I have been running an independent publishing house for long enough to know that optimism about the future needs to be earned. Plenty of indie publishers have folded over the years, killed by thin margins, distribution nightmares, or the slow suffocation of competing with corporate publishers who have ten times the marketing budget. This is a hard business. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

And yet. I am optimistic. Cautiously, specifically, with conditions attached, but genuinely optimistic. The forces reshaping the book industry right now, technological, cultural, economic, favor small and mid-sized publishers in ways that they have not for decades. Not all of us will thrive. Some of us will still fail. But the structural advantages that once belonged almost exclusively to the Big Five are eroding, and the opportunities opening up for independent publishers are real.

Here is what I see happening, and where I think indie publishing is headed.

The Distribution Bottleneck Is Loosening

For decades, the biggest structural disadvantage facing independent publishers was distribution. Getting physical books from a warehouse to bookstore shelves required relationships with distributors who controlled access to the major retail channels. The big distributors preferred working with big publishers because the volume was higher and the risk was lower. Indie presses were often stuck with smaller distributors, consignment arrangements, or doing it themselves, which meant their books were simply not available in many bookstores.

This has changed significantly. Ingram’s distribution services, particularly through its Ingram Publisher Services division, now offer independent publishers access to the same retail channels that the Big Five use. The barriers to entry have dropped. A small press with ten titles can get its books into Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores, and online retailers through a distribution partner that handles warehousing, fulfillment, and returns.

Print-on-demand has further loosened the bottleneck. Through Ingram’s Lightning Source and Amazon’s KDP Print, indie publishers can make physical books available without any inventory investment. A reader in Des Moines orders a copy of The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo from their local bookstore, and a copy is printed and shipped within a few days. The publisher does not need to predict demand, fund a print run, or maintain warehouse space. The book simply exists, available to anyone who wants it.

This does not solve every distribution problem. Physical placement in bookstores (face-out displays, front tables, endcap features) still requires either a strong distributor relationship or direct outreach to booksellers. And discovery, the problem of readers finding your book among millions of others, remains the central challenge. But the logistical barrier that once kept indie books out of retail channels is lower than it has ever been.

Direct-to-Reader Sales Are Getting Easier

The most exciting development for independent publishers, in my view, is the growing viability of direct-to-reader sales channels. Historically, publishers sold books through intermediaries: distributors, wholesalers, bookstores, online retailers. Each intermediary took a cut, typically 50-55% of the retail price combined. This meant the publisher received 45-50 cents of every dollar a reader spent, and out of that came production costs, author royalties, overhead, and hopefully some profit.

Selling directly to readers changes the math dramatically. When a reader buys a book from a publisher’s own website, the publisher keeps 85-90% of the retail price (minus payment processing and shipping). The margin improvement is enormous. A $25 book sold through a bookstore might net the publisher $11. The same book sold directly might net $20. That $9 difference is the margin between survival and growth for a small press.

The technology for direct sales has matured rapidly. Platforms like Shopify, with specialized plugins for book sales, make it straightforward for a publisher to run an online store. Ebook delivery can be automated through services like BookFunnel. Print fulfillment can be handled through POD partners. The technical complexity that once made direct sales impractical for small publishers has been largely eliminated.

The challenge is driving traffic to a direct sales channel. Amazon, for all its problems, has a built-in audience of millions of book buyers. A publisher’s website does not. Building that direct audience requires consistent investment in email marketing, social media, content marketing (like this blog), and community building. It is a slow process. But every reader who buys directly from us, rather than through a retailer, contributes roughly twice as much to our ability to publish the next book.

We are investing heavily in our direct sales capabilities at ScrollWorks. Every reader who joins our mailing list, visits our site, or buys from us directly is someone we can reach without paying a retailer for the privilege. Over time, that direct relationship compounds. It is the single most valuable asset an independent publisher can build.

The Consolidation of Big Publishing Creates Opportunities

The ongoing consolidation of the major publishers, most recently the Penguin Random House attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster (which was blocked by the Department of Justice, then completed by a different buyer), has paradoxical effects on the independent publishing sector.

On one hand, bigger publishers have more resources, more shelf space, and more negotiating leverage. They can outbid indie presses for hot manuscripts and crowd smaller publishers out of bookstore displays. These are real competitive pressures that consolidation makes worse.

On the other hand, bigger publishers are also more risk-averse. As corporate entities answerable to shareholders or private equity owners, they prioritize books with large commercial potential. Midlist literary fiction, experimental work, translated literature, niche nonfiction, anything that is unlikely to sell 50,000 copies, gets less attention from the major houses. Some of these books do not get acquired at all.

This creates a gap that independent publishers can fill. The books that the Big Five pass on are not necessarily bad books. Many of them are excellent books with smaller but devoted potential audiences. An indie press that can identify these books, publish them well, and connect them with the right readers can build a catalog of genuine literary value that also generates sustainable revenue.

This is essentially the ScrollWorks strategy. We are not competing with Penguin Random House for the next big commercial thriller. We are finding books like The Last Archive by Catherine Voss and Still Waters by Elena Marsh, books with strong voices and specific audiences, and giving them the editorial and marketing attention they deserve. The major publishers’ loss is our opportunity.

Consolidation also pushes disaffected editors and agents toward the independent sector. I know several excellent editors who left Big Five publishers because they felt constrained by commercial pressures and corporate bureaucracy. Some started their own imprints. Others joined independent presses where they have more editorial freedom. This migration of talent strengthens the independent sector and weakens the mainstream, though the effects take years to become visible.

The Reader’s Relationship with Publishers Is Changing

Most readers do not think about publishers. They think about authors, genres, recommendations from friends, and whatever BookTok is excited about this week. The publisher’s name on the spine is, for most readers, invisible.

This is changing, slowly, for independent publishers. And it is changing because some indie presses have built identities that readers recognize and trust. Graywolf Press, Tin House Books, Catapult, Coffee House Press, Soho Press: these names mean something to their audiences. A reader who loved one Graywolf book is likely to try another, because they trust the press’s editorial judgment. The publisher functions as a curator, and in an age of overwhelming choice, curation has real value.

Building this kind of brand recognition is difficult and takes years. It requires consistent editorial quality, a coherent visual identity, and ongoing communication with readers. But the payoff is significant: publisher-level brand loyalty creates a base of readers who will consider any new title you publish, regardless of the author’s name recognition. This base provides a floor under every book’s sales and reduces the risk of publishing debut authors and lesser-known writers.

Social media and email newsletters have made publisher branding more feasible for small presses. We can talk directly to readers about our editorial philosophy, our authors, our decision-making process. We can share the story behind each book, the reasons we chose to publish it, what we love about it. This transparency builds a relationship that goes beyond individual transactions. Readers who feel connected to the press, not just the books, become advocates. They recommend not just a single title but the publisher itself.

Niche Is the New Mass

The old publishing model depended on mass appeal. Print a lot of copies, get wide distribution, reach as many readers as possible. This model still works for certain books (celebrity memoirs, franchise thrillers, major literary prize winners), but it has become less relevant for the majority of titles.

The new model, which independent publishers are better positioned to execute, is based on niche depth. Instead of trying to reach everyone, reach the right people more effectively. Instead of selling 50,000 copies to a diffuse audience, sell 5,000 copies to readers who are deeply engaged with your subject matter and likely to buy every book you publish in that space.

This niche approach works because the economics of publishing have changed. Print-on-demand means you do not need to sell 5,000 copies to justify a print run. Direct sales mean you keep a larger share of revenue. Digital marketing tools allow you to target specific reader communities with precision. A book that sells 3,000 copies directly to engaged readers can be more profitable than a book that sells 10,000 copies through conventional retail channels.

Consider our experience with Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne. This is a book with a specific audience: people who want to understand cryptocurrency but have been put off by the jargon and complexity of existing resources. We did not try to market it to everyone. We marketed it to that specific audience through targeted channels, and the response was strong because the book met a real, specific need. The Amazon listing continues to perform well because readers with that specific need find it through search and recommendation algorithms.

The niche approach requires a different mindset from the mass approach. Instead of asking “how do we reach as many people as possible?” you ask “how do we reach the right 3,000 people as effectively as possible?” The tools for answering this question have never been better or more accessible to small publishers.

The Challenges That Remain

I promised an honest take, so let me be clear about what keeps me up at night.

Cash flow is the perennial indie publisher killer. The lag between spending money to produce a book and receiving revenue from its sales can be six months to a year or more. During that gap, you are paying authors, printers, editors, and designers out of whatever reserves you have. One book that underperforms can create a cash flow crisis that cascades through the entire list. We manage this carefully, but the margin for error is thin.

Amazon’s dominance of online book retail is a structural threat to every publisher, but especially to indie presses. Amazon’s algorithms favor books with high sales velocity, which means big-publisher titles with big marketing budgets. Independent press titles can get buried in search results, making discovery nearly impossible for readers who shop primarily on Amazon. The platform’s terms and conditions change frequently, and those changes can affect publisher revenue and visibility without warning or negotiation.

Author recruitment is increasingly competitive. As more indie presses emerge and improve their operations, the competition for quality manuscripts intensifies. The best agents still tend to submit to major publishers first, which means indie presses often see manuscripts after they have been rejected by the Big Five. This is not necessarily bad (some of those rejected manuscripts are excellent), but it limits our access to the most commercially promising projects.

AI-generated content, as I discussed in a previous post, poses both opportunities and threats. The flood of AI-generated books on retail platforms makes discovery harder for all publishers. And while AI tools can boost productivity in areas like marketing and administration, they do not solve the core challenge of publishing great books, which requires human judgment, taste, and editorial skill.

What the Future Looks Like

Here is where I put my predictions on the record, so you can check back in five years and tell me how wrong I was.

I believe independent publishers will capture a larger share of the book market over the next decade. Not a dramatically larger share, but a measurably larger one. The combination of better distribution, direct sales capabilities, niche marketing tools, and talent migration from corporate publishing will compound over time.

I believe the most successful indie presses will be those that build direct relationships with readers, through email, social media, events, and community. The publishers who treat every book sale as a one-time transaction will struggle. The publishers who treat every book sale as the beginning of a relationship will thrive.

I believe physical books will remain the primary revenue source for most publishers, including independents, for at least the next decade. Ebooks and audiobooks will grow, but the physical book has proven remarkably resilient, and its resilience is partly due to the same forces that favor indie publishers: the desire for curation, quality, and objects that feel meaningful in a digital world.

I believe some indie publishers will experiment with hybrid models that blur the line between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Offering authors higher royalty rates in exchange for shared marketing responsibilities, for example. Or creating cooperative publishing models where a group of authors share infrastructure and costs while maintaining individual editorial control. These models are already emerging, and I think they will become more common.

I believe the indie presses that survive and grow will be those that maintain a clear editorial identity. In a market flooded with content, the ability to say “this is what we stand for, this is what we publish, this is what you can expect from us” is a competitive advantage that no amount of marketing spending can replace. An independent publisher with a clear identity and a loyal readership has something that even the largest corporate publisher cannot easily replicate.

Why I Still Do This

I want to end on a personal note, because I think the future of independent publishing depends partly on why people choose to do it.

Nobody gets into independent publishing to get rich. The hours are long. The margins are thin. The stress of managing cash flow, production schedules, and author relationships simultaneously is considerable. If financial return were the primary motivation, there are much easier ways to make a living.

I do it because publishing a book that matters is one of the most satisfying things I have experienced. When I hold a finished copy of a book we have spent a year developing, and I know that the words inside it have been shaped and refined by skilled editors and that the book will find its way to readers who need it, that feeling is worth the headaches.

I do it because independent publishers can take chances that corporate publishers cannot. We can publish a first novel by an unknown writer because we believe in the writing, without needing to justify the acquisition to a corporate board. We can publish translated literature because we think English-language readers deserve access to it, even if the sales projections are modest. We can publish Echoes of Iron because the story deserves to exist in the world, regardless of whether it fits neatly into a commercial category.

The future of independent publishing will be shaped by technology, economics, and market dynamics. But it will also be shaped by the people who choose this work despite its difficulties, because they believe that books matter and that the right books in the right hands can change how people think and feel and understand the world. That belief is not naive. It is the engine that keeps this industry running, and as long as there are people willing to act on it, independent publishing has a future worth fighting for.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team is an independent publisher committed to finding and developing distinctive voices. Explore our catalog, follow our blog for industry insights, or get in touch with a manuscript, a question, or a thought about where publishing is headed.

I’ve been in three book clubs over the past fifteen years. The first one lasted four months. The second one lasted about a year. The third one is still going, seven years and counting, and it’s one of the things I look forward to most in any given month. The difference between the first two (which died) and the third (which thrived) has almost nothing to do with the books we read and almost everything to do with how the group is structured.

Book clubs have experienced a resurgence in recent years, partly driven by celebrity book clubs (Oprah’s Book Club, Reese’s Book Club) and partly by a broader cultural desire for in-person social connection in the aftermath of years spent staring at screens. But starting a book club is easy. Keeping one alive past the six-month mark is hard. Most book clubs fizzle within their first year, and the ones that survive tend to share certain characteristics that have nothing to do with literary taste and everything to do with group dynamics, logistics, and expectations.

I’m going to walk through why book clubs work, why they fail, and how to build one that lasts. This draws on my own experience, on conversations with our authors who’ve been guests at book clubs around the country, and on the practical realities of organizing a group of busy adults to read the same book and show up in the same place once a month.

Why Book Clubs Work

The simplest explanation for why book clubs work is that they add a social dimension to what’s normally a solitary activity. Reading a book alone is one experience. Reading the same book knowing that you’ll discuss it with six or eight people next Tuesday is a different experience entirely. The anticipation of discussion changes how you read. You notice things you’d otherwise skip over. You form opinions more deliberately. You mark passages, not because you need them for anything, but because you want to share them with the group.

This social accountability also simply makes people read more. In my book club, I finish books I might otherwise have abandoned, because I know I’ll be expected to have opinions about them. This has led to some of my best reading experiences. Books that I wasn’t enjoying at page fifty turned out to be remarkable by page two hundred, and I only got to page two hundred because the club was waiting for me. The gentle pressure of a shared commitment pushes you past the point where you’d normally give up, and sometimes what’s on the other side of that resistance is extraordinary.

There’s also the simple pleasure of talking about ideas with people you like. Good book club discussions aren’t literary criticism. They’re conversations, wide-ranging and personal and often surprising. Someone connects a novel to their own life experience. Someone else brings up a historical context that changes how the whole group understands a passage. Someone admits they hated the book and explains why, and the ensuing debate is more interesting than the book itself. These conversations create a kind of intellectual intimacy that’s hard to find elsewhere in adult life.

Why Most Book Clubs Die

My first book club died because nobody would commit to showing up. We started with eight people, enthusiastic and full of plans. By the third meeting, only four showed up. By the fourth meeting, it was three, and one of them hadn’t read the book. We tried moving the date, tried meeting less frequently, tried shorter books. Nothing worked. People were busy, or they’d lost interest, or they just couldn’t prioritize it. By month five, we stopped scheduling meetings and the group dissolved without anyone officially ending it.

My second book club died for a different reason: the discussions were boring. Everyone was too polite. We’d go around the table saying “I liked it” or “I thought it was interesting,” and nobody would disagree or dig deeper. The conversations felt performative, like we were auditioning for the role of “cultured person who reads books” rather than actually engaging with the material. After a few months of surface-level discussion, the meetings started to feel like an obligation rather than a pleasure, and people drifted away.

From talking to friends and colleagues whose book clubs have failed, these are the two most common causes of death: attendance problems and boring discussions. Fortunately, both can be addressed with some structural planning at the outset.

How to Start a Book Club That Lasts: The Practical Stuff

Let me go through the logistics first, because getting the logistics right prevents about 80% of book club failures.

Size matters. My thriving book club has six members. I think six to eight is the sweet spot. Fewer than five, and a single absence guts the discussion. More than ten, and the conversation becomes unwieldy. People don’t get enough airtime. Side conversations start. The group fragments into smaller groups, and you lose the coherence that makes a book club work.

Choose a fixed day and time, and don’t change it. Our club meets the first Wednesday of every month at 7:30 PM. It’s been the first Wednesday at 7:30 PM for seven years. Everyone knows it. Everyone plans around it. If you can’t make it, you miss that month. We don’t reschedule, ever. This sounds rigid, and it is. But the rigidity is what keeps the club alive. The moment you start negotiating dates by email, trying to find a time that works for everyone, you’ve entered the death spiral. There will never be a time that works for everyone. Pick a time, commit to it, and accept that some people will occasionally miss a meeting.

Rotate hosting. In our club, whoever chose the book hosts the meeting at their home. This distributes the logistical burden and keeps the experience varied. Different spaces produce different conversations. There’s something about the host’s environment, their bookshelves, their furniture, the snacks they provide, that subtly shapes the atmosphere of each meeting.

Set a minimum attendance commitment upfront. When we formed our club, we agreed that everyone would attend at least eight of the twelve annual meetings. If you can’t commit to that, you’re not in the club. This sounds harsh, but it’s prevented the attendance problem that killed my first club. Everyone knows they’re expected to be there, and that expectation is reinforced by the fact that it was established as a condition of membership from the beginning.

How to Choose Books (Without Starting a War)

Book selection is the most politically fraught aspect of running a book club. Everyone has different tastes. Everyone has strong opinions about what’s worth reading. Left unmanaged, the selection process can generate resentment that poisons the whole group. Here’s how we handle it, and I think our system works well.

We rotate selection. Each month, a different member chooses the book. When it’s your month, you have absolute authority. You can pick a novel, a memoir, a history book, a graphic novel, a collection of essays. The only rule is that it should be available in paperback or e-book (no out-of-print rarities that cost $75 to find) and it should be under 500 pages (we tried a 700-page novel once, and half the group couldn’t finish it in time).

The absolute authority part is what makes this system work. There’s no voting, no debate, no compromise. When it’s your turn, you pick what you want. This means that everyone reads things they wouldn’t have chosen themselves, which is half the point of a book club. It also means that if you hate a book, you only have to endure it once, and then it’s someone else’s turn to pick something you’ll probably love.

Some of my best reading experiences have come from books chosen by other members of the group. A historical mystery I never would have picked up. A memoir by an athlete whose sport I don’t follow. A work of popular science about a subject I thought I had no interest in. The forced exposure to unfamiliar books is one of the book club’s greatest gifts.

One suggestion: I’d encourage new book clubs to start with books that are accessible and discussion-friendly rather than difficult or obscure. Building the group’s confidence in discussion is more important, in the early months, than proving your literary credentials. Pick books that provoke opinions. Pick books that are well-written enough to reward attention but not so challenging that half the group gives up. Once the group has found its rhythm, you can introduce more ambitious choices.

For what it’s worth, some of our most lively discussions at ScrollWorks-related book events have been around books from our own catalog. Still Waters by Elena Marsh generates passionate disagreements about the protagonist’s choices. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo raises questions about representation and knowledge that can fuel hours of conversation. And Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, while non-fiction, has sparked some of the most heated debates I’ve witnessed in a group setting, because people have strong feelings about money and technology.

How to Have Better Discussions

This is where most book clubs fail even if the logistics are solid. The meeting happens, everyone has read the book, and then… silence. Or worse, a round-robin of pleasant but shallow reactions that doesn’t produce genuine conversation.

The person who chose the book should come prepared with five or six discussion questions. Not generic questions pulled from a reading guide (“What did you think of the main character?”) but specific, opinionated questions that invite disagreement. For example: “The author argues that X caused Y. Do you buy it, or do you think they’re overstating the case?” Or: “The protagonist lies to her sister in chapter four. Is she right to do so? What would you have done?” Questions that have a clear yes-or-no dimension work well because they create immediate debate. Once people start disagreeing, the conversation tends to take care of itself.

A good discussion leader also knows when to let the conversation run and when to redirect it. Some tangents are productive: a comment about a character’s decision leads to a broader conversation about moral reasoning that enriches everyone’s understanding of the book. Other tangents are just tangents: someone starts talking about their vacation and suddenly nobody’s discussing the book anymore. The discussion leader’s job is to gently steer the conversation back to the text without being heavy-handed about it.

Encourage disagreement. I can’t stress this enough. The best book club discussions I’ve been part of have involved genuine, respectful disagreement. Two members arguing passionately about whether a novel’s ending was earned or cheap. Someone defending a book that everyone else disliked, and doing it so well that opinions shift. Someone articulating exactly why a book didn’t work for them in a way that changes how the group thinks about it. These moments of productive friction are where the real value of a book club lives.

To make disagreement feel safe, the group needs a culture of respect. Disagreeing with someone’s interpretation is fine. Dismissing their response or making them feel stupid for liking (or disliking) a book is not. In our club, we’ve had members with very different literary tastes who disagree regularly and respectfully. The trust that enables that disagreement was built over time, through repeated demonstrations that having a minority opinion doesn’t get you mocked or marginalized.

The Social Glue

A book club is, at its core, a group of friends (or soon-to-be friends) who meet regularly. The books are the occasion for meeting, but the relationships are the reason the club endures. If you don’t like the people in your book club, no amount of structural optimization will make you want to show up every month.

My thriving book club works because I genuinely enjoy spending time with the other five members. Some of them are close friends. Some I know primarily through the club. But all of them are people whose company I find stimulating, whose opinions I respect even when I disagree with them, and whose presence makes my month better. The books are wonderful, but if we sat in a room and talked about anything, I’d still show up.

This means that choosing your founding members wisely is the most consequential decision you’ll make. Don’t invite someone because they “should” be in a book club. Invite people who are curious, opinionated, and good at conversation. A brilliant reader who never speaks in group settings won’t add much to the discussion. A less avid reader who asks great questions and listens thoughtfully can be the best member you have.

Mix up the social dynamics. A book club made up entirely of people who know each other well from another context (all coworkers, all parents from the same school) will import the dynamics of that other context into the club. The hierarchy from work, the social politics of the school gate, these things follow people into new settings. A mix of people from different parts of your life creates a fresher, more egalitarian dynamic where the book is the primary shared reference point rather than a pre-existing social structure.

Dealing With Common Problems

Even the best book clubs encounter recurring challenges. Here’s how we’ve dealt with the most common ones.

The member who never finishes the book. In our club, we’ve made it clear that you don’t have to finish the book to attend the meeting. If you got halfway through and couldn’t continue, come anyway. You can still participate in the discussion about the first half, and hearing the group discuss the second half might motivate you to finish, or it might confirm that the book wasn’t for you. Either way, you’re present, and presence matters more than completion.

The member who dominates the conversation. Every group has one (or fears developing one). The discussion leader can manage this by directing questions to specific people: “Sarah, you haven’t said anything about this yet. What did you think?” This isn’t rude; it’s facilitation. Most conversation-dominators don’t realize they’re doing it, and they’re usually grateful when the leader creates space for other voices.

The meeting that turns into a dinner party. Our meetings always include food and drink, and the first thirty minutes are pure socializing: catching up, pouring wine, settling in. But at some point, usually around the forty-minute mark, the discussion leader says “should we talk about the book?” and we shift into the discussion. This transition can feel awkward if it’s not established as routine. In our club, everyone expects it, so it happens naturally. The socializing is important (it’s part of the glue), but the book discussion is the purpose, and honoring that purpose is what makes the evening feel meaningful rather than just pleasant.

The book that everyone hates. This actually produces some of the best meetings. When a group unanimously dislikes a book, the conversation often turns to why it doesn’t work, which leads to thoughtful discussion about what good writing looks like and what we value as readers. The member who chose the book might feel defensive, so the group should be generous about it. Sometimes a book you love doesn’t land with other people, and that’s fine. The discussion of why it didn’t land is often more interesting than the discussion of a book everyone mildly enjoyed.

Online and Hybrid Book Clubs

The pandemic forced many book clubs online, and some have stayed there, either fully or in a hybrid format. I have mixed feelings about this. Online meetings work. I’ve participated in Zoom book clubs that had excellent discussions. But something is lost when the group isn’t physically together. The side conversations before and after the meeting, the body language, the way someone’s expression changes when they’re about to disagree: these non-verbal elements contribute to the richness of in-person discussion in ways that video calls can’t replicate.

That said, online book clubs have a significant advantage: they eliminate geography as a constraint. You can have members in different cities, different states, different countries. If you can’t find six people in your immediate area who want to join a book club, you can almost certainly find six people in your broader network who would. The barrier to showing up is lower (no commute, no babysitter), which can actually improve attendance.

If you go the online route, I’d suggest keeping the group small (five or six people maximum, because larger groups are chaotic on video calls) and using the same fixed-schedule approach I described earlier. And consider meeting in person at least once or twice a year if geographically possible. Even one annual in-person gathering can strengthen the personal bonds that make the club worth sustaining.

Starting Yours

If you’ve been thinking about starting a book club, stop thinking and start texting. Send a message to five people you’d enjoy discussing books with. Propose a date, a location, and a first book. Keep it simple. The first meeting doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to happen.

For your first book, pick something recent, well-reviewed, and rich enough to sustain a conversation but accessible enough that nobody feels overwhelmed. If you’re looking for suggestions from our catalog, The Last Archive by Catherine Voss is a novel that generates strong reactions and divergent interpretations, which is exactly what a new book club needs for its first discussion.

Seven years into my own book club, I can tell you this: it has enriched my reading life, my social life, and my thinking in ways I couldn’t have predicted when we started. The books are wonderful, but what I value most is the monthly practice of sitting in a room with people I like and talking seriously about ideas. In a culture that incentivizes speed, distraction, and superficiality, that practice feels increasingly rare and increasingly necessary. A book club is a small, stubborn act of resistance against all the forces that discourage deep engagement. And it’s fun. Don’t forget that part. It’s supposed to be fun.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I’ve been reading submissions for ScrollWorks Media for a long time. Before that, I read submissions at two other publishing houses. In total, I’ve read somewhere in the range of fifteen thousand manuscripts, proposals, and query letters. I’ve said no to most of them. The rejection-to-acceptance ratio in publishing is brutal, typically in the range of ninety-eight or ninety-nine rejections for every acceptance, and being on the sending end of those rejections has taught me things I wish someone had told me earlier.

These are the lessons from the submissions desk. They’re specific. They’re sometimes uncomfortable. And they’re offered in the genuine hope that they’ll help writers who are currently navigating the dispiriting process of submitting their work.

Lesson One: Your First Page Has About Ninety Seconds

I don’t read every submission from beginning to end. No editor does. We can’t. The volume is too high. What I do is read the first page carefully. If the first page pulls me in, I read the second. If the second holds me, I keep going. But if the first page doesn’t work, the manuscript goes into the rejection pile. I don’t feel good about this. It feels unfair. It probably is unfair. But it’s the reality of a profession where the supply of manuscripts vastly exceeds the capacity to publish them.

What makes a first page work? Voice. Specificity. A sense that the writer knows what they’re doing. I’m not looking for fireworks. I’m not looking for a shocking opening line or an action sequence. I’m looking for prose that makes me trust the writer. Confident sentences. An absence of cliches. A detail or observation that feels fresh and true. These signals tell me that the writer has craft, and craft is the prerequisite for everything else.

What kills a first page? Throat-clearing. Background information dumped before the story starts. Weather descriptions that feel generic. Dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who has never listened to how people actually talk. Prose that’s trying too hard to impress, loaded with ornate vocabulary and convoluted syntax. Simplicity and confidence beat complexity and anxiety every time.

Lesson Two: The Query Letter Matters More Than You Think

For unsolicited submissions, the query letter is usually the first thing I read. A query letter is essentially a sales pitch: a one-page letter introducing yourself and your book, explaining what it’s about and why someone should publish it. A surprising number of writers treat the query as a formality, dashing off something generic before attaching their precious manuscript. This is a mistake.

A good query letter does several things. It tells me what the book is about in concrete, specific terms. It gives me a sense of the author’s voice. It positions the book within its market (comparable titles, target audience). And it’s well-written, because if you can’t write a compelling one-page letter, I’m not optimistic about your ability to sustain a three-hundred-page book.

The most common query letter mistake is vagueness. “My novel explores themes of love and loss in a world torn apart by conflict.” Okay, but so does half of all fiction ever written. What specifically is your book about? Who are the characters? What happens to them? What makes this particular story different from the thousands of other stories about love and loss? If you can’t answer those questions in your query, either you haven’t figured them out yet (which means the manuscript probably isn’t ready) or you have figured them out but can’t communicate them (which is a writing problem that the manuscript probably also has).

Lesson Three: Genre Confusion Is an Instant Rejection

I receive manuscripts regularly from writers who seem confused about what their book actually is. The query describes it as a thriller, but the manuscript reads like literary fiction with a crime subplot. Or the query calls it literary fiction, but the manuscript is actually a genre romance with literary pretensions. Or the author claims it “defies categorization,” which usually means it doesn’t commit to any genre’s conventions and therefore doesn’t satisfy any genre’s readers.

I understand the impulse to resist categories. No writer wants to feel boxed in. But categories exist because readers use them to find books they’ll enjoy. When I acquire a book, I need to know how to position it in the market, which means I need to know what shelf it belongs on. If the author can’t tell me, I’m going to have trouble selling it to my sales team, who will have trouble selling it to bookstores, who will have trouble selling it to readers.

This doesn’t mean every book has to be a pure genre exercise. Plenty of successful books blend genres or subvert genre expectations. But even a genre-bending book has a primary category. “It’s literary fiction with a thriller structure.” “It’s a romance set against a historical backdrop.” These hybrid descriptions work because they give me something to work with.

Lesson Four: Most Rejected Manuscripts Are Competent, Not Bad

Here’s something that might surprise you: most of the manuscripts I reject are not bad. They’re competent. The prose is clean enough. The characters are functional. The plot makes sense. There are no glaring technical problems. And yet they don’t grab me. They don’t make me want to keep reading. They don’t make me think “I need to publish this.”

The gap between competent and compelling is where most writers get stuck, and it’s a gap that’s harder to close than the gap between bad and competent. You can learn to fix bad prose through practice and study. Fixing competent-but-flat prose is harder because the problem isn’t technical; it’s something more elusive. It’s voice. It’s vision. It’s the quality that makes a reader feel like they’re in the presence of a distinct intelligence with something specific to say.

I wish I had a formula for developing that quality. I don’t. What I can say is that the writers who have it tend to be the ones who read widely, who think deeply about their subjects, who are willing to take risks rather than play it safe, and who have put in years of practice. It’s not about talent as some innate, mystical gift. It’s about accumulated experience and the willingness to push beyond adequacy toward something more individual.

Lesson Five: Timing and Market Fit Are Real

This is the lesson that makes writers angriest, and I get it. Sometimes I reject a good book because the market isn’t right for it. I already have a similar title on my list. The genre is oversaturated. The subject had a moment two years ago and the window has passed. The book is good, but I can’t see a clear path to getting it in front of enough readers to justify the investment.

These rejections are genuinely painful to send because I know the writer has no control over market conditions. You can’t time the market when you’re writing a book that takes two or three years to complete. By the time you finish, the market may have shifted. That’s not your fault, but it’s a reality you need to be aware of.

What you can do is be flexible about timing. If your book doesn’t find a publisher right away, it might find one later, when market conditions shift or when a different publisher has a gap in their list that your book fills. Persistence matters. I’ve acquired books that were rejected by other publishers years earlier. The book didn’t change. The market did.

Lesson Six: Rejection Is Not Personal (But It Feels Personal)

When I send a rejection letter, I’m not saying “you’re a bad writer” or “your book is worthless.” I’m saying “this particular book is not the right fit for our particular list at this particular time.” That’s a judgment about fit, not a judgment about quality. It’s a narrow, specific assessment that involves variables (our existing catalog, our financial constraints, our editorial capacity, market conditions) that have nothing to do with the writer or their talent.

I know this is cold comfort. I’ve been rejected myself, and the rational knowledge that it’s not personal doesn’t help much when you’re staring at a form email that dismisses months or years of your work in three sentences. The emotional experience of rejection is real and valid, and I don’t want to minimize it.

What I will say is that every writer I’ve worked with, every one, has a story about rejection. Catherine Voss, whose novel The Last Archive we’re proud to have published, had earlier work turned down by multiple publishers. James Whitfield spent years getting rejections before Echoes of Iron found its home. Elena Marsh was told by one editor that the quiet, interior qualities of her writing were “not commercial enough,” a judgment that looks particularly wrong now that Still Waters has found appreciative readers. Rejection is a universal experience in writing. It’s the cost of admission. Nobody is exempt.

Lesson Seven: Revision Is Where Books Are Won

The single biggest differentiator between writers who get published and writers who don’t, in my experience, is willingness to revise. Not ability to write brilliant first drafts. Not connections in the industry. Not luck (though luck plays a role). The willingness to take feedback, to be honest about a manuscript’s weaknesses, and to do the hard, unglamorous work of revision.

I’ve seen writers with enormous natural talent refuse to revise because they felt their first draft was the “authentic” version and any changes would compromise their vision. Their manuscripts stayed in slush piles. I’ve seen writers with more modest natural talent work through four, five, six drafts, incorporating feedback from writing groups, early readers, and editors, gradually shaping a competent manuscript into a compelling one. Their books got published.

Revision is where you close the gap between what you intended and what’s actually on the page. First drafts are explorations, ways of discovering what the book wants to be. Revision is where you take that discovery and craft it into something a reader can share. This process requires a kind of productive self-criticism: the ability to look at your own work with clear eyes, identify what’s not working, and fix it without losing what is working.

My advice to writers: finish your first draft, then put it away for at least a month. Read it fresh. Be honest. Then revise. Then get feedback from readers you trust. Then revise again. The manuscript you submit should be the best version you’re capable of producing, not a rough draft with a hopeful cover letter.

Lesson Eight: The Cover Letter Reveals More Than You Think

I can often predict the quality of a manuscript from the cover letter or query. Not because of the letter’s content, specifically, but because of what it reveals about the writer’s professionalism and self-awareness.

Red flags include: comparing yourself to literary icons (“my novel has been described as a cross between Tolstoy and Toni Morrison”), making grandiose claims about the book’s significance (“this book will change how people think about love”), mentioning how many agents have rejected you (“forty-seven agents have passed on this, but I know they’re wrong”), or providing detailed backstory about your inspiration (“I started writing this after a dream I had in 2019”). None of these things are disqualifying in isolation, but they suggest a writer who hasn’t done their homework about professional norms in publishing.

Green flags include: a clear, concise description of the book, relevant credentials (writing publications, relevant expertise for non-fiction), awareness of comparable titles, and a professional tone. The writers who get these basics right tend to submit better manuscripts, because the same attention to craft that produces a good query letter produces good prose.

Lesson Nine: There Is No Conspiracy

I hear this from frustrated writers more often than I’d like: the publishing industry is a closed club, and unless you know the right people, you can’t get in. There’s a gatekeeping elite that only publishes their friends, and outsiders don’t stand a chance.

I understand why people believe this. The industry can seem opaque and cliquish from the outside. Connections do matter; a referral from a respected agent or a published author can get your manuscript read faster. Literary communities tend to cluster in a few cities, and being outside those clusters can feel isolating.

But the conspiracy theory is wrong. Publishers are desperate for good books. Genuinely desperate. Our business depends on finding manuscripts that readers will want to buy, and we are constantly, actively looking for them. If your book is good, it can get published. It might take longer than you’d like. You might accumulate a painful number of rejections along the way. But the barrier to entry is quality, not connections.

I’ve acquired books from slush piles, from debut authors with no connections whatsoever. David Okonkwo submitted The Cartographer’s Dilemma through a standard query process. Nobody vouched for him. Nobody called in a favor. The manuscript was good, and that was enough.

Connections help. Of course they do. They help in every industry. But they’re not a substitute for quality, and their absence isn’t an insurmountable barrier. If your book is being consistently rejected, the most productive response is to examine the book itself, not to blame the system.

Lesson Ten: Every Published Book Was Once a Rejected Manuscript

I want to end with perspective. Every book on your shelf, every book that changed your life, every classic that seems like it was destined for greatness, was once a manuscript that someone could have rejected. And in many cases, someone did reject it. Multiple someones.

“A Confederacy of Dunces” was rejected during John Kennedy Toole’s lifetime and only published after his death, through his mother’s relentless advocacy. “Dune” by Frank Herbert was rejected by more than twenty publishers. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was rejected by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury picked it up, reportedly because the chairman’s eight-year-old daughter insisted. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was rejected 121 times, which might be a record.

These stories aren’t exceptions. They’re the norm. The path from manuscript to published book almost always passes through rejection. The writers who succeed are the ones who survive that passage, who keep working, keep revising, keep submitting, even when the process feels pointless and cruel.

I don’t say this to romanticize suffering or to suggest that persistence alone guarantees success. It doesn’t. Some good books never find publishers. Some talented writers give up, and I can’t blame them. The system is imperfect, and some of its imperfections cause real harm.

But I do believe that the writers who ultimately succeed share a quality that goes beyond talent: they’re durable. They can absorb rejection without being destroyed by it. They can use criticism to improve their work rather than taking it as a verdict on their worth. They can sit alone with a manuscript for years, doing the slow, difficult work of making it better, without any guarantee that the effort will pay off.

That durability, that stubborn refusal to quit, is what I look for in a writer as much as talent. When I read a manuscript and feel that combination of skill and determination, that sense that this writer is going to keep going regardless of what I do, I pay attention. Those are the writers who, whether I publish them or not, will eventually get their books into the world. The rejection pile is where careers begin, even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re in the middle of it.

To every writer reading this who has a stack of rejection letters: I see you. I respect you. Keep going.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

We have two non-fiction books on our list that, on the surface, could not be more different. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo is about maps, geography, and how the act of representing the world shapes our understanding of it. Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne is a plain-English guide to cryptocurrency. One deals with centuries of spatial knowledge. The other explains a technology that barely existed fifteen years ago.

And yet, as I have spent time with both books and their authors, I have come to think they are doing the same thing. Both are about how we make sense of complex systems. Both argue that the tools we use to represent reality (maps in one case, money in the other) are never neutral. And both insist that understanding how these tools work is a form of power that belongs to everyone, not just experts.

This is what good non-fiction does at its best. It takes a subject that seems specialized and shows you why it matters to your life, whether or not you ever draw a map or buy a Bitcoin.

Maps Are Arguments

One of the core ideas in The Cartographer’s Dilemma is that maps are not objective representations of the world. They are arguments about the world. Every map makes choices about what to include, what to exclude, what to center, and what to push to the margins. These choices reflect the values, priorities, and biases of the mapmaker, and they shape how the map’s users understand the territory.

David Okonkwo traces this idea through centuries of cartographic history, from medieval mappae mundi that placed Jerusalem at the center of the world to modern digital maps that center wherever you happen to be standing. Each era’s maps reveal its assumptions. The medieval mapmaker placed the holy city at the center because their worldview was organized around religious geography. Google Maps places you at the center because its worldview is organized around the individual consumer. Both choices are ideological, even if neither mapmaker would describe them that way.

This is not abstract academic theory. It has real consequences. Okonkwo discusses how colonial-era maps drew borders across African territories without regard for the people who lived there, creating nation-states that combined hostile groups and divided allied ones. Those borders, drawn by European cartographers in European capitals, still define the political reality of the continent. The map preceded the territory, and the territory was forced to conform to the map.

When I first read Okonkwo’s manuscript, this argument hit me hard. I had never thought about maps as instruments of power. I had thought of them as useful reference tools, roughly equivalent to a dictionary or an instruction manual. Okonkwo showed me that a map is closer to a political speech: it tells you what matters, what does not matter, and where you stand in relation to both.

Money Is Also an Argument

Alexander Hawthorne’s Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners operates at a completely different scale and register, but the underlying logic is similar. Money, like maps, is a system of representation. A dollar bill represents value, but the value is not inherent in the paper. It is a shared agreement, maintained by institutions and backed by trust. When that trust erodes, as it has periodically throughout history, the entire system of representation breaks down.

Bitcoin, as Hawthorne explains it, is an attempt to build a system of monetary representation that does not depend on institutional trust. Instead of a central bank certifying that a dollar is worth a dollar, Bitcoin uses mathematical proof and distributed consensus. The argument is not just technical. It is philosophical: who should control the representation of value, and what happens when that control is decentralized?

Hawthorne is careful not to take sides on whether Bitcoin’s answer to these questions is correct. His book is educational, not evangelical. But he does make clear that the questions themselves are important, and that understanding them requires understanding how money works at a fundamental level. Most people do not think about money as a technology. They think of it as a natural fact, like gravity. Hawthorne’s book gently dislodges that assumption, and the result is a reader who sees the financial system with slightly different eyes.

You can find the book on Amazon if you want to see what I mean.

The Shared Question

Here is what links these two apparently unrelated books: both ask how systems of representation shape what we can think and do. A map shapes how you understand space. A monetary system shapes how you understand value. In both cases, the representation is not a transparent window onto reality. It is a lens that focuses some things and blurs others, and understanding the lens changes what you see.

This is a question that applies far beyond maps and money. Language is a system of representation. So are statistical models, news media, social media algorithms, and legal codes. Every system that mediates between us and reality carries assumptions and biases that we usually do not notice until someone points them out. Good non-fiction is the pointing out.

I think this is why non-fiction has such a strong hold on contemporary readers. We live in a world of extraordinary complexity, where systems we barely understand shape our daily lives. The financial system determines our economic prospects. Digital platforms shape our social relationships. Legal and political systems define our rights and obligations. Most of us navigate these systems without understanding how they work, like drivers who have never opened the hood of their car.

Non-fiction that makes these systems legible, that opens the hood and shows you the engine, performs a service that fiction, for all its emotional power, cannot replicate. You can read a novel that makes you feel the consequences of economic inequality. But to understand the mechanisms that produce it, you need non-fiction.

The Challenge of Accessibility

Both Okonkwo and Hawthorne faced the same challenge: explaining complex material to readers who lack specialized knowledge. This is the central problem of accessible non-fiction, and solving it well is harder than most people realize.

The temptation is to simplify. Take a complex idea, strip away the nuance, and present a clean, digestible version. This approach works in the short term: the reader feels like they understand. But simplified explanations often distort the material. They create a false sense of understanding that breaks down the moment the reader encounters the real complexity.

The alternative is to clarify without simplifying. This means finding ways to communicate complexity that respect the reader’s intelligence while meeting them where they are. It means using analogies that illuminate without distorting. It means being honest about uncertainty and disagreement. It means trusting the reader to handle difficulty if it is presented with care.

Okonkwo does this through storytelling. Each chapter of The Cartographer’s Dilemma is built around a specific map and the story of its creation. The theoretical ideas emerge from the stories rather than being imposed from above. By the time the reader encounters a complex concept, they have already encountered its concrete expression in a narrative. The theory feels like a natural extension of the story rather than an interruption of it.

Hawthorne does it through analogy and tone. His explanations of blockchain technology, cryptographic principles, and monetary theory are built on comparisons to everyday experiences. He compares a blockchain to a shared notebook that everyone in a neighborhood can read but nobody can erase. He compares mining to a competitive puzzle-solving contest with a cash prize. These analogies are not perfect (no analogy is), but they give the reader a foothold from which to approach the real complexity.

Both approaches require the author to deeply understand their material. You cannot write a good analogy for something you only partially understand. The analogy will break at exactly the point where your understanding breaks, and sharp readers will notice. Okonkwo and Hawthorne both brought years of expertise to their writing, and that expertise shows not in the jargon they use (they use very little) but in the confidence with which they handle difficult ideas.

Narrative Non-Fiction and Its Discontents

Both of our non-fiction titles use narrative techniques borrowed from fiction: characters, scenes, pacing, and dialogue. This approach, sometimes called narrative non-fiction or creative non-fiction, has been the dominant mode of accessible non-fiction for decades. It works because humans are wired for stories. We process information more easily when it is embedded in narrative.

But narrative non-fiction has critics, and their concerns are worth hearing. The main criticism is that narrative structure can distort the material. Real life does not have clean narrative arcs. Reducing complex systems to stories about individual people can overemphasize the role of individuals and underemphasize structural factors. A book that tells the story of cartography through individual mapmakers might imply that history is made by great individuals, when in reality it is made by economic forces, technological changes, and millions of anonymous people.

Okonkwo is aware of this risk and addresses it directly. His individual stories are always connected to broader structural analysis. The mapmaker’s choices are explained in the context of the political, economic, and technological conditions that shaped them. No individual mapmaker is presented as a lone genius. They are all shown as products of their time, working within constraints and possibilities that they did not create.

Hawthorne faces a different version of this challenge. Bitcoin’s story is often told as a narrative of visionary individuals: the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the early adopters, the Silicon Valley evangelists. Hawthorne resists this framing. His book focuses on the technology and its implications rather than on personalities. The human stories are there, but they are in service of understanding the system, not celebrating the people who built it.

Why We Publish Non-Fiction

ScrollWorks is primarily known as a literary publisher. Our fiction titles, The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, Still Waters, form the core of our identity. So why publish non-fiction at all?

The honest answer is that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction matters less to us than the distinction between good writing and bad writing. A well-written non-fiction book shares more with a well-written novel than it shares with a poorly written non-fiction book. The skills that make prose work, clarity, rhythm, precision, attention to the reader’s experience, are genre-agnostic.

We also believe that a publisher’s catalog should reflect the range of human curiosity. Readers who love literary fiction often also love well-written non-fiction. The person who reads Echoes of Iron for its historical depth might also enjoy The Cartographer’s Dilemma for similar reasons. The person who reads Still Waters for its intimacy and honesty might connect with Hawthorne’s patient, transparent explanation of complex material.

The common thread is not genre. It is the quality of attention. All of our books, fiction and non-fiction alike, are written by people who pay close attention to the world and who have the craft to communicate what they see. That is the editorial identity we are building, and non-fiction is an essential part of it.

Making Sense of the World

I keep coming back to that phrase: making sense of the world. It is what maps do. It is what money does. It is what books do. Each is a system for organizing the overwhelming complexity of reality into something a human mind can grasp.

Maps make sense of space. Money makes sense of value. The Cartographer’s Dilemma and Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners make sense of those sense-making systems. They are books about the tools we use to understand the world, and they ask us to look at those tools critically rather than accepting them as given.

This meta-level awareness, thinking about how we think, understanding how we understand, is what the best non-fiction provides. It does not just give you new information. It changes the way you process information. After reading Okonkwo, you will never look at a map the same way. After reading Hawthorne, you will think differently about the money in your pocket. These shifts in perception are permanent and cumulative. They make you a more informed participant in the systems that shape your life.

That, ultimately, is why we publish non-fiction at ScrollWorks. Not because it sells (though it does), and not because it diversifies our catalog (though it does that too). We publish it because understanding how the world works is a prerequisite for navigating it well, and because books remain the best technology we have for transmitting complex understanding from one mind to another.

The map is not the territory. The currency is not the value. The book is not the knowledge. But each one, done well, gets you closer to the real thing. And getting closer, I think, is the whole point.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Most book marketing is forgettable. This is not a criticism, exactly. It is a description of reality. The standard playbook, advance review copies, a press release, some social media posts, maybe a book tour if the budget allows, gets the job done in a workmanlike way. Books sell. Careers are sustained. The machinery hums along.

But every once in a while, a book marketing campaign breaks through the noise in a way that changes how the industry thinks about promotion. These campaigns do not just sell a particular book. They create new templates that other publishers study and adapt for years afterward. I have been collecting these case studies for a long time, and I want to share the ones that taught me the most about what is actually possible when publishers think creatively about reaching readers.

Penguin’s “Drop Everything and Read” Campaign

In 2013, Penguin ran a campaign in Australia called “Drop Everything and Read” that remains, in my opinion, one of the smartest book marketing efforts of the past two decades. The premise was simple: for one day, Penguin encouraged everyone in Australia to stop what they were doing and read for thirty minutes.

The genius was in the execution. Penguin partnered with schools, libraries, workplaces, and public spaces across the country. They distributed free excerpts and created pop-up reading lounges in train stations and shopping centers. The campaign was not about selling a specific book. It was about selling reading itself. Penguin positioned their brand as synonymous with the act of reading, which is a far more durable marketing achievement than driving sales of any individual title.

The campaign generated enormous media coverage because it was genuinely useful. It gave news outlets an easy, visual, feel-good story. Photos of people reading in unusual places (on the steps of Parliament House, in a boxing gym, on a surfboard) circulated widely. Penguin sales in Australia increased measurably in the weeks following the campaign, across their entire catalog, not just promoted titles.

What I took from this: the most powerful marketing does not push a product. It advocates for an activity. If you can make people more excited about reading in general, they will buy more books. And some of those books will be yours.

The “Gone Girl” Phenomenon

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was published by Crown in 2012, and its marketing campaign is a case study in strategic surprise. Crown’s marketing team recognized that the book’s major twist, roughly halfway through, was its biggest asset. Readers who reached that point were compelled to tell someone about it, but doing so would spoil the experience.

Crown leaned into this tension. They sent advance copies with a note asking reviewers not to reveal the twist. This simple request accomplished two things: it made reviewers feel like insiders (they knew a secret the public did not), and it created a meta-narrative around the book that was itself interesting. The conversation became not just about the book’s plot but about the collective effort to protect it. Readers who finished the book became members of an informal club.

The advance reading campaign was massive by literary fiction standards. Crown printed far more advance copies than typical and distributed them aggressively to booksellers, librarians, and media contacts. The goal was to create a critical mass of readers who had a personal, emotional investment in the book before publication day. By the time Gone Girl hit shelves, there were thousands of people eager to recommend it.

The word-of-mouth engine ran on its own after that. Crown did not need to spend heavily on advertising because readers were doing the marketing for them, passing copies to friends, posting vague but enthusiastic reviews online, saying things like “You HAVE to read this, and I cannot tell you why.” The mystery of the recommendation became part of the appeal.

What I took from this: if your book has a moment that will make readers gasp, build your entire marketing strategy around protecting and amplifying that moment. Create the conditions for word of mouth, then get out of the way.

Scholastic and the Harry Potter Midnight Launches

Whatever you think about the Harry Potter books, the marketing campaigns around their publication were historic. Scholastic’s handling of the U.S. launches, particularly for books four through seven, created a template for event-based book marketing that no one has replicated at the same scale.

The midnight launch parties were the centerpiece. Bookstores, libraries, and community spaces hosted events where readers could pick up the book the moment it went on sale at midnight. These were not simple sales transactions. They were cultural events. Fans dressed in costume. Stores organized trivia contests and themed activities. The lines wrapped around blocks. Local news covered the events, generating free publicity worth millions.

Scholastic supported this with extreme secrecy around plot details. Books were shipped in sealed boxes with strict instructions not to open them before the release date. Leaks were treated with the seriousness of national security breaches. This secrecy created anticipation that was almost unbearable by publication day, which is exactly the emotional state that drives people to line up at midnight.

The campaign also benefited from Scholastic’s willingness to invest in the reading experience beyond the book itself. They created companion websites, classroom materials, reading guides, and community events that kept fans engaged between publications. The marketing was year-round, not seasonal, which maintained momentum across the gaps between books.

What I took from this: books can be events. When people feel like they are participating in something larger than a purchase, the emotional investment drives both immediate sales and long-term loyalty. Also: scarcity and secrecy are powerful marketing tools, even in an age of information abundance.

McSweeney’s and the Art Object Book

Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern has been a masterclass in physical book design since its launch in 1998. Each issue has a completely different format: one came as a bundle of individual pamphlets in a cardboard box; another was designed to look like a pack of mail; another included a comb. The physical object is so distinctive that owning it feels like owning a piece of art.

This approach markets the literary journal in a way that no amount of conventional advertising could. People display McSweeney’s issues on their shelves as objects. They photograph them for social media. They collect them. The physical format generates its own publicity because every new issue is inherently newsworthy. Reviewers and media outlets cover the format almost as much as the content.

McSweeney’s proved that in an age of digital content, physical books can compete by being more physical, not less. By leaning into everything that digital cannot replicate (texture, weight, spatial design, the surprise of opening a package and finding something unexpected), they turned a literary journal into a coveted object.

What I took from this: do not concede the physical space to digital. Instead, make the physical product so distinctive that it becomes its own marketing. At ScrollWorks, this has influenced how we think about cover design and physical production. When we published Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, we invested heavily in the cover design and paper quality because we knew the physical object needed to justify its existence alongside the ebook. A reader holding a beautiful book is a reader who might set it face-up on a coffee table, where a visitor sees it, asks about it, and becomes a potential buyer.

Colleen Hoover and the TikTok Revolution

You cannot write about book marketing campaigns without addressing BookTok, and you cannot write about BookTok without talking about Colleen Hoover.

Hoover’s It Ends with Us, originally published in 2016, experienced an extraordinary sales resurgence starting in late 2020 when BookTok creators on TikTok began recommending it. The novel had been a solid performer in its initial release but had settled into backlist status. Then short video reviews, many focusing on the book’s emotional impact and featuring creators crying on camera while discussing it, pushed it back onto bestseller lists. By 2022, it had sold millions of additional copies.

What happened here was not a publisher marketing campaign in the traditional sense. Atria Books (the publisher) did not create the BookTok phenomenon. But they responded to it brilliantly. They printed new editions with covers that appealed to the TikTok audience. They increased print runs rapidly to meet surging demand. They promoted BookTok content through their own channels, amplifying the organic momentum rather than trying to control it.

The deeper lesson is about emotional authenticity. BookTok recommendations work because they feel genuine. A person looking into a camera and saying, with tears in their eyes, “This book wrecked me,” is more persuasive than any polished marketing copy. The recommendations are personal, emotional, and unscripted. They work precisely because they are not professional.

Publishers who have tried to manufacture BookTok moments, by paying influencers or creating artificial buzz, have mostly failed. The audience can smell inauthenticity. What works is putting books into the hands of genuine readers who are likely to connect with them emotionally, and then hoping (not controlling) that the response generates organic content.

What I took from this: the most powerful marketing in the current era is authentic reader response. Publishers cannot create it. They can only create the conditions for it by publishing books that provoke genuine emotional reactions and getting those books to the right readers at the right time.

Vintage’s “Classics Redesigned” Strategy

Vintage Books has run one of the most successful long-term marketing strategies in publishing by continuously redesigning their classic literature covers. Every few years, they release new editions of Kafka, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and others with contemporary cover designs that reposition these old books for new audiences.

This strategy recognizes that classics have an image problem. The standard edition of Crime and Punishment, with its serious-looking cover and intimidating thickness, appeals to students and serious readers. But a redesigned edition with a striking, modern cover can catch the eye of a reader browsing a bookstore who might never have considered Dostoevsky. The content is identical. The marketing is radically different.

Vintage has taken this further by commissioning cover designs from contemporary artists and graphic designers, creating editions that are visually distinctive enough to collect. The covers generate social media engagement, media coverage, and display opportunities in bookstores. A fresh cover turns a 150-year-old novel into something that feels new.

What I took from this: marketing is not a one-time event. A book’s commercial life can be extended indefinitely if you are willing to reimagine how it is presented. This applies to frontlist titles too, not just classics. A book that did not find its audience on first publication might find it with a new cover, a new positioning statement, or a new format.

The “Big Little Lies” Cross-Media Playbook

Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies offers a case study in how cross-media adaptation can be integrated into a book marketing strategy rather than treated as a separate event.

When HBO adapted the novel as a television series in 2017, Moriarty’s publisher (Putnam) coordinated closely with the production. They timed a new edition to coincide with the series premiere. The cover was redesigned to feature the show’s stars (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley). A “Now an HBO series” banner was added. The book was repositioned in bookstores near the front, with prominent displays.

But the most effective marketing was the publisher’s strategic patience. Rather than doing a massive promotional push before the series aired, they waited for the series to build its audience over the first few episodes, then ramped up book marketing as viewers naturally sought out the source material. Sales of the novel increased 600% in the weeks following the series premiere, and continued climbing throughout the season.

The strategy of letting the adaptation do the heavy lifting, then catching the resulting demand with well-timed reprints and retail placement, is something more publishers should study. Too often, publishers rush to capitalize on adaptation news at the announcement stage, when public awareness is low, rather than at the premiere stage, when millions of potential readers are actively engaged.

What I took from this: timing matters as much as budget. A well-timed marketing push can accomplish more than a larger effort deployed at the wrong moment.

The Independent Press Advantage

I want to close with a perspective that is personal and specific to our situation at ScrollWorks Media, because I think small publishers have marketing advantages that are underappreciated.

Big publishers have big budgets. They can buy advertising, fund national tours, and place books in airport bookstores. They can afford to experiment with expensive campaigns that may or may not work. An independent publisher like ours cannot compete on those terms, and we should not try.

What we can do is be more personal, more direct, and more creative. When we market The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, I can personally email every independent bookseller I know and explain why this specific book will appeal to their specific customers. When we launched Still Waters by Elena Marsh, we organized intimate reading events at bookstores where Elena could have real conversations with readers, not just sign books and move on.

We can move faster than big publishers. When a cultural moment or a news story connects to one of our books, we can respond in hours rather than weeks. We can adjust our social media messaging, reach out to relevant media contacts, and capitalize on timeliness in a way that corporate marketing departments simply cannot.

We can also be more honest. A small publisher does not need to pretend that every book on its list is a potential bestseller. We can tell readers exactly who a book is for and who it is not for, which builds trust. When we say “this book is for you,” the reader knows we mean it, because we are not saying it about everything.

The best marketing campaigns I have studied share a common thread: they understand their audience deeply and meet that audience where it already is, emotionally and physically. They do not shout into the void. They start a conversation. Big budgets help, but they are not the determining factor. Insight, timing, and authenticity matter more. Those are resources that any publisher, regardless of size, can develop.

The book industry will always need new ways to connect the right books with the right readers. The campaigns that succeed in the coming decade will probably look nothing like the ones I have described here. But the principles behind them, generosity, authenticity, respect for the reader’s intelligence, and a willingness to take creative risks, will remain the same. Those principles are what we try to bring to every title in our catalog.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team thinks constantly about how to connect great books with the readers who will love them. Have a marketing idea for the publishing industry? Reach out via our contact page.

When I tell people in publishing that we’ve released a book about Bitcoin, the reaction usually falls into one of two categories. Some people are curious, even excited. Others give me a look that suggests I’ve just told them we’re publishing a book about alchemy or flat earth theory. The skepticism is real, and I understand where it comes from. Cryptocurrency has been associated with speculation, scams, and breathless hype for so long that many serious people have written it off entirely.

I’m not here to convince you that Bitcoin is going to replace the dollar or that blockchain will solve all of society’s problems. I don’t believe either of those things. What I do believe is that the technology behind cryptocurrency has specific, practical implications for the publishing industry that deserve honest examination. That’s why we published Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, and it’s why I’m writing this post.

The Problem Crypto Might Actually Solve

Publishing has a money problem, and I’m not talking about profitability (though that’s a problem too). I’m talking about the infrastructure through which money moves from readers to creators. The current system is, to put it politely, inefficient.

When you buy a book, your payment goes to the retailer, who takes their cut and sends the rest to the distributor, who takes their cut and sends the rest to the publisher, who takes their cut and eventually sends the rest to the author. This chain involves multiple intermediaries, each adding processing time and cost. An author typically waits months to receive royalties from a sale that happened in real time. The royalty statements they eventually receive are complex documents that even experienced authors sometimes struggle to verify.

This system works, in the sense that money eventually gets where it’s supposed to go. But it’s slow, opaque, and stacked with intermediaries who each take a percentage. For an industry where margins are already thin and creators are already underpaid, the inefficiency of the payment chain is a real issue.

Cryptocurrency, specifically the blockchain technology that underlies it, offers a potential alternative. A blockchain-based payment system could, in theory, allow direct transactions between reader and creator with fewer intermediaries, faster settlement, and transparent accounting. When someone buys your book, you could see the payment arrive in near real-time. The transaction would be recorded on a public ledger that both parties can verify. Smart contracts could automate royalty splits, distributing payments to co-authors, agents, and other collaborators instantly.

That’s the theory. The practice is more complicated, which I’ll get to. But the underlying idea, that blockchain could make publishing’s financial infrastructure more efficient and transparent, is worth taking seriously.

Direct-to-Reader Sales

The most immediately practical application of cryptocurrency in publishing is direct-to-reader sales. Right now, most book sales go through a small number of massive retailers, with Amazon dominating the market. These retailers provide valuable services (discovery, fulfillment, customer trust), but they also control the relationship between publisher and reader, and they take a substantial cut of every transaction.

Some publishers and authors have experimented with selling directly to readers through their own websites. This eliminates the retailer’s cut and gives the publisher direct access to customer data (which is valuable for marketing). But direct sales have historically been limited by the friction of payment processing. Setting up a payment system, managing credit card fees, dealing with international transactions, handling refunds: these are operational headaches that small publishers would rather avoid.

Cryptocurrency could simplify some of this. A reader anywhere in the world could send payment directly to a publisher’s wallet with minimal fees and no dependence on traditional banking infrastructure. International transactions, which are particularly expensive and complicated with traditional payment processors, become trivially easy with crypto. A reader in Nigeria and a reader in Norway pay using the same system with the same fees.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve been exploring this on a small scale. We’re not ready to go fully crypto for our sales (most readers still prefer traditional payment methods, and we respect that), but we’re interested in the option. For our non-fiction titles especially, where the audience tends to be more technically savvy, cryptocurrency payment could be a natural fit.

Smart Contracts and Royalty Distribution

Smart contracts are probably the most interesting blockchain application for publishing, and also the least understood. A smart contract is a program that runs on a blockchain and automatically executes when certain conditions are met. In a publishing context, a smart contract could be programmed to distribute royalties automatically every time a sale occurs.

Here’s how it might work. A book is published with an associated smart contract that specifies: 15% of each sale goes to the author, 10% to the agent, 5% to the cover designer (if they negotiated a royalty share), and the remainder to the publisher. Every time someone buys the book, the smart contract executes and distributes the payment according to these pre-set percentages. Instantly. Automatically. With a transparent, verifiable record of every transaction.

Compare this to the current system, where royalties are calculated quarterly (if you’re lucky), summarized in statements that can be difficult to audit, and paid months after the actual sales occurred. A smart contract system would give authors real-time visibility into their sales and instant access to their earnings. For authors who depend on royalty income, this would be a meaningful improvement in their financial lives.

The practical barriers are significant. Smart contract platforms still have scalability and cost issues. The legal and tax implications are complex and vary by jurisdiction. And the publishing industry’s existing infrastructure isn’t set up to integrate with blockchain systems. These are solvable problems, but they’ll take time and investment to solve.

Digital Ownership and the Ebook Problem

Here’s something that bothers me about ebooks: when you buy one, you don’t really own it. You own a license to access it through a specific platform, and that license can be revoked. Amazon can (and has) remotely deleted books from people’s Kindles. If Amazon goes out of business, or if you lose access to your account, your entire ebook library could disappear.

Blockchain technology offers a potential solution. An ebook could be minted as a digital asset (sometimes called an NFT, though that term carries a lot of baggage from the speculative art market). The owner would hold the asset in their own digital wallet, independent of any platform. They could prove ownership, transfer it to another person, or even resell it, all without needing permission from a centralized platform.

The resale point is particularly interesting. Physical books can be resold, lent, donated, and given away. Ebooks can’t. This is a fundamental limitation of the current digital book ecosystem, and it’s one that readers rightfully find frustrating. Blockchain-based ebooks could restore the first-sale doctrine to digital books, allowing readers to resell or give away ebooks they’ve finished with.

Authors and publishers would need to work out how resale royalties would function. One advantage of blockchain is that smart contracts could ensure a percentage of every resale goes back to the author. Used book sales currently generate zero revenue for authors. Blockchain-based resale could change that, creating a secondary market where authors participate in the ongoing value of their work.

The Micropayment Possibility

Traditional payment processing makes very small transactions impractical. Credit card fees and minimum charges mean that a payment of ten cents costs more to process than it’s worth. This has locked publishing into a model where content comes in large, expensive chunks (full books) with occasional experiments in smaller formats (individual stories or chapters) that have mostly failed commercially.

Cryptocurrency micropayments could change this. On some blockchain networks, you can send fractions of a cent with negligible fees. This opens up possibilities for content monetization that don’t currently exist. A reader could pay ten cents to read a single essay or short story. A subscription service could distribute tiny payments to authors based on actual readership rather than opaque allocation formulas. Serialized fiction could be sold chapter by chapter at prices that feel almost free to the reader but accumulate into meaningful revenue for the writer.

I find this possibility exciting because it could create new economic models for kinds of writing that currently have no viable business model. Short fiction, literary essays, poetry, experimental work: these forms struggle financially because they don’t fit the traditional book-length publishing model. If micropayments could create a direct economic link between writer and reader for any length of text, it could support a wider variety of literary work than the current system does.

The Skeptic’s Objections (and My Responses)

I’ve presented the optimistic case. Let me address the objections, because they’re real and I take them seriously.

“Crypto is too volatile to use as a payment system.” This is true for many cryptocurrencies, and it’s a legitimate concern. Bitcoin’s price has swung wildly, making it a poor store of value for day-to-day transactions. However, stablecoins (cryptocurrencies pegged to traditional currencies) address this problem. A payment made in a dollar-pegged stablecoin has the blockchain’s technical advantages without the price volatility. Stablecoin payment wouldn’t require authors or publishers to speculate on crypto markets.

“The environmental cost of crypto is unacceptable.” This was a strong argument a few years ago, when Bitcoin mining consumed enormous amounts of energy. The situation has improved. Bitcoin’s mining increasingly uses renewable energy, and many newer blockchain networks use proof-of-stake systems that consume a fraction of Bitcoin’s energy. The environmental objection remains valid for some cryptocurrencies but is less universal than it was.

“Nobody wants to pay for books with crypto.” Right now, that’s largely true. Most readers are perfectly happy with credit cards and existing payment systems. But payment preferences change. Twenty years ago, most people were nervous about entering credit card numbers online. Ten years ago, mobile payments seemed fringe. Technology adoption follows patterns, and what seems marginal today can become mainstream faster than expected. We don’t need everyone to switch to crypto overnight. We need the infrastructure to be ready for those who want to use it.

“The crypto space is full of scams and bad actors.” This is unquestionably true, and it’s one of the reasons we published Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners. Alexander Hawthorne’s book is specifically designed to help people navigate the crypto space safely and skeptically, understanding what’s genuine and what’s hype. (You can find it on Amazon here.) The existence of bad actors in a technology space doesn’t invalidate the technology itself. The early internet was full of scams too. We didn’t abandon the internet; we developed better tools and literacy to navigate it.

What We’re Doing at ScrollWorks

I want to be transparent about where we are in this journey. We’re early. We’re experimenting. We haven’t committed to any specific blockchain platform or cryptocurrency, and we’re not telling anyone they should rush to adopt crypto for their publishing operations.

What we are doing is educating ourselves and our authors. Part of that education was publishing Alexander Hawthorne’s book, which gives readers the foundational knowledge they need to understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency without getting swept up in hype or falling for scams. If you’re curious about crypto but feel overwhelmed by the jargon and the noise, that book is a good starting point.

We’re also watching the space closely. Several startups are building blockchain-based tools for publishers, from smart contract royalty platforms to decentralized ebook marketplaces. Some of these will fail. Some might succeed in ways that change how our industry works. We want to be informed enough to adopt useful tools when they’re ready, without being so eager that we adopt bad ones prematurely.

Our approach is pragmatic. We’re interested in any technology that could help authors get paid faster, help readers own their purchases more fully, and help publishers operate more transparently. Blockchain has the potential to do all of these things. Whether it will actually deliver on that potential is a question nobody can answer with certainty today.

The Bigger Picture

Stepping back from the specifics, I think the most important thing cryptocurrency represents for publishing is the possibility of disintermediation: cutting out middlemen between creators and audiences. Publishing, like most media industries, has historically required layers of intermediaries to connect writers with readers. Agents, publishers, distributors, retailers, each serving a function but each also adding cost and complexity to the chain.

The internet already disintermediated some of these layers. Self-publishing platforms allow authors to reach readers without traditional publishers. Social media allows authors to build audiences without traditional publicists. Cryptocurrency could disintermediate the financial layer, allowing direct economic relationships between creators and consumers with minimal friction.

I don’t think intermediaries will disappear. Publishers, editors, and designers add genuine value that most authors need. But the balance of power could shift. If authors have more direct access to revenue and more transparent visibility into their sales, they’ll have more leverage in negotiations and more options for how to bring their work to market. That’s healthy for the ecosystem, even if it means publishers like us need to clearly demonstrate our value rather than assuming it.

The convergence of publishing and cryptocurrency is still in its early stages. Five years from now, we might look back on this period the way we look back on the early days of ebooks: a time of confusion and uncertainty that eventually resolved into a transformed industry. Or we might look back and realize that crypto’s impact on publishing was more modest than the optimists predicted. Either way, paying attention now and thinking seriously about the possibilities seems like the responsible thing to do.

Books like The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo remind us that maps are always redrawn, that the territories we thought we understood are always shifting. The same is true of the publishing industry. The map of how books get made, distributed, and paid for is being redrawn right now. Cryptocurrency is one of the forces doing the redrawing. Whether you’re enthusiastic about that or skeptical, understanding the technology, what it can and can’t do, what risks it carries, puts you in a better position to navigate what comes next.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Memoir submissions to ScrollWorks Media have tripled in the past three years. I checked the numbers twice because I thought someone had miscounted. They had not. Three years ago, we received roughly forty memoir proposals a year. Last year, it was over a hundred and twenty. Something has changed, and I have been trying to figure out what.

The easy answer is that memoir is trendy. That is true but insufficient. Genres do not become popular in a vacuum. When a form suddenly attracts a flood of writers and readers, something in the culture is creating the demand. Understanding what that something is matters if you are a publisher, a writer, or a reader trying to make sense of why every other book on the bestseller list seems to be someone’s life story.

The Numbers Tell a Story

Memoir and personal narrative have been growing as a category for over a decade, but the acceleration in the past few years is notable. According to industry data, memoir sales have grown faster than overall book sales in every measured year since 2019. The category now accounts for a larger share of non-fiction sales than at any point in the past thirty years.

The growth is not concentrated in celebrity memoir, which is what most people think of when they hear the word. Celebrity memoirs still sell well, but the real growth is in what publishers call “ordinary person memoir”: books by people who are not famous, whose stories derive their power from the specificity and honesty of the telling rather than the name on the cover.

This is the category that Still Waters by Elena Marsh belongs to. Elena is not a celebrity. Her book is not about brushes with fame or spectacular events. It is about memory, family, and the ways we construct narratives about our own lives. It sold well because readers connected with the intimacy and honesty of her voice, not because of any external platform or notoriety.

Why Now?

I have been thinking about this question for months, and I have a few theories. None of them is complete on its own, but together they start to explain the memoir boom.

The first is the therapy effect. Mental health awareness has increased dramatically in the past decade. More people are in therapy, more people talk openly about their psychological experiences, and the language of therapy, particularly concepts like trauma, narrative identity, and processing, has entered mainstream conversation. Memoir is the literary form that most closely mirrors the therapeutic process: examining your past, making sense of your experiences, and constructing a coherent story from fragmented memories. It makes sense that a culture increasingly fluent in therapeutic concepts would produce more memoir.

The second is the social media effect. For over a decade now, people have been practicing personal narrative on social media. They have been telling stories about their lives in posts, threads, and videos. They have learned that personal stories generate engagement, that vulnerability attracts attention, and that “being real” is valued (or at least performed) across digital platforms. Memoir is the long-form extension of this impulse. If you have been telling stories about yourself on Instagram for ten years, writing a memoir is a natural next step.

The third is the trust deficit in institutions. People are less likely to trust organizations, media outlets, and official narratives than they were twenty years ago. In this environment, the individual voice carries more weight. “Here is what I experienced” is more credible to many readers than “here is what experts say.” Memoir offers a first-person authority that other forms of non-fiction struggle to claim in a low-trust era.

The fourth, and I think the most interesting, is the loneliness epidemic. Multiple studies have documented increasing social isolation in modern life. People have fewer close friends, fewer community ties, and more time spent alone or in shallow digital interactions. Memoir provides a form of intimate connection that many people are missing in their daily lives. Reading someone’s honest account of their inner experience creates a sense of closeness that is hard to find elsewhere. It is a one-way relationship, but it is a real one.

What Makes a Good Memoir

The flood of memoir submissions has given us a lot of data about what works and what does not. Most of the proposals we receive fall into predictable patterns, and the books that rise above those patterns share a few qualities.

The most common problem in memoir proposals is the assumption that having an interesting life is enough. It is not. Many people have had remarkable experiences, but a remarkable experience does not automatically produce a remarkable book. The experience is raw material. The book requires craft: structure, voice, pacing, and the ability to transform lived experience into something that a stranger can inhabit.

When Elena Marsh proposed Still Waters, what caught our attention was not the events of her life, which she described modestly, but her voice. The way she wrote about ordinary moments made them feel luminous and specific. She had a gift for finding meaning in small details: the way light fell through a window, the particular silence of a house in early morning, the sound of a specific person’s laugh. These are not dramatic events. They are the texture of lived experience, and capturing them well is harder than describing a car chase or a near-death experience.

Good memoir also requires distance from the material. This is counterintuitive because memoir is personal, and people often want to write it while the events are still fresh. But freshness can be the enemy of perspective. A memoirist who is still processing an experience often cannot see it clearly enough to shape it for a reader. The result is a manuscript that feels like therapy rather than literature: cathartic for the writer, exhausting for the reader.

Elena told us that she started writing Still Waters five years after the period the book covers. The distance gave her perspective on what mattered and what did not, which scenes carried weight and which were merely personal. “When I tried to write it closer to the events,” she said, “everything felt equally important. I could not see the shape. Years later, the shape became clear.”

The Truth Problem

Every conversation about memoir eventually arrives at the question of truth. How much of a memoir needs to be factually accurate? What happens when memory is unreliable, which it always is? Where is the line between shaping a narrative and fabricating one?

The publishing industry has been burned by memoir fabrication scandals, and the resulting caution is understandable. But the binary of “true” and “false” does not capture the complexity of how memory actually works. Every memoirist is reconstructing the past from imperfect recall. Dialogue in memoir is almost never verbatim. Scenes are compressed, rearranged, and composited from multiple memories. The order of events may be shifted for narrative clarity. These are standard practices, and readers generally accept them as long as the emotional truth is intact.

The problems arise when a memoirist invents events that did not happen, claims experiences they did not have, or misrepresents other people in ways that are harmful. These are not issues of imperfect memory. They are issues of dishonesty, and the distinction matters.

At ScrollWorks, we handle this through direct conversation. When we acquire a memoir, we ask the author to identify any areas where their memory is uncertain or where they have made compositional choices. We do not expect perfect recall. We do expect honesty about the limits of recall. And we expect that when the author writes a scene with dialogue, the dialogue represents the spirit of what was said even if the exact words are reconstructed.

Elena Marsh handled this beautifully in Still Waters. In several places, she explicitly acknowledges that her memory of a conversation is imperfect. “I do not remember exactly what she said,” she writes at one point, “but the feeling of it has stayed with me for twenty years, and the feeling is what matters here.” This kind of transparency builds trust with the reader and demonstrates that the memoirist is engaging honestly with the limitations of their own perspective.

Memoir and Privacy

Writing about your own life inevitably means writing about other people’s lives. Parents, siblings, partners, friends, and children appear in memoir whether they asked to or not. This raises genuine ethical questions that the genre has never fully resolved.

Some memoirists show the manuscript to the people they write about before publication and offer to make changes. Others do not, arguing that their own experience belongs to them and they have the right to tell it. Both positions have merit, and neither fully resolves the tension between self-expression and the privacy of others.

At ScrollWorks, we encourage our memoirists to think carefully about this. We do not require them to show the manuscript to everyone mentioned in it (that would be impractical for many memoirs and could give other people veto power over the author’s story), but we do ask them to consider the impact of their revelations. Are they writing about someone who is still alive? Could the portrayal cause harm? Is the detail necessary for the story, or is it gratuitous?

These are not questions with universal answers. They depend on the specific relationships, the nature of the revelations, and the memoirist’s own moral compass. But asking the questions is part of responsible memoir writing, and publishers have a role in prompting that reflection.

The Market Challenge

From a publishing perspective, the memoir boom creates both opportunity and difficulty. The opportunity is obvious: readers want memoir, so publishing memoir makes commercial sense. The difficulty is differentiation. When a hundred memoirs about loss, identity, or family land on publishers’ desks every month, standing out becomes extraordinarily hard.

What distinguishes one grief memoir from another? Usually voice. Two people can have very similar experiences and produce completely different books because they bring different sensibilities, different humor, different ways of noticing the world. Voice is what made Still Waters stand out from the stack. Elena’s particular way of seeing, her attention to physical detail, her refusal to reach for easy consolation, her dry wit in unexpected places, made the book feel like no other memoir we had read.

For aspiring memoirists, this means that the question is not “Is my story interesting enough?” but “Is my way of telling it distinctive enough?” Almost any life, examined closely and rendered with skill, can produce a compelling memoir. The skill is the hard part. And the skills that make memoir work, scene construction, dialogue, sensory detail, narrative structure, are the same skills that make fiction work. There is a reason that many of the best memoirists started as fiction writers, or at least studied fiction craft.

Where Memoir Is Going

I see a few trends that I think will shape memoir in the coming years.

Hybrid forms are growing. Books that blend memoir with reportage, criticism, history, or science are increasingly common and increasingly popular. A memoirist writes about their family’s immigration story and weaves in research about immigration policy. Another writes about their illness and includes reporting on the healthcare system. These hybrid memoirs appeal to readers who want the intimacy of personal narrative combined with the intellectual substance of non-fiction.

Short memoir is also gaining traction. Not every life story needs 300 pages. Some of the most powerful memoirs I have read recently were under 200 pages. The brevity forces discipline: the memoirist must choose carefully what to include and what to leave out. The result is often more concentrated and more powerful than a longer book that includes everything.

I also think audio memoir will become increasingly important. The human voice adds a dimension to personal narrative that print cannot replicate. Hearing someone tell their own story, with all the pauses, hesitations, and emotional shifts that a voice conveys, is a fundamentally different experience from reading it on the page. The success of personal narrative podcasts suggests a large audience for this format, and publishers who figure out how to serve it will do well.

At ScrollWorks, we are paying attention to all of these trends. We acquired Still Waters because we believed in Elena’s voice and her story. But we are also looking for memoirs that push the form in new directions: hybrid structures, unconventional voices, stories from perspectives that have been underrepresented in the genre. The memoir boom is not going away. The question for publishers is whether we can ensure that the boom produces books worth reading, or whether we will drown in a flood of competent but forgettable personal narratives.

I am optimistic. For every twenty formulaic memoir proposals we receive, one arrives that has a voice I have never heard before, telling a story in a way I did not expect. Those are the ones we publish. And I suspect that the larger cultural forces driving the memoir boom, the desire for connection, the search for meaning in personal experience, the hunger for honest voices in a noisy world, will continue to produce writers whose stories are worth hearing.

The challenge for readers is finding them among the noise. That is what publishers, booksellers, and reviewers are for. And it is why we take the responsibility of selecting and shaping memoir seriously. Every book we publish is a bet that this particular voice, this particular story, told in this particular way, will find the readers who need it.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

A few years ago, I read a novel translated from the Korean. The prose was extraordinary: precise, emotionally rich, full of rhythm and surprise. Afterward, I looked up other translations by the same translator and bought three more books on that basis alone. Not because of the original authors (though they turned out to be excellent), but because I trusted the translator’s voice and judgment. That experience changed how I think about translation, and eventually it shaped how we approach translated works at ScrollWorks Media.

Translation is one of the most misunderstood processes in publishing. Many readers do not think about it at all. They pick up a translated novel and experience it as if the author wrote in English. When the translation is good, this transparency is the whole point. But the transparency also means that the translator’s enormous contribution is invisible, which has consequences for how translators are compensated, credited, and valued by the industry.

I want to pull back the curtain on how we work with translators, because I think readers who understand the process will appreciate translated literature more, and because I think the industry needs to do better by the people who make it possible.

Finding the Right Translator

When we acquire a book for translation, finding the right translator is the most consequential decision we will make. A brilliant novel paired with the wrong translator will become a mediocre English-language book. A good novel paired with the right translator can become something extraordinary, sometimes better in English than in the original language (translators hate when you say this, but it occasionally happens).

What makes a translator “right” for a particular book? It goes beyond language competency. We look for translators who have a natural affinity with the author’s style and subject matter. A translator who excels with spare, minimalist prose might struggle with a baroque, ornamental style. A translator with a deep understanding of rural life in Colombia will bring something to a Gabriel Garcia Marquez-influenced novel that a translator without that context cannot.

We also consider the translator’s own voice as a writer. Good translators are good writers. They have to be. They are not converting words from one language to another. They are recreating a literary experience in a different linguistic system. This requires creativity, judgment, and a strong command of English prose. When we evaluate potential translators, we read their existing translations looking for the same qualities we look for in an author: clarity, rhythm, emotional precision, a distinctive ear.

The search process usually begins with our network. Literary translation is a small world, and translators tend to know each other. If we need a translator from Portuguese, we will ask translators we have worked with before, check the PEN America Translation Committee database, look at recent translations from Portuguese that we admired, and reach out to the translators behind them. Sometimes the author of the original work has a preference, which we take seriously. Authors know their own work best, and when they have opinions about who should translate it, those opinions carry weight.

The Trial Translation

Before committing to a full translation, we typically ask potential translators to produce a trial translation of 10-20 pages. This is standard practice in the industry, and we compensate translators for this work regardless of whether we proceed with them. (Not all publishers do this. Some expect trial translations for free, which I think is disrespectful of the translator’s time and skill.)

We usually select a passage that presents specific challenges: dialogue with cultural references, a section with unusual syntax or wordplay, a passage that depends heavily on the sound and rhythm of the original language. We want to see how the translator handles difficulty, because difficulty is where the real skill shows.

Evaluating trial translations is subjective and requires care. We read each one multiple times. We compare it to the original (when we have readers who can assess the source language). We read it aloud, because prose rhythm is often more apparent when spoken. And we ask ourselves a simple question: does this sound like a real book? Not a translation, not a homework assignment, but a book that a reader would willingly pick up and enjoy?

Sometimes none of the trial translations are quite right, and we go back to the search. This delays the project but produces a better book. We would rather wait six months for the right translator than rush into a partnership that results in a mediocre translation.

The Translation Process

Once we have selected a translator and agreed on terms, the actual work begins. A full-length novel translation typically takes six to twelve months, depending on the length and difficulty of the source text and the translator’s schedule. Many literary translators juggle multiple projects because no single translation pays enough to support them for that period.

The translator works from the original text, producing a first draft in English. This is the most labor-intensive phase and involves a constant series of decisions. Every sentence requires choices about word order, diction, register, and connotation. Some sentences in the source language have no natural equivalent in English and must be reconstructed from scratch. Idioms, slang, cultural references, and wordplay all require creative solutions.

Let me give a concrete example. Suppose a character in a French novel uses a particular regional expression that conveys warmth, informality, and a working-class background. The translator cannot simply find the English equivalent because there may not be one. Instead, they have to create the same effect using different means: a colloquial phrase, a particular rhythm of speech, a word choice that English readers will associate with a similar social register. The specific words change. The emotional effect must remain.

This is why translation is an art, not a mechanical process. A computer can substitute words. It takes a human being to preserve meaning across the gap between two languages and two cultures.

During the translation, we stay in regular communication with the translator. Our editor reads sections as they are completed, offering feedback and raising questions. The translator often has questions for us (about house style, target audience, how to handle specific cultural references) and sometimes for the original author (about ambiguities in the source text or the author’s intent in a particular passage).

Author involvement varies widely. Some authors are deeply engaged in the translation process, reviewing sections, answering detailed questions, and expressing preferences about how their work should read in English. Others prefer to step back and trust the translator’s judgment. Both approaches can work well, depending on the personalities involved.

Editing a Translation

A completed first draft of a translation goes through the same editorial process as any manuscript we publish, with some additional considerations.

Our editor reads the translation as an English-language text, looking for all the usual things: clarity, pacing, consistency, voice. Does the prose feel alive? Do the characters sound distinct from each other? Does the narrative pull the reader forward? These questions are the same whether the manuscript was originally written in English or translated from another language.

The additional layer involves checking the translation against the source text. For languages we have in-house reading ability for, we do this ourselves. For languages we do not read, we hire a second translator or a bilingual reader to do a comparison reading, checking key passages against the original to ensure accuracy and completeness.

This comparison reading sometimes reveals interesting tensions. A translator might have made a choice that departs from the literal meaning of the source text in service of a better English-language experience. Is this acceptable? It depends. If the departure preserves the author’s intent and improves the prose, we generally support it. If the departure changes meaning in a way that the author would not approve, we flag it. These conversations between editor, translator, and sometimes author are where the final shape of the translation emerges.

The editing process for a translation is typically longer than for an original English-language manuscript. There are more decisions to negotiate, more stakeholders to consult, and more opportunities for subtle misalignment between intent and execution. We budget 20-30% more editorial time for translations than for comparable original works.

The Question of Voice

One of the most interesting aesthetic questions in translation is how much of the translator’s own voice should be present in the finished work.

The traditional view is that translators should be invisible. The reader should feel they are reading the author’s voice, not the translator’s. The translation should be a clear pane of glass through which the original shines without distortion.

The alternative view, which has gained ground in recent decades, is that the translator is a co-creator of the English text and that their voice will inevitably shape it. Denying this is dishonest. Better to acknowledge the translator’s presence and allow them a degree of creative freedom that produces a text with its own literary integrity, even if it departs from the original in ways that a more literal translation would not.

I find myself somewhere between these positions. The author’s intentions and style should guide the translation. But within those boundaries, the translator must be free to make creative choices, because rigid literalism produces dead prose. When a translator’s distinct sensibility enriches the text without distorting it, the result is often better than what a slavishly faithful rendering would have produced.

Our editorial approach at ScrollWorks is to start with the author’s voice as the north star and give the translator room to find the best English-language expression of that voice. This sometimes means accepting solutions that are not literal. It sometimes means pushing back when the translator’s own style overwhelms the original author’s. Finding the right balance is the editor’s job, and it requires sensitivity to both languages and both writers.

Compensation and Credit

Literary translators are catastrophically underpaid. I do not say this with any pleasure. It is a fact that anyone in the industry will confirm.

The going rate for literary translation in the U.S. market ranges from roughly $0.10 to $0.20 per word, depending on the language, the difficulty of the text, and the translator’s experience. At the higher end, a full-length novel translation might pay $15,000-$20,000. That sounds reasonable until you consider that the translation takes six to twelve months of intensive work. The effective hourly rate, even for experienced translators, often works out to well below minimum wage.

Most literary translators cannot survive on translation income alone. They teach, they do commercial translation work (manuals, legal documents, websites), they freelance in other areas, and they translate literature on the side because they love it. This is a structural problem in the industry, and it limits who can afford to do literary translation, which in turn limits the range and diversity of translated literature available to English-language readers.

Credit is the other issue. Many translated books still bury the translator’s name in small print on the copyright page. Some bookstores and review outlets omit the translator’s name entirely when discussing translated works. The author gets all the attention; the translator gets none. This is slowly changing, partly due to advocacy by organizations like the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), but progress is uneven.

At ScrollWorks, we have committed to several practices that we think represent a minimum standard (not a gold standard, a minimum).

Translators receive a flat fee plus a royalty share on sales. The royalty is smaller than the author’s, but it means the translator benefits if the book does well. This aligns incentives: the translator has a financial interest in producing the best possible translation, and we have a financial incentive to market the book effectively.

The translator’s name appears on the cover of the book, in the same size font as “Translated by.” We do not hide this information on the copyright page. If someone’s creative work made the book possible, their name belongs where readers can see it.

We include the translator in marketing activities: interviews, events, media appearances. When a translated book gets reviewed, we encourage reviewers to mention the translation and the translator by name. Good translation should be noticed and praised, and bad translation should be identified and discussed, because both outcomes help raise the profile and standards of the profession.

The Role of Grants and Subsidies

Literary translation in the United States relies heavily on grants and subsidies, which is both a strength and a vulnerability.

The National Endowment for the Arts provides translation fellowships. PEN America offers grants for translations. Many foreign governments subsidize translations of their national literatures through programs like the French Publishers’ Agency, the Goethe-Institut’s translation funding, and similar bodies in Scandinavia, South Korea, and elsewhere. These subsidies are often the financial margin that makes a translated book viable.

Without grant support, many translations simply would not happen. The economics are too unfavorable. A translated literary novel might sell 3,000 copies in the U.S., which generates revenue that barely covers the translation fee, let alone editing, production, and marketing. The grant closes the gap between what the market will pay and what the book costs to produce.

The vulnerability is obvious: grants can be cut. Government funding for the arts is always politically precarious. If NEA funding were reduced or eliminated, the number of literary translations published in the U.S. would drop sharply. Publishers like us, who are committed to translated literature, would have to make painful choices about which projects to pursue.

We apply for translation grants for every eligible project. We have received support from several foreign cultural programs and from PEN. This support makes our translation publishing possible at its current scale. We are grateful for it, and we advocate for its continuation, because the alternative is a more insular, more monolingual literary culture.

Why Translated Literature Matters

Only about 3% of books published in the United States are translations. In most European countries, the figure is 25-40%. This disparity means that English-language readers have access to a much narrower slice of the world’s literary output than readers in most other languages.

This matters for reasons beyond literary variety. Reading translated literature is one of the most effective ways to encounter a perspective genuinely different from your own. A novel written in Korean about life in Seoul will show you things that no English-language journalist or travel writer can, because it comes from inside the culture rather than observing it from outside. The rhythms of thought are different. The assumptions are different. The things that go unsaid are different.

I think about this when we work on our own titles. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo engages with West African geography and history in ways that emerge from Okonkwo’s own background and education. A reader who encounters this book, and then encounters a translated novel by a Nigerian or Ghanaian writer, will have a richer, more layered understanding of the region than they could get from either book alone. Translated literature and domestically authored literature complement each other. The richer your reading is in both categories, the more complete your picture of the world becomes.

We publish translated literature because we believe English-language readers deserve access to the best writing happening anywhere in the world, regardless of the language it was originally written in. And we believe that the translators who make this access possible deserve far more recognition, compensation, and respect than they currently receive.

The next time you read a translated book and the prose sings, take a moment to look at the translator’s name. That person rebuilt the book from the ground up for you. They spent months living inside someone else’s sentences, finding the English words that would carry the same weight, the same music, the same silence. They made something that did not exist before. That is worth noticing. That is worth celebrating.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team works with translators to bring international voices to English-language readers. Explore our full catalog or contact us if you are a translator interested in working together.

There’s an image of the writer that persists in popular culture despite decades of evidence against it: the solitary genius, alone in a room, producing a masterpiece from the pure force of individual talent. Hemingway at his standing desk. Emily Dickinson in her bedroom. J.D. Salinger behind his compound walls. The writer as monk, as hermit, as singular mind working in magnificent isolation.

It’s a romantic image. It’s also mostly fiction.

I’ve worked in publishing long enough to know that every book that reaches your hands is the product of collaboration. Sometimes the collaboration is visible (co-authors, editorial acknowledgments) and sometimes it’s invisible (conversations that shaped the writer’s thinking, early readers who said “this chapter isn’t working,” partners who kept the household running while the writer wrote). But it’s always there. The truly solitary writer, the one who produces a finished book without meaningful input from anyone else, is so rare as to be essentially mythical.

I want to talk about the collaborations behind published books, not to diminish the writer’s contribution, which remains central, but to give credit to the many people whose work makes good books possible.

The Editor

The most significant collaborator in most writers’ creative process is their editor. The nature of this collaboration varies enormously, from light-touch guidance to intensive structural overhaul, but its influence on the finished book is almost always substantial.

Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver is perhaps the most famous (and controversial) example. Lish cut Carver’s stories dramatically, sometimes removing half or more of the text, and in doing so shaped the spare, minimalist style that became Carver’s signature. When unedited versions of Carver’s stories were published after his death, they were recognizably different. Longer, less precise, warmer but also less striking. The “Carver style” was, to a significant degree, a collaboration between writer and editor.

Most editorial relationships aren’t that extreme. But the editor’s influence is real and pervasive. A good developmental editor reads a manuscript and sees not just what it is but what it could be. They identify structural problems the writer is too close to see. They ask questions that force the writer to clarify their thinking. They push back on easy choices and advocate for bolder ones.

At ScrollWorks, our editorial process is deeply collaborative. When I work with an author on a manuscript, we’re in constant conversation. I might send a ten-page editorial letter identifying major issues, followed by weeks of back-and-forth emails and phone calls as the author works through revisions. I’ll read revised chapters and respond with notes. The author will push back on some of my suggestions, and sometimes they’re right to. The finished book emerges from this dialogue. It belongs to the author, absolutely. But it has my fingerprints on it too, and the fingerprints of the copyeditor, the proofreader, and everyone else who touched it along the way.

First Readers and Writing Groups

Before a manuscript ever reaches a publisher, it has usually been read by several people. Spouses, friends, writing group members, trusted colleagues. These early readers provide the first external perspective on work that the writer has been developing in isolation (or what feels like isolation).

The value of first readers is hard to overstate. Writers lose perspective on their own work. After months or years of immersion in a project, they can no longer see it clearly. Details that are vivid in the writer’s mind may not actually be on the page. Structural choices that seemed logical during the writing process may confuse a reader encountering the story for the first time. The first reader provides the reality check that every manuscript needs.

Writing groups, when they function well, offer something more structured. The Bloomsbury Group, the Inklings (Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s Oxford circle), the Beats, the Algonquin Round Table: literary history is full of writers who developed their work in community with other writers. These groups provided not just feedback on specific texts but ongoing intellectual stimulation, accountability, and the kind of creative friction that sharpens thinking.

I know contemporary writing groups get mixed reviews. Some writers find them invaluable. Others find them frustrating, full of competing egos and contradictory advice. My observation, from the publishing side, is that the writers who participate in good writing groups, the ones with clear norms, honest feedback, and mutual respect, tend to produce more polished manuscripts than writers who work entirely alone. The group doesn’t write the book. But it creates conditions where better writing happens.

The Agent as Creative Partner

Literary agents are often thought of as business people, deal-makers who negotiate contracts and manage careers. That’s part of the job. But many agents are also deeply involved in the creative development of their clients’ work.

A good agent reads a manuscript with both creative and commercial instincts engaged simultaneously. They might say, “This chapter is brilliant, but it’s going to make the book a hard sell because editors will think it’s too long. Can we find a way to preserve what’s working while tightening the structure?” That’s a creative note informed by market awareness, and it’s the kind of feedback that many writers can’t get anywhere else.

Some agents do extensive editorial work before submitting a manuscript to publishers. They’ll go through multiple rounds of revision with the author, essentially providing a developmental edit before the publisher’s developmental editor ever sees the book. By the time we receive a submission from a top agent, the manuscript has already been through at least one rigorous editorial process.

The agent’s creative contribution is rarely visible to readers. Their name might appear in the acknowledgments, but the nature and extent of their involvement is usually private. This is appropriate; the author is the creative authority. But the agent’s influence on the final product is real, and many authors will tell you that their agent was instrumental in making their book what it is.

The Copyeditor’s Invisible Art

Copyediting is perhaps the most invisible form of collaboration in publishing. A good copyedit is one you don’t notice, because the text simply reads cleanly and consistently. A bad copyedit (or the absence of one) is immediately apparent in the form of errors, inconsistencies, and distracting mistakes that pull the reader out of the story.

Copyeditors catch things that everyone else misses. They notice that a character’s eyes were described as blue in chapter two and brown in chapter fourteen. They flag timeline inconsistencies where a scene set in October describes flowers that bloom in April. They ensure that the author’s use of commas, capitalization, and terminology is consistent throughout. They verify facts, dates, and proper names.

This work requires an unusual combination of attentiveness and self-effacement. The copyeditor’s job is to perfect the author’s text, not to impose their own style on it. They need to understand the difference between an error and a deliberate stylistic choice. When an author uses a sentence fragment for effect, the copyeditor needs to recognize the intention and leave it alone. When an author uses a sentence fragment because they lost track of their syntax, the copyeditor needs to fix it.

I’ve worked with copyeditors who saved manuscripts from embarrassing errors that no one else caught. A historical novel where the author had the wrong year for a major battle. A memoir where the author contradicted their own account of an event from one chapter to another. A science book where a unit conversion was wrong in a way that would have been obvious to any expert reader. These catches, made quietly and without fanfare, are acts of collaboration that directly improve the finished book.

Design as Collaboration

The book designer is another collaborator whose work is essential but often invisible, at least to the extent that their work succeeds. Good interior design (typography, margins, spacing, chapter openings) creates a reading experience that feels natural and unforced. Bad interior design creates friction: text that’s hard to read, margins that are too narrow, font choices that distract from the content.

We’ve written elsewhere about cover design, which is the most visible aspect of book design. But I want to emphasize the interior as well. The way a book feels in your hands, the way the text sits on the page, the way chapter openings signal a new beginning: these are designed experiences. Someone made deliberate choices about typeface, leading, margins, and paper stock that collectively create the physical experience of reading the book.

At ScrollWorks, our designers work closely with our editors and sometimes with our authors. For The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, the interior design reflects the book’s engagement with archival materials. The typography evokes the feel of institutional documents without being literally imitative. That design choice emerged from conversations between the designer, the editor, and the author about what the book’s physical form should communicate.

The Partner at Home

Here’s a collaboration that almost never gets enough credit: the people who live with writers. Spouses, partners, family members, roommates. The people who keep the household functioning while the writer disappears into their office for months. The people who read drafts, absorb anxieties, tolerate mood swings, and provide emotional support through the inherently uncertain process of creating a book.

I notice this most in acknowledgments pages, which often include a final, emotional paragraph thanking a partner “without whom this book would not exist.” That line is usually not hyperbole. Writing a book, especially a first book, requires a kind of sustained, obsessive focus that is difficult to maintain without someone else picking up the slack in the rest of your life.

The domestic support system also provides something less tangible but equally important: a sense of safety. Writing, real writing, the kind where you try to say something true and risk failing publicly, is emotionally exposing. Having someone in your corner, someone who believes in the project and in you, someone who will still be there if the book flops, creates the psychological security that makes creative risk-taking possible.

I’ve watched authors go through the publication process, and the ones with strong support systems weather it much better than the ones who are truly alone. The loneliness of writing is partly a myth. But the loneliness of publishing, of waiting for reviews, of watching sales numbers, of dealing with the public exposure of something you made in private, that loneliness is real. Having people around you who care about you as a person, not just as an author, is a form of collaboration that deserves recognition.

Research Collaborators

Non-fiction books in particular rely on extensive collaboration with sources, experts, and research assistants. An author writing about a historical event needs access to archives, interviews with experts, and sometimes the cooperation of people who were involved in the events described. Each of these interactions shapes the book.

Even fiction writers depend on research collaborators more than people realize. A novelist writing about a medical setting consults with doctors. A thriller writer researches weapons and procedures with help from specialists. A historical novelist relies on historians, museum curators, and archivists to get the details right. These consultations are collaborative acts that directly influence the content of the finished work.

James Whitfield’s research for Echoes of Iron involved conversations with historians, visits to historical sites, and extended correspondence with experts in the period he was writing about. The novel reads as authoritative because it was informed by people with deep specialized knowledge. Those experts didn’t write the novel, but their expertise is in every historically grounded detail.

The Publishing Team

Beyond the individual relationships I’ve described, there’s the institutional collaboration of the publishing team. A book’s journey from manuscript to published work involves marketing strategists, publicists, sales representatives, production managers, warehouse staff, and distribution partners. Each of these people makes decisions that affect whether the book finds its audience.

The publicist who convinces a reviewer to cover the book is collaborating in its success. The sales rep who persuades a bookstore buyer to stock it prominently is collaborating. The marketing person who identifies the right audience and figures out how to reach them is collaborating. None of these people wrote a word of the book, but without their contributions, the book might never reach the readers it was written for.

At ScrollWorks, because we’re a smaller operation, these roles overlap more than they would at a larger house. This has advantages: everyone on the team has a holistic understanding of each book, and communication is faster. But it doesn’t change the fundamental reality that publishing is a team effort. I’ve never seen a successful book that was the product of one person working alone.

Why the Myth Persists

If book-making is so collaborative, why does the myth of the solitary writer persist? Several reasons.

The myth is commercially useful. A book attributed to a single genius is easier to market than a book described as a collaborative product. Readers connect with individual authors, develop loyalty to them, follow their careers. The author brand is a powerful marketing tool, and it works best when the author is positioned as the singular creative force.

The myth is psychologically appealing. There’s something comforting about the idea that great art comes from individual genius. It suggests that the source of creative achievement is knowable, that it resides in specific, exceptional people. The collaborative reality is messier and less inspiring as a narrative. “A talented person worked hard and was supported by many skilled collaborators” is a less compelling story than “a genius sat alone and produced something extraordinary.”

The myth also has a cultural function. In societies that valorize individualism, the solitary creator is a heroic figure. To acknowledge the collaborative nature of creative work would mean rethinking some deep assumptions about individual achievement and merit. That’s uncomfortable territory.

But the myth also does harm. It sets unrealistic expectations for writers, making them feel inadequate when they need help (which is always). It devalues the contributions of editors, agents, designers, and everyone else whose work makes books possible. And it obscures the reality of how creative work happens, which makes it harder for aspiring writers to understand the support they’ll need.

Embracing Collaboration

My argument isn’t that individual talent doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Catherine Voss’s prose is hers. David Okonkwo’s narrative vision for The Cartographer’s Dilemma is his. Elena Marsh’s ability to write about emotional complexity with precision in Still Waters is a gift that belongs to her alone. The writer’s individual talent and vision are the foundation on which everything else is built.

But a foundation isn’t a house. The writer provides the vision, the voice, the hundreds or thousands of hours of focused creative labor. And then a whole team of people works to help that vision reach its fullest expression and its widest possible audience. Acknowledging this doesn’t diminish the writer. It recognizes the reality of how books come into the world and gives credit to the many people who deserve it.

If you’re a writer reading this, my advice is simple: accept help. Seek out good readers, join a writing community, work with an editor you trust, and be honest about what you don’t know. The best writers I’ve worked with are the ones who understand that needing collaboration isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that you’re serious about making your work as good as it can be.

And the next time you read a book’s acknowledgments page, take a moment to appreciate the names listed there. Those people helped make the book in your hands. The writer will tell you so, if you give them half a chance. The solitary genius rarely exists. The collaborative genius exists everywhere, quietly making the books we love.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

When James Whitfield submitted the first draft of Echoes of Iron, he included a twenty-page bibliography. For a novel. This is unusual, and it told us something about the kind of historical fiction he was writing. He was not using history as wallpaper. He was engaged in a serious, sometimes obsessive attempt to get the past right, down to what kind of nails were used in foundry construction in 1873.

Working with James on that novel taught me more about the relationship between historical fiction and actual history than anything I had read on the subject. It also forced me to think about where the line is between historical accuracy and narrative truth, and why the best historical fiction sometimes bends one to serve the other.

This is a topic I care about deeply, partly because we publish historical fiction at ScrollWorks and partly because I think most readers do not realize how much research goes into a good historical novel, or how many deliberate choices the author makes about where to follow the record and where to depart from it.

The Research Problem

Good historical fiction requires extraordinary amounts of research. An author writing about, say, the American Civil War needs to understand not just the major events but the texture of daily life. What did people eat? How did they light their homes? What slang did they use? What did a city street smell like? What diseases were common? What did a letter look like, physically? How long did mail take?

These details matter because readers can feel when they are wrong, even if they cannot articulate what is off. A character in the 1860s who uses a word coined in 1920 breaks the spell. A room lit by electric light in a decade before electrification shatters the illusion. Readers may not consciously notice these errors, but they register as a vague sense that something is not quite right, and that sense erodes trust in the narrative.

James Whitfield spent two years researching Echoes of Iron before writing a single page of fiction. He visited historical societies, read primary sources, examined artifacts, and talked to historians who specialized in the industrial era. Our copy editor, also named James, worked with period-specific dictionaries to flag any anachronistic language.

The result is a novel where the historical setting feels lived-in rather than reconstructed. The difference between those two qualities is the difference between a historical novel that works and one that feels like a costume drama. In a costume drama, the characters are modern people wearing old clothes. In genuinely immersive historical fiction, the characters think and feel in ways shaped by their time, even when those ways are alien to modern readers.

Where Fiction Departs From Record

Here is the tension that every historical novelist faces: the historical record is incomplete, contradictory, and biased. Primary sources were written by specific people with specific agendas. Whole populations, particularly those who were poor, illiterate, or marginalized, left few written records. The past as it actually happened is largely unrecoverable. What we have is a partial, fragmentary account filtered through the perspectives of people who had the power and literacy to record things.

Historical fiction lives in the gaps. It imagines what the record does not tell us. It gives voices to people who were silenced or overlooked. It constructs interior lives for people whose external actions we might know but whose thoughts and feelings are lost. This is simultaneously the genre’s greatest strength and its greatest danger.

The strength is that fiction can make the past feel real in ways that history books cannot. A well-written historical novel puts you inside someone else’s experience. You feel the heat of the foundry, the fear of the battlefield, the tedium of domestic labor in an era without modern conveniences. This emotional access is something that even the best academic history cannot fully provide, because academic history, properly done, maintains a scholarly distance from its subjects.

The danger is that fiction can create false impressions of the past that readers mistake for fact. A novel that depicts a historical figure saying things they never said, or a historical event happening in a way it did not happen, can shape public understanding of history as powerfully as any textbook. This is a real responsibility, and not all historical novelists take it seriously enough.

The Deliberate Departure

Every historical novelist makes deliberate departures from the record. The question is whether those departures are thoughtful or lazy.

A thoughtful departure is one where the author knows what the historical record says, understands why it says it, and makes a conscious decision to deviate for narrative reasons. They know the facts and choose to change them, usually in minor ways, to serve the story. The key word is “conscious.” They are not getting it wrong. They are getting it different, and they know the difference.

A lazy departure is one where the author simply did not do enough research to know what the record says. They put electric lights in a pre-electrification setting not because they made a creative choice but because they did not bother to check. This kind of error reveals a lack of respect for the material, and attentive readers will catch it.

James Whitfield told me about a scene in Echoes of Iron where he deliberately moved a historical event by two months to align with his narrative timeline. The event (a labor action at a specific industrial facility) actually happened in March, but James needed it to happen in May to coincide with another plot development. He flagged this in his author’s note at the end of the book, explaining the change and his reasons for it.

I asked him whether he considered just changing his plot to match the historical timeline. He said he tried, but it created a structural problem in the novel’s pacing. The two-month gap between the events, which was irrelevant in historical terms, created dead space in the narrative. Moving the date was a small factual change that solved a large structural problem, and he decided the trade-off was worth it.

This is the kind of decision that good historical novelists make constantly. Which details are sacred and which are flexible? Where does the historical record constrain the narrative, and where does the narrative need room to breathe? There are no universal rules. Each decision depends on the specific book, the specific facts, and the author’s sense of where the line is.

The Author’s Note: An Underrated Tool

I am a strong believer in author’s notes for historical fiction. These are the pages at the back of the book where the author explains what is historically accurate, what was changed, and why. Not every reader reads them, but for those who do, they provide transparency that strengthens trust.

A good author’s note does several things. It signals that the author cares about accuracy. It helps readers separate fact from fiction, which is particularly important when the novel deals with real events or real people. And it gives the author a chance to recommend further reading for anyone who wants to explore the history behind the novel.

James Whitfield’s author’s note for Echoes of Iron is four pages long. He identifies every major historical departure, explains his reasoning, and lists the primary sources he drew from. Several readers have told us that the author’s note was one of their favorite parts of the book, because it gave them insight into the creative process and respect for the research behind it.

I have also seen author’s notes that go wrong. The most common mistake is defensiveness: an author who uses the note to preemptively argue against critics who might accuse them of inaccuracy. This rarely lands well. A better approach is straightforward disclosure. “Here is what I changed and why. Here is where the history is solid.” Let readers draw their own conclusions about whether the departures were justified.

Common Ways Historical Fiction Gets History Wrong

After years of editing and reading historical fiction, I have noticed patterns in how novels misrepresent the past. Some are avoidable research failures. Others are more subtle distortions that stem from unconscious biases.

Modern values in historical characters is the most pervasive issue. A novel set in the eighteenth century where the protagonist holds twenty-first century views on gender, race, or class is not historically honest. People in the past had different moral frameworks, and while fiction can certainly challenge or critique those frameworks, it should not pretend they did not exist. A character who is too enlightened for their time feels false, even if the author’s intent is to create a sympathetic protagonist.

The solution is not to make all historical characters bigoted or retrograde. It is to show the moral complexity of their time. Some people in every era were ahead of their culture. But they existed within that culture, and their progressive views would have had limits and contradictions that a modern character would not share. Depicting those limits honestly is harder than making a character a convenient stand-in for modern values, but it produces better fiction.

Sanitized violence is another common problem. Historical eras were often brutal in ways that modern readers find uncomfortable. War, disease, industrial labor, childbirth, and criminal punishment were far more physically devastating than their modern equivalents, and fiction that softens these realities creates a misleadingly comfortable past. This does not mean every novel needs graphic violence. As we discussed when editing Echoes of Iron, there are ways to convey horror without explicit depiction. But the horror should be present, even if it is shown through implication rather than detail.

Teleological thinking is a subtler distortion. This is the tendency to write about the past as if it were leading inevitably to the present. Characters in a novel about the early industrial revolution should not feel like they are living through “the early industrial revolution.” They are living their lives. They do not know what comes next. A novel that imposes hindsight on its characters, making them aware of historical significance they could not have perceived, distorts the experience of living in a particular time.

The best historical fiction captures the openness of the past: the sense that events could have gone differently, that the future was uncertain, and that the people living through historical moments did not experience them as history. They experienced them as life.

What Historical Fiction Does That History Cannot

For all its risks, historical fiction does something that academic history cannot: it makes the past emotionally accessible. Reading a history of the Industrial Revolution will teach you facts. Reading a novel set in a nineteenth-century foundry will make you feel what those facts meant for actual human beings.

This emotional access is not a weakness. It is the genre’s defining contribution. Empathy across time, the ability to feel something of what it was like to be someone else in a different era, is a form of understanding that facts alone cannot provide. When a reader finishes Echoes of Iron and understands, in their gut rather than their head, what industrial labor cost in human terms, the novel has done something valuable that complements rather than competes with academic history.

Historical fiction also reaches audiences that academic history does not. Most people do not read academic monographs. They do read novels. If a novel sends a reader to the library to learn more about the period it depicts, it has performed a service to historical understanding that no amount of scholarly publishing could match.

I have heard from multiple readers of Echoes of Iron who said they went on to read non-fiction about the era after finishing the novel. One reader emailed to say she had enrolled in a community college history course because James Whitfield’s novel had made her curious about a period she had never thought much about. That is historical fiction working exactly as it should.

The Responsibility of the Publisher

As a publisher, we have a role to play in ensuring that historical fiction is responsible. Our editorial process includes historical fact-checking, which is unusual for fiction but, I think, necessary. When an author claims a historical detail as fact, we verify it. When they depart from the record, we make sure they know they are departing and that the departure is intentional.

We also encourage our authors to be transparent about their process. Author’s notes, bibliographies, and acknowledgments of historical advisors all signal to readers that the book takes its historical responsibilities seriously. These paratextual elements may seem minor, but they shape how readers approach the fiction and how much trust they place in its historical claims.

At ScrollWorks, we think of historical fiction as a form of public history. It shapes how people understand the past, and that comes with obligations. We do not expect our novels to be textbooks. We do expect them to be honest about what they know, what they imagine, and where the boundary between the two falls.

That boundary, I think, is where the best historical fiction lives. Right at the edge of what we know and what we can only imagine. The history provides the skeleton. The fiction provides the flesh. And if both are done well, the past comes to life in a way that feels not just accurate but true.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.