the copy you missed. The typos will be fixed. The cover might be improved. The text will have had the benefit of another round of care and attention. It is not a consolation prize for waiting. It is the reason for the wait.

We apply this same patient approach to every title in our catalog, from The Last Archive to Echoes of Iron. Each reprinting is an opportunity to make the book a little closer to what it wants to be. That process takes time. We think the results justify it.