Last year I read a book whose central argument I found completely wrong. Not offensively wrong, not morally repugnant, just wrong. The author made claims about economics and social policy that I disagreed with on almost every page. I finished the book in three sittings and recommended it to two friends. It was one of the most useful things I read all year.

This isn’t a contradiction. Reading a book you disagree with is a specific skill, and I think it’s one that’s becoming rarer. We live in an era of algorithmically curated information, where the books that get recommended to you are the books that people like you have already enjoyed. Your social media feed confirms your existing views. Your podcast subscriptions align with your politics. Even your bookstore’s “recommended for you” shelf is, in some sense, a mirror: it reflects what you’ve already read and liked, not what might challenge or unsettle you.

I think this is a genuine problem, and I think readers, especially serious readers who care about understanding the world, have a responsibility to read outside their comfort zone. Not because disagreeable books are inherently valuable (some of them are genuinely bad). But because the practice of engaging thoughtfully with ideas you resist is one of the most productive things a reader can do.

Why We Avoid Books We Disagree With

Before I get into the how, let me address the why. Why do most readers avoid books that challenge their worldview? The reasons are more complex than simple laziness or closed-mindedness.

There’s a psychological mechanism called “motivated reasoning” that makes it genuinely uncomfortable to encounter evidence or arguments that contradict your existing beliefs. When you read something that challenges a deeply held view, your brain treats it almost like a physical threat. Your heart rate increases. You feel defensive. You start generating counterarguments before you’ve even finished the sentence. This is normal human cognition, and it affects everyone, regardless of intelligence or education.

There’s also the time factor. Reading is a significant investment of time, especially at the pace of a book rather than an article. If you’re going to spend ten or fifteen hours with a text, it’s natural to want that experience to be pleasant, affirming, and aligned with your existing understanding of things. Why spend your limited reading time in a state of cognitive discomfort when you could spend it learning more about something you already find interesting?

And there’s a social dimension. In highly polarized cultural environments, what you read signals which team you’re on. Carrying a book by a conservative author in a liberal social circle (or vice versa) can feel like a provocation. People make assumptions about you based on what’s on your shelf, and those assumptions can be socially costly. I know people who read controversial books on their Kindle specifically so that no one can see the cover.

All of these are real barriers. I don’t dismiss them. But I think they can be overcome with practice and with the right approach to reading.

The Difference Between Disagreement and Offense

I want to draw a line here that I think is important. There’s a difference between reading a book whose arguments you disagree with and reading a book that attacks your humanity or denies your right to exist. I’m not suggesting that a person of color should read white supremacist literature for the intellectual exercise, or that a queer person should engage with books arguing that their identity is a disorder. Some books are not “challenging perspectives” worthy of engagement. They’re bigotry in a hardcover, and choosing not to read them is perfectly reasonable.

What I’m talking about is something different: reading books by thoughtful, good-faith authors whose conclusions differ from yours. A libertarian reading a case for social democracy. A materialist reading a defense of religious belief. A free-market advocate reading a critique of capitalism. These are the kinds of intellectual disagreements that sharpen your thinking without degrading your dignity.

The distinction matters because conflating disagreement with harm makes intellectual engagement across differences impossible. If every opposing view is treated as an attack, there’s no space for the kind of productive friction that makes reading worthwhile. I think most readers can tell the difference between a book that challenges their ideas and a book that targets their identity, even if the cultural conversation sometimes conflates the two.

How to Actually Do It: A Practical Approach

Let me offer some specific strategies for reading books you disagree with, drawn from my own practice and from conversations with readers who do this regularly.

First, start with the strongest version of the opposing view. Don’t seek out the worst book on a topic you disagree with. Find the best one. If you’re skeptical of a particular political or economic philosophy, ask someone who holds that philosophy which book makes the best case for it. Reading weak arguments is a waste of your time and will only confirm your existing views. Reading the strongest possible argument against your position is where the real work happens.

This was my approach when I picked up the economics book I mentioned at the beginning. A colleague whose intelligence I respect told me it was the most persuasive case he’d read for a set of policies I oppose. I trusted his judgment about the book’s quality, even though I expected to disagree with its conclusions. And he was right: the arguments were well-constructed and the evidence was carefully marshaled. Disagreeing with a strong argument is much more productive than dismissing a weak one.

Second, read with a pencil. This is advice I give for all serious reading, but it’s especially useful when you’re reading something you disagree with. Mark the passages where the author makes a point you find compelling, even if you ultimately reject the conclusion. Mark the passages where you think the argument breaks down. Write your counterarguments in the margins. This practice forces you to engage actively with the text rather than passively resisting it.

Third, try to articulate the author’s argument in your own words before you argue against it. There’s a concept in philosophy sometimes attributed to the psychologist Daniel Dennett, building on earlier ideas from Anatol Rapoport: before you critique an argument, restate it in the strongest possible terms, so clearly and charitably that the author would say “yes, that’s what I meant.” This practice, sometimes called a “steel man” (the opposite of a straw man), forces you to understand the argument on its own terms before you evaluate it. Most disagreements, in my experience, are built on misunderstandings. When you take the time to genuinely understand what someone is arguing, you often find that your disagreement is narrower and more specific than you initially thought.

Fourth, pay attention to the evidence, not just the conclusions. A book might reach a conclusion you disagree with while presenting evidence that’s genuinely valuable. The facts an author marshals in support of their argument might be accurate and interesting even if the argument itself doesn’t hold up. Some of the most useful things I’ve learned from disagreeable books have been the evidence and examples, the raw material of the argument, rather than the argument itself.

What You Gain From Disagreeable Reading

The most obvious benefit is that it strengthens your own positions. If you’ve only ever read people who agree with you, your beliefs might be correct, but they’re untested. You hold them by default rather than by conviction. Reading a strong opposing argument and finding that your position survives the encounter gives you a different kind of confidence: the confidence that comes from having tested your ideas against the best available counterarguments and found them durable.

Sometimes, though, your ideas don’t survive the encounter. You read something that genuinely changes your mind, either entirely or in part. This is uncomfortable, and it should be. Changing your mind means admitting you were wrong, which nobody enjoys. But the willingness to change your mind in response to good evidence or better arguments is, I’d argue, the single most valuable intellectual quality a person can have. Books are one of the few remaining spaces where you can change your mind privately, without the social pressure of a public debate or the performative nature of social media disagreements.

There’s a subtler benefit too: reading across disagreements improves your ability to understand people who think differently from you. In a polarized world, this skill has enormous practical value. If you can understand why a reasonable person holds a position you reject, you can have productive conversations with people who hold that position. You can find common ground where it exists and identify genuine disagreements where it doesn’t. You can distinguish between people who are wrong and people who are malicious, which is a distinction that our current discourse badly needs.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is interesting in this context because it’s a book that deliberately presents multiple perspectives on its subject without telling the reader which one to adopt. Okonkwo understands that reasonable people can look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions, and he trusts the reader to grapple with that complexity rather than smoothing it out into a simple argument. That kind of intellectual generosity is rare in non-fiction, and it models the kind of reading I’m advocating here.

The Role of Fiction in Disagreeable Reading

Everything I’ve said so far applies primarily to non-fiction, where the disagreements tend to be explicit: this policy is good, this economic theory is correct, this interpretation of history is right. But fiction offers a different and in some ways more powerful form of disagreeable reading.

A novel doesn’t make arguments in the way that a work of non-fiction does. Instead, it invites you to inhabit a perspective. When you read a novel with a protagonist whose values differ from yours, you spend hours inside that character’s mind, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling their emotions, understanding their motivations. This is a fundamentally different kind of engagement than reading a logical argument. It’s empathetic rather than analytical.

I’ve had the experience of finishing a novel and realizing that I now understand a perspective I’d previously dismissed. Not because the author argued for it, but because the author made me feel it. That’s fiction’s unique power: it can bypass the defensive mechanisms that make non-fiction disagreements so difficult. You’re not being told that a position is right. You’re being shown what it feels like to hold that position, and that showing can be transformative.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters does something like this. The novel’s protagonist makes choices that I, as a reader, wouldn’t make. Some of those choices frustrated me. But Marsh writes with such interior depth that I understood why the character made them, understood the emotional logic even when the rational logic eluded me. That understanding didn’t change my own values, but it expanded my sense of what human experience looks like. That’s the best thing a novel can do.

Common Objections (And My Responses)

When I talk about this subject, I get pushback. Let me address the most common objections.

“I don’t have time to read books I disagree with. I barely have time to read books I want to read.”

Fair point. Nobody should read disagreeable books exclusively. But consider replacing one book per year on your reading list with something that challenges your assumptions. One book. If you read twenty books a year, that’s 5% of your reading devoted to intellectual challenge. The return on that small investment is disproportionately large.

“Reading bad arguments gives them legitimacy and a platform.”

I’d push back on the premise. If an argument is published and circulating, it already has a platform. Reading it privately doesn’t extend that platform. And if you haven’t read it, you’re less equipped to argue against it effectively. The most devastating critics of any position are usually the ones who understand that position best.

“Some views are so wrong that engaging with them is a waste of time.”

Sometimes this is true. I’m not advocating for reading flat-earth manifestos or Holocaust denial literature. I’m advocating for reading serious, good-faith works by people whose conclusions differ from yours. There’s a lot of space between “books I agree with” and “obviously crackpot nonsense,” and that space is where the most productive reading happens.

Building a Practice of Intellectual Discomfort

I’ve come to think of disagreeable reading as a practice, something you do regularly and intentionally, like exercise. The first time you do it, it feels unpleasant. Your mental muscles protest. You want to stop and pick up something more comfortable. But over time, the discomfort diminishes and the rewards increase. You develop a tolerance for cognitive dissonance that makes you a better thinker, a more empathetic person, and a more interesting conversationalist.

Here’s a practical exercise if you want to start. Think of an issue you feel strongly about. It could be political, philosophical, social, or economic. Now ask yourself: can I articulate the strongest version of the opposing position? If you can’t, that’s your reading assignment. Find the best book arguing for the position you reject, and read it cover to cover. Take notes. Steel-man the argument. Then, and only then, formulate your response.

You might come out the other side with your original position intact but better defended. You might come out with a modified position, having found that parts of the opposing argument had merit you hadn’t previously recognized. You might even come out having changed your mind entirely, which, I realize, sounds threatening but is actually a sign of intellectual health.

Whatever happens, you’ll have spent hours in genuine engagement with a different way of thinking. In a world that increasingly sorts us into ideological silos and rewards us for staying there, that’s a quietly radical act. A book is an invitation to think alongside another mind. Accepting that invitation when the other mind disagrees with yours is one of the bravest and most productive things a reader can do.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Every book has an environmental footprint. This is uncomfortable to say as someone who loves books and whose livelihood depends on making and selling them. But pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and honesty about where we are is the only way to figure out where we should go.

The publishing industry produces roughly 2.2 billion printed books per year worldwide. Each of those books requires paper, ink, energy, water, and transportation. The paper comes from trees. The ink contains petroleum-based chemicals. The printing presses run on electricity. The finished books travel by truck, ship, and airplane to warehouses, bookstores, and homes. And a significant percentage of those books, roughly 25-30% by some estimates, are never sold. They are returned to publishers and, in many cases, pulped or remaindered.

I want to walk through the environmental costs of publishing with specificity, acknowledge where the industry has improved, explain what we at ScrollWorks Media are doing, and be honest about the trade-offs that remain unresolved.

Paper and Forests

Paper is the most visible environmental cost of a physical book, so let me start there.

A standard paperback novel uses about 2-3 pounds of paper. The paper industry in North America and Europe has, over the past two decades, made genuine progress on sustainability. Most major paper mills now source fiber from managed forests or tree farms rather than old-growth timber. Certifications like FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) provide some assurance that paper production follows environmental standards.

The word “some” in that sentence is doing real work. Certification systems are imperfect. Auditing is inconsistent. Chain of custody can be difficult to verify, especially when paper crosses multiple international borders before reaching a printing press. And even well-managed tree farms are monocultures that support less biodiversity than natural forests. The paper industry has gotten better, but “better than it was” is not the same as “good.”

Recycled paper is part of the answer, but it introduces its own complications. Recycled paper often has a slightly different texture and color than virgin fiber paper, which some publishers resist for aesthetic reasons. The de-inking process used in recycling requires chemicals and generates waste. And the supply of high-quality recycled fiber is limited; there is simply not enough post-consumer paper stock to meet the industry’s needs if everyone switched to recycled simultaneously.

At ScrollWorks, our current standard is FSC-certified paper for all our print editions. We have experimented with recycled-content paper for some titles and found the results acceptable for most formats. We use 30% post-consumer recycled content as our baseline and are working toward 50%. The cost premium for certified and recycled paper runs about 10-15% above conventional stock, which we absorb rather than passing on to readers.

Printing and Energy

Modern offset printing is more energy-efficient than it was twenty years ago, but it still requires substantial electricity and generates waste. The printing process involves plate-making, ink application, drying (often using gas-fired ovens), trimming, and binding. Each step consumes energy and produces some combination of waste paper, chemical byproducts, and emissions.

Digital printing, which is increasingly common for shorter print runs, has a different environmental profile. It eliminates the plate-making step and reduces setup waste, which makes it more efficient for runs under 1,000 copies. But digital printing uses toner rather than traditional ink, and toner cartridges contain plastics and chemicals that require careful disposal. The per-unit energy consumption of digital printing is also higher than offset for large runs, so the environmental advantage depends on scale.

Print-on-demand (POD) technology has changed the equation significantly. Instead of printing 5,000 copies upfront and hoping they all sell, a publisher can print one copy at a time, only when an order comes in. This eliminates overproduction almost entirely, which is a major environmental win. The trade-off is that POD books tend to be printed closer to the point of sale, which can mean different (and sometimes lower-quality) printers, and the per-unit cost is higher.

We use a hybrid model at ScrollWorks. For titles where we are confident in demand, like Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, we do offset print runs of a size calibrated to sell through within 12-18 months. For less predictable titles, we use POD through our distribution partners. This minimizes waste while keeping books available. It is not a perfect system, but it is a significant improvement over the old model of printing large runs and pulping the leftovers.

The Overproduction Problem

Overproduction is the publishing industry’s dirtiest environmental secret, and nobody talks about it enough.

Here is how the traditional model works. A publisher prints a large initial run (say, 10,000 copies) to achieve economies of scale on per-unit costs. The books ship to a warehouse, then to bookstores. Bookstores have the right to return unsold copies for credit. Returns in the book industry average around 25-30%, though they can be much higher for individual titles.

What happens to returned books? Some are resold through remainder channels at steep discounts. Some are donated. And some, particularly mass-market paperbacks, are simply destroyed. The covers are stripped off and returned to the publisher as proof of destruction, and the coverless books go to recycling (at best) or landfill (at worst).

The numbers are staggering. The U.S. book industry alone produces hundreds of millions of copies per year that are never read by anyone. They are manufactured, shipped, shelved, unshelved, shipped back, and destroyed. The carbon footprint of this cycle, paper production, printing energy, two-way shipping, disposal, is enormous and almost entirely unnecessary.

The returns system persists because of inertia and because it benefits certain parties (bookstores get to order aggressively without risk). But it is environmentally indefensible, and the industry knows it. Some publishers have experimented with non-returnable terms, offering deeper discounts to bookstores in exchange for final-sale arrangements. This shifts the risk to booksellers, who understandably resist, but it would dramatically reduce waste if adopted more widely.

As a small publisher, we have more flexibility here. Our relationships with booksellers are direct enough that we can have honest conversations about order quantities. When a bookstore orders 20 copies of a title and we think 12 is more realistic, we say so. This does not always make us popular, but it means our return rate is well below the industry average, which means fewer books are printed for no purpose.

Shipping and Distribution

Books are heavy. A box of twenty hardcovers weighs about 30 pounds. Moving millions of these boxes around the country and around the world requires a lot of fuel.

The typical journey of a printed book looks something like this: from printing press (often in China or the eastern United States) to a publisher’s warehouse, then to a distributor’s warehouse, then to a bookstore or directly to a consumer. If the book does not sell, it makes the return trip: bookstore to distributor to publisher. This back-and-forth shipping is one of the most carbon-intensive aspects of the publishing supply chain.

The globalization of book printing has made this worse. Many publishers print books in China because printing costs are significantly lower there. But shipping containers of books across the Pacific Ocean adds weeks of transit time and a substantial carbon footprint. A book printed in Shenzhen and sold in Portland has traveled roughly 6,000 miles by sea before reaching a bookshelf.

We print domestically whenever we can. Our primary printer is in the eastern United States, and we use POD services with print locations across the country to minimize shipping distances. The cost is higher per unit than printing overseas, but the environmental and supply chain benefits justify it. Domestic printing also means faster turnaround times, which lets us print smaller quantities more frequently, further reducing waste.

Online retail has complicated the picture. When a reader orders a single book from an online retailer, that book is typically packed in a corrugated cardboard box (with plastic air pillows or paper fill), loaded onto a delivery truck, and driven to their door. The last-mile delivery of individual books is remarkably carbon-intensive per unit. Buying from a local bookstore, where one delivery truck serves hundreds of customers, is almost always the more environmental choice.

Ebooks and Their Hidden Costs

The obvious response to all of this is: read ebooks. No paper. No shipping. No overproduction. Problem solved, right?

Not exactly. Ebooks have environmental costs too, though they are less visible and harder to measure.

An e-reader device requires mining of rare earth minerals, energy-intensive manufacturing, shipping from the factory (almost always in Asia), and eventually disposal as electronic waste. The lifecycle environmental impact of a single Kindle has been estimated at roughly equivalent to 20-50 printed books, depending on the study and assumptions used. If you read more than 50 books on your e-reader before replacing it, you come out ahead environmentally. If you replace your device every two years and only read a dozen books per year, the calculus is less clear.

Then there are the server farms. Ebooks live in the cloud, and the cloud is not weightless. Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and water for cooling. Every time you download an ebook or sync your reading progress, a small amount of energy is consumed at a data center somewhere. Individually, these transactions are trivial. At the scale of millions of readers, they add up.

The honest answer is that ebooks are probably better for the environment than printed books for heavy readers, and probably worse for light readers who also need to buy a device. Neither format is zero-impact. The most environmentally friendly book is one that already exists: borrowed from a library, bought secondhand, or shared among friends.

What the Industry Is Doing

The publishing industry has made progress on sustainability, and I want to acknowledge that progress before talking about where it falls short.

The Book Industry Environmental Council (now part of the Book Industry Study Group) has developed guidelines for environmental reporting. Major publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins publish sustainability reports and have set emissions reduction targets. FSC certification has become widespread. The use of soy-based inks (which have lower volatile organic compound emissions than petroleum inks) has increased substantially.

Print-on-demand technology, as I mentioned, has reduced overproduction for many titles. Digital-first publishing models allow publishers to gauge demand before committing to large print runs. And the growth of ebook and audiobook formats means that a larger share of reading happens without any physical product at all.

But the industry’s sustainability efforts remain uneven and, in some areas, performative. Many publishers tout FSC certification while continuing to overprint. Sustainability reports focus on what has improved while glossing over what has not. The fundamental structural issue, the returns system that incentivizes overproduction, remains largely unaddressed by the major publishers.

What We Are Doing at ScrollWorks

I want to be specific about our own practices, because vague sustainability claims are easy and accountability is hard.

Paper: FSC-certified, minimum 30% post-consumer recycled content. We are working to reach 50% by the end of next year. We track paper sourcing by title and can tell you where the fiber for any of our books came from.

Printing: domestic printers only, with a preference for facilities that use renewable energy. Our primary printer sources 40% of its electricity from wind and solar. We use soy-based inks for all interior printing.

Print runs: calibrated to sell through within 12-18 months. We use POD for backlist titles and for initial publication of titles with uncertain demand. Our return rate last year was 8%, compared to the industry average of roughly 25%.

Shipping: we consolidate shipments whenever possible and use ground freight rather than air. For direct-to-consumer sales through our website, we use recyclable packaging and have eliminated plastic fill materials entirely, replacing them with recycled paper padding.

Offsets: we purchase verified carbon offsets for our estimated annual emissions from printing and shipping. I will be honest that I have mixed feelings about offsets. They are better than nothing, but they can also be a way of buying permission to continue polluting. We treat them as a bridge measure while we work on reducing actual emissions, not as a permanent solution.

Ebooks and audiobooks: we publish all our titles in digital formats, including The Cartographer’s Dilemma and Echoes of Iron, and we encourage readers to consider digital when the format suits them. We do not push digital over print, because we believe physical books have value beyond their content, but we want the option to be available and affordable.

What Readers Can Do

Individual consumer choices are not going to solve the publishing industry’s environmental problems. Structural changes in production, distribution, and the returns system will have far more impact than any number of individual readers choosing to buy used. But reader behavior does matter at the margins, and there are choices worth making.

Use your local library. Every book borrowed from a library is a book that did not need to be printed for you individually. Library copies serve dozens of readers over their lifetime. On a per-read basis, library books are the most environmentally efficient way to read.

Buy from local bookstores rather than ordering individual copies online. The per-unit shipping footprint of a book that traveled in a box with 200 others to a bookstore is far lower than a book that was individually packed and delivered to your door.

Buy used when you can. The secondhand book market is large and healthy, and buying a used copy has essentially zero additional environmental impact beyond the shipping.

When you are done with a book, pass it along. Give it to a friend, donate it to a library or thrift store, leave it in a Little Free Library. Every additional read a book gets extends the useful life of the resources that went into making it.

If you are a heavy reader (say, more than 30 books per year), an e-reader probably makes environmental sense, especially if you keep the device for several years. If you read fewer books and value the physical experience, printed books are fine, especially if you are buying from publishers who take their supply chain seriously.

The Honest Truth

Here is what I think, stripped of any PR considerations.

The publishing industry’s environmental impact is real but moderate compared to most manufacturing industries. Books are not fast fashion. They are not single-use plastics. They are durable goods that provide years of value. The average book emits roughly 7-8 kg of CO2 over its lifecycle, which is less than a round trip by car to the nearest city.

The biggest environmental problem in publishing is waste, specifically, the overproduction of books that nobody reads. Fixing the returns system and embracing print-on-demand for a larger share of titles would do more for the industry’s environmental footprint than any number of FSC certifications or carbon offset purchases.

As a small publisher, we have advantages: we can move faster, take more risks on new production methods, and maintain closer relationships with our supply chain. We are using those advantages to try to publish more responsibly. We are not perfect. We still use too much packaging. Our shipping is still too carbon-intensive. We still print books that do not sell as quickly as we hoped.

But we are trying, and we believe that transparency about our failures is more valuable than a polished sustainability brochure that glosses over the hard parts. The environmental cost of publishing is real. Addressing it requires honesty, investment, and a willingness to change practices that the industry has relied on for decades. We are committed to that process, even when it is uncomfortable.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team is committed to reducing our environmental impact while continuing to publish books that matter. Learn more about our titles on our books page, or share your thoughts on publishing sustainability via our contact page.

There’s a statistic that gets cited frequently in publishing circles: only about 3% of books published in the United States are translations. The number has improved slightly in recent years, but it remains startlingly low compared to most other countries. In France, translated literature accounts for roughly 15-18% of books published. In Germany, it’s around 12%. In many smaller European countries, the percentage is even higher.

What this means, practically, is that most English-language readers are consuming literature from a remarkably narrow slice of the world’s literary output. We’re reading books written in English, by English-speakers, about English-speaking cultures. And while that’s a rich tradition, it’s also a limited one. Imagine listening to only one radio station your entire life. You might love that station, but you’d never know what you were missing on all the others.

I want to make the case for reading in translation, to explain why it matters, what you gain from it, and where to start if you’ve never really ventured outside English-language literature.

What You’re Missing

The most obvious thing you’re missing by reading only in English is a wider range of perspectives. Different cultures produce different kinds of stories, with different assumptions about what a novel should do, how characters should behave, what counts as a satisfying ending. Japanese fiction has a tradition of ambiguity and understatement that feels fundamentally different from the American emphasis on conflict and resolution. Latin American fiction has a relationship with time and memory that doesn’t map neatly onto European narrative conventions. African literatures (plural, because the continent contains dozens of distinct literary traditions) offer ways of understanding community, identity, and history that challenge Western frameworks.

But it’s more than just different perspectives. Translated literature also gives you access to different ways of using language. Every language has its own music, its own rhythms, its own capabilities and limitations. When a skilled translator brings a book from one language into another, they’re negotiating between these different musical systems. The result, when it works, is prose that feels subtly different from anything written originally in English. There’s a quality to good translated fiction that I can only describe as slightly unfamiliar in the best way, like hearing a melody played on an instrument you’ve never encountered before.

I first experienced this reading the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. His sentences, even in English translation, have a quality of sustained, accumulative attention that feels distinctly Scandinavian. The long, patient descriptions of ordinary activities, making breakfast, changing a diaper, driving to a gas station, have a rhythm that owes something to the Norwegian language’s structure and something to a cultural attitude toward time and detail that’s different from the American rush to get to the point.

The Translator’s Art

Translation is one of the most underappreciated arts in publishing. A literary translator must be a skilled writer in the target language, a sensitive reader of the source language, and a diplomat who can negotiate between two linguistic systems that often have no one-to-one correspondence.

Consider the challenge of translating wordplay. A pun that works in French almost certainly doesn’t work in English. The translator has to decide: do they try to create an equivalent pun in English (which might require changing the joke entirely), do they translate literally and add a footnote explaining the pun, or do they skip it and accept the loss? Each choice has tradeoffs. Multiply this decision by hundreds across a full novel, and you begin to understand the complexity of the translator’s task.

Cultural references pose similar challenges. A passing reference to a popular TV show, a political figure, or a local custom in one culture may be meaningless to readers in another. The translator can keep the reference and add context, can substitute an equivalent from the target culture (which changes the text), or can generalize the reference into something universal (which loses specificity). Again, every choice involves compromise.

The best translators find a way to bring the original text’s voice, tone, and personality into the target language while also making the result read as natural, living prose. This is an enormously difficult balancing act. Translations that are too literal sound stilted and awkward. Translations that are too free lose the distinctive qualities of the original. The sweet spot, where the translation reads beautifully in English while preserving something essential about the source, is what separates great translators from competent ones.

I want to name some translators I admire, because they too rarely get the recognition they deserve. Ann Goldstein, who translates Elena Ferrante from Italian, has managed to capture the intensity and directness of Ferrante’s prose in a way that has helped make her a global phenomenon. Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian” from Korean was a literary event in itself, introducing English readers to a writer of extraordinary power. Jhumpa Lahiri, better known as a novelist, has translated several Italian works and brings a writer’s sensitivity to language to every page.

Starting Points: Where to Begin

If you’re new to translated literature, the prospect of choosing from the world’s literary output can be overwhelming. Here are some starting points organized by what you might already enjoy.

If you like literary thrillers and crime fiction, Scandinavian noir is an obvious entry point. The genre has been popular in English translation for over a decade, and the quality remains high. Beyond the well-known Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo, try Arnaldur Indridason’s Icelandic detective Erlendur series, which is slower and more melancholic than most crime fiction, or Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg novels from France, which blend detective fiction with something close to magical realism. Find Indridason on Amazon.

If you like literary fiction with strong character work, try the Italian novels of Elena Ferrante. Start with “My Brilliant Friend,” the first of her Neapolitan quartet, which follows two women from childhood in 1950s Naples through decades of friendship, rivalry, and social change. Ferrante writes about female friendship with an intensity and honesty that I haven’t found anywhere else. Find it on Amazon.

If you enjoy novels of ideas, French literature has a long tradition of fiction that engages with philosophical and political questions. I’d recommend starting with Albert Camus, whose “The Stranger” remains as startling and provocative as when it was published in 1942. For something more contemporary, try Michel Houellebecq, whose novels are deliberately provocative and uncomfortable, or Leila Slimani, whose “The Perfect Nanny” is a disturbing psychological study of domestic life. Find Camus on Amazon.

If you’re interested in family sagas and generational stories, Latin American literature has some of the best examples in any language. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is the obvious starting point, and it deserves its reputation. But also try Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits,” which covers a Chilean family across the 20th century with warmth and political awareness, or Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s “The Sound of Things Falling,” which explores how Colombia’s drug wars echoed through ordinary lives. Find Garcia Marquez on Amazon.

If you’re drawn to spare, minimalist writing, Japanese literature has produced some of the finest practitioners. Yoko Ogawa’s “The Memory Police” is a haunting novel about a society where objects (and the memories attached to them) gradually disappear. Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” is a compact, tender novel about grief and food. And Haruki Murakami, for all his fame, remains genuinely strange and compelling, especially his earlier, shorter works like “A Wild Sheep Chase.” Find Ogawa on Amazon.

African Literature in Translation

I want to give African literature its own section because it’s an area where English-language readers have the most catching up to do. While some African writers write in English or French and are relatively well-known (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong’o), there are extraordinary literary traditions in Swahili, Yoruba, Arabic, Amharic, and dozens of other languages that remain largely untranslated.

For Arabic literature, start with Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate whose Cairo Trilogy follows three generations of a Cairo family from World War I through the 1950s. The books are warm, detailed, and deeply humane. For something more contemporary, try Jokha Alharthi’s “Celestial Bodies,” which won the International Booker Prize in 2019. Set in Oman, it weaves together the stories of three sisters with the story of a nation in transition. Find Mahfouz on Amazon.

East African literature in Swahili is a growing area of translation. The Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, writes primarily in English but is deeply engaged with the literary and cultural traditions of the Swahili coast. His novel “Paradise” is a gorgeous account of a boy’s coming of age in early 20th-century East Africa. Find Gurnah on Amazon.

The Problem of Availability

One barrier to reading in translation is simply finding translated books. Most mainstream bookstores have limited translated fiction on their shelves. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm tends to favor English-language titles, making discovery difficult. Review coverage in major publications, while improving, still skews heavily toward books originally written in English.

There are some excellent resources for finding translated literature. The International Booker Prize shortlist, which specifically recognizes fiction in translation, is a reliable annual guide to the best recent translations. Words Without Borders, an online magazine, publishes translated fiction, poetry, and non-fiction and is one of the best places to discover new voices. The publisher New Directions has been bringing international literature to English readers for decades and has a catalog worth exploring systematically.

Independent bookstores, particularly those in cities with diverse populations, tend to be better about stocking translated literature. If you’re lucky enough to live near one, ask the staff for recommendations. They’re often passionate about translated fiction and glad to have someone ask about it.

Reading Translation Generously

I want to offer some practical advice for reading translated literature, particularly if you’re not used to it.

First, be patient with unfamiliarity. Translated novels may have different pacing, different narrative structures, and different assumptions about what the reader knows. A Japanese novel’s quiet, elliptical approach to conflict might initially feel like “nothing is happening” to a reader trained on American fiction’s emphasis on plot momentum. Give it time. Adjust your expectations. Let the book teach you how to read it.

Second, don’t judge a literary tradition by a single book. If you read one translated novel and don’t connect with it, that doesn’t mean all literature from that language or country is “not for you.” There’s as much variety within any literary tradition as there is within English-language literature. Try a different author, a different genre, a different translator.

Third, pay attention to the translator. Different translators bring different sensibilities to the same text. If you’ve read a translation that felt flat or awkward, the issue might be the translation rather than the original. Some classic works have multiple translations available, and the differences between them can be striking. For Russian literature in particular, translator choice can dramatically affect your experience. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have generated heated debate among scholars and readers who find them either more accurate or more stilted than older translations.

Fourth, resist the temptation to treat translated literature as anthropology. When you read a novel from another country, you’re reading a work of art, not a field guide to a foreign culture. The characters are not representative of their entire nation or language group. The novel’s depiction of a place or a people is one artist’s vision, shaped by their own perspective and biases. Read with the same critical awareness you’d bring to an American novel about America.

What Translation Means for Writers

Reading widely in translation has made me a better editor. It’s expanded my sense of what fiction can do, what shapes a narrative can take, what registers prose can operate in. When I encounter a manuscript that does something structurally unusual, I’m more likely to recognize it as a deliberate choice rather than a mistake if I’ve seen similar techniques in translated literature.

At ScrollWorks, we think about this when developing our own titles. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo draws on narrative traditions from both European and West African storytelling. Still Waters by Elena Marsh has a quality of restraint and observation that owes something to the Japanese literary tradition. These connections aren’t always visible on the surface, but they’re there, enriching the work in ways that a purely Anglophone literary diet wouldn’t produce.

For writers, reading in translation is one of the best ways to stretch your craft. Exposure to different narrative strategies, different relationships between sentences, different approaches to time and structure, all of this feeds back into your own writing in ways that can be hard to trace but easy to feel. The writer who reads only in English is working with a limited toolkit. The writer who reads across languages has access to the full range of human storytelling.

The Moral Dimension

I’ll end with something that might sound grandiose but that I believe sincerely: reading in translation is a moral act. In a world that seems to be fragmenting along cultural and national lines, literature in translation is one of the few forces pulling us toward understanding across those lines. When you read a novel from another country, another language, another culture, you’re engaging in an act of imaginative empathy. You’re spending hours inside the mind of someone whose experience of the world is different from yours.

This doesn’t mean that reading a Japanese novel makes you an expert on Japan, or that reading a Colombian novel gives you authority on Colombian politics. But it does mean that you’ve spent time, serious, sustained time, engaging with a perspective you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. That engagement, repeated across many books and many cultures, builds something. I’d call it literacy in the broadest sense: the ability to read not just words but worlds.

The 3% of American books that are translations should be 10%. It should be 15%. We’d all be better readers, better writers, and better citizens if we read more widely across languages. The books are out there. The translators are doing heroic work to bring them to us. All we have to do is pick them up.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I used to read for three hours straight without looking at my phone. I know this because I remember doing it. I remember sinking into a novel on a Saturday afternoon and surfacing only when the light changed. Now I read for twenty minutes and then check something. Email. A notification. The weather, as if the weather has changed since I last looked. It is embarrassing to admit, but I think most honest readers would say the same.

This is not a moral failing. It is an environmental one. Our attention has been engineered into a commodity by companies that profit from interrupting us, and reading, which requires sustained focus, is one of the casualties. As a publisher, I think about this constantly. Not because I want to moralize about screen time, but because the books we publish at ScrollWorks Media require the kind of attention that is becoming harder to give.

What follows is not a lecture. It is a collection of practical strategies that have helped me, our team, and readers we have talked to reclaim some of the deep reading capacity that the digital environment has eroded. Some of these are obvious. Some are counterintuitive. All of them work, if you actually do them.

The Problem Is Real and Measured

Before getting into solutions, I want to acknowledge the research. This is not imagined. Studies from multiple universities over the past decade have documented a measurable decline in sustained reading capacity among adults. Average reading session lengths have shortened. The number of books read per year has declined in most demographic groups. Self-reported difficulty concentrating on long texts has increased.

The reasons are well understood. Smartphones deliver variable-reward stimulation (you never know what notification is coming next, which makes checking addictive). Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, which means maximizing the frequency with which you return to the app. Even email, which seems benign, trains a constant monitoring habit that fragments attention throughout the day.

The result is that many adults who consider themselves readers have gradually lost the ability to sustain attention on a book for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. They still buy books. They still intend to read them. But the books accumulate on nightstands and in Kindle libraries, partially read or unstarted, while the phone gets picked up a hundred times a day.

I recognize the irony of writing about this in a blog post, which is itself a digital medium competing for your attention. But here we are. Let me try to be useful.

Strategy One: Create a Physical Separation

The single most effective thing I have done for my reading life is put my phone in another room when I sit down with a book. Not in my pocket. Not face-down on the table. In another room, with the door closed.

This sounds simplistic, but the psychology behind it is solid. When your phone is within reach, part of your brain is always aware of it. Even if it is silenced, even if it is face-down, you know it is there. That ambient awareness creates a low-level distraction that competes with whatever you are reading. Removing the phone from your physical space eliminates that competition.

The first few times I did this, I felt anxious. That anxiety was informative. It told me something about my relationship with the device that I was not comfortable acknowledging. After about a week, the anxiety faded. After a month, the reading sessions got longer. I went from twenty-minute stretches to forty-five minutes and then to an hour or more. The capacity was still there. It just needed the interference removed.

Some people use physical book reading as the enforcing mechanism. If you read on a Kindle, the temptation to switch apps or check notifications is built into the device. A physical book has no notifications. It does one thing. For readers who struggle with distraction, print books are not a nostalgic preference. They are a practical tool.

Strategy Two: Schedule Reading Like You Schedule Exercise

Most people who exercise regularly do not wait until they feel like exercising. They have a time and a routine. Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Every day after work. The commitment is built into their schedule, and showing up is non-negotiable even when motivation is low.

Reading benefits from the same approach. If you wait until you feel like reading, you will probably end up scrolling instead, because scrolling requires less activation energy. But if you have a designated reading time, even a short one, the habit builds on itself.

At ScrollWorks, several team members have adopted a “reading hour” before bed. No screens after 9 PM; books only. Clara, our senior editor, told me she resisted this initially because she liked watching shows in the evening. After two weeks, she noticed she was sleeping better and reading more. She has kept the habit for over a year.

The specific time matters less than the consistency. Some people read in the morning before the day’s noise starts. Some read during lunch. The important thing is that the time is protected. It is not “I will read if I have time.” It is “this is my reading time.” The framing makes a difference.

Strategy Three: Start With Shorter Books

If you have not finished a book in months, do not start with a 600-page novel. This is like trying to run a marathon when you have not jogged in a year. You will fail, and the failure will reinforce the idea that you cannot focus anymore.

Instead, start with something short. A novella. A collection of essays. A book under 200 pages. Give yourself the experience of finishing something, of reaching the last page and closing the cover. That feeling of completion is motivating. It rebuilds your identity as a reader, which matters more than you might think.

Our publicist Rachel suggested a book to a friend who had not finished a book in over a year. It was short, under 180 pages, and her friend read it in three sittings over a weekend. “I forgot I could do that,” her friend said afterward. She has read four more books since then, each one slightly longer than the last. The momentum is real.

I also think there is no shame in abandoning a book that is not working for you. Life is too short and there are too many good books. If you are fifty pages in and dreading picking it up, stop. Find something that pulls you forward instead of requiring effort to continue. Reading should not feel like homework. If it does, you are reading the wrong book.

Strategy Four: Read What You Actually Want to Read

This is related to the previous point but deserves its own discussion. I have noticed that many people who struggle to read are trying to read what they think they should read rather than what they actually want to read. They have a list of Important Books that they feel obligated to tackle, and the obligation turns reading into a chore.

Read the thriller. Read the romance. Read the graphic novel. Read the sports biography. Read whatever makes you want to turn the page. The goal right now is to rebuild the reading habit, and the habit is built on pleasure, not virtue. Once the habit is established, you can gradually expand into more challenging territory. But starting with the “important” books when your reading muscles are atrophied is a recipe for frustration.

I say this as someone who publishes literary fiction and serious non-fiction. I want people to read The Last Archive by Catherine Voss and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo. But I would rather someone read a book they love in another genre and rebuild their reading habit than force themselves through one of our titles out of obligation and give up halfway through. A reader who devours popular fiction is more likely to eventually pick up literary fiction than a non-reader who feels guilty about their unread pile.

Strategy Five: Use Audiobooks Strategically

Audiobooks are divisive in the reading community, and I think the debate is often unproductive. The question is not “Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading?” It is “Does listening to audiobooks help me engage with more books?” For many people, the answer is yes.

Audiobooks fit into moments when print reading is impossible: commuting, exercising, cooking, doing laundry. These are hours in the day when your hands and eyes are occupied but your mind is free. Filling those hours with a good audiobook can add ten or fifteen hours of “reading” to your week without displacing any other activity.

I have also found that audiobooks can serve as on-ramps to print reading. When I listen to the first few chapters of a novel on audio and get hooked, I sometimes switch to the print edition because I want to read at my own pace and reread passages. The audio got me past the initial resistance, and the print edition took over once I was invested.

There are books where audio is the better format. Memoirs, in particular, often benefit from being read by the author. When Elena Marsh recorded the audiobook for Still Waters, readers told us the experience was different from the print edition in ways that enriched their understanding. The pauses, the inflections, the places where her voice caught: these added a layer that print cannot provide.

The key is not to treat audiobooks as a replacement for reading but as a complement. Use them for the moments when you cannot sit with a book. Use print or ebook for the moments when you can.

Strategy Six: Talk About What You Read

Reading in isolation is fine, but reading in community is better for building a sustainable habit. When you discuss a book with someone else, your engagement with it deepens. You notice things you missed. You see the book through another person’s eyes. And you have social accountability: if you are meeting for a book club next week, you are more likely to finish the book.

Book clubs are the obvious vehicle here, but they are not the only one. A friend who reads the same book as you and wants to text about it. A Goodreads community where you post updates. A family member who will listen to you explain why a particular chapter made you angry. Any social context that connects reading to conversation will strengthen the habit.

Online reading communities have their own distraction risks, of course. A Goodreads session can easily turn into a social media scrolling session. But used with intention, these platforms add a social dimension to reading that isolated reading lacks.

Strategy Seven: Reclaim Waiting Time

Before smartphones, people read during idle moments. Waiting rooms. Bus stops. Lunch breaks. Airport gates. These small pockets of time were filled with books, newspapers, and magazines. Now they are filled with phones.

Reclaiming even some of this time for reading can add up significantly. If you carry a book with you (or keep one on your phone’s ebook app), you can read during waits that would otherwise go to scrolling. Five minutes here, ten minutes there. It sounds trivial, but those fragments accumulate. Over the course of a week, they can add an hour or more of reading.

The trick is making the book more accessible than the phone. If you have to dig through your bag for a book but your phone is in your pocket, you will reach for the phone. Keep the book where you can grab it easily. Better yet, keep the phone in the bag and the book in your hand.

Strategy Eight: Lower the Stakes

Somewhere along the way, reading became a performance. People track their reading on apps, set annual goals (“I am going to read fifty books this year!”), and measure their progress publicly. While goals can be motivating, they can also create pressure that makes reading feel like an obligation.

If counting books stresses you out, stop counting. If your Goodreads goal is creating guilt, delete it. Read what you want, at the pace you want, without keeping score. The point of reading is the experience, not the number. A person who reads five books deeply and thinks about them for months afterward is a better reader than someone who speed-reads fifty and remembers none of them.

I also think rereading is undervalued. There are books I have read three or four times, and each reading gives me something new. A book like Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield rewards rereading because the historical details and the prose style reveal more on a second pass. Rereading is reading. It counts, if you are counting. And if you are not counting, it still matters.

What This Means for Publishers

I would be dishonest if I did not acknowledge that the attention crisis affects our business. We publish books that ask for sustained engagement. The Last Archive is a slow, deliberate novel that rewards patient reading. Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne asks readers to stick with complex material. These are not books you can absorb in five-minute increments.

As a publisher, I could respond to the attention crisis by publishing shorter, simpler books. There is a market for that, and I do not look down on publishers who serve it. But I believe the solution to diminished attention is not to accommodate it. It is to help people reclaim it. The world needs books that require sustained focus, because the problems the world faces require sustained focus. You cannot think carefully about history, or technology, or human relationships, in ten-second bursts.

So we will keep publishing the books we believe in, and we will keep looking for ways to help readers find the time and space to engage with them. If any of the strategies in this post help even one person read one more book this year, I will consider it time well spent.

Now put your phone in another room and go read something.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I’ve been collecting bookstores the way some people collect stamps or restaurant recommendations. Wherever I travel, for work or otherwise, I find the local independent bookshop. Sometimes it’s a planned stop; sometimes I just stumble across it while walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. Over the years, I’ve built a mental map of bookstores around the world, and the best ones have become places I return to whenever I’m nearby. A great bookstore isn’t just a place that sells books. It’s a place that understands books, that has opinions about them, that introduces you to things you didn’t know you wanted to read.

What follows is a personal list. These are bookstores I’ve visited and loved. They’re not the most famous or the most Instagrammed (though some are both). They’re the ones where I’ve had the best experiences as a reader and as a publisher. I’ve tried to spread the list geographically, because great bookstores exist everywhere, not just in London and New York.

Powell’s City of Books, Portland, Oregon

I have to start here, because Powell’s is the bookstore that ruined me for all other bookstores, at least for a while. It occupies an entire city block in downtown Portland, with over a million volumes spread across multiple floors and color-coded rooms. The first time I walked in, I got lost for four hours. I mean genuinely lost: I couldn’t find the exit and didn’t particularly care.

What makes Powell’s special isn’t just the size, though the size is staggering. It’s the curation. New and used books sit side by side on the same shelves, which creates a browsing experience unlike anything I’ve encountered elsewhere. You’ll be looking at a new novel and right next to it find a used first edition of something you’ve been hunting for years. The staff picks are genuinely helpful, reflecting the individual tastes of actual readers rather than whatever the publisher is pushing this week. And the store has a seriousness of purpose that you can feel when you walk in. It takes books seriously. It expects you to take them seriously too.

Powell’s also buys used books from the public, which means the inventory is constantly changing. Every visit is different. I’ve found out-of-print academic texts, forgotten 1970s paperbacks, and obscure poetry chapbooks on their shelves. If you’re ever in Portland, block out an afternoon. You’ll need it.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Yes, this is the obvious Paris bookstore. Yes, it’s touristy. I don’t care. Shakespeare and Company earns its reputation. The current shop, on the Left Bank facing Notre-Dame, was opened in 1951 by George Whitman and named in tribute to Sylvia Beach’s original shop that had been a gathering place for Hemingway, Joyce, and the Lost Generation in the 1920s. It’s been a literary landmark for over seventy years, and it still functions as a living, breathing bookstore rather than a museum.

The ground floor is a well-stocked English-language bookshop with strong sections in literary fiction, philosophy, and poetry. Upstairs is a chaotic, beautiful warren of reading nooks, old typewriters, handwritten quotes on the walls, and beds where the store’s “Tumbleweeds” (visiting writers given free lodging in exchange for working in the shop) sleep at night. The atmosphere is romantic in the best sense: it makes you believe in the life of the mind as something worth pursuing.

I’ve bought books there on every visit to Paris. The last time, I picked up a novel by a French author I’d never heard of, recommended by the young woman at the register, and it turned out to be one of the best things I read that year. That’s the promise of a good bookstore: it connects you with books you never would have found on your own.

City Lights Books, San Francisco

City Lights has literary history embedded in its walls. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin in 1953, it was the first all-paperback bookstore in the country and became the de facto headquarters of the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti’s publishing arm, City Lights Publishers, published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and defended it against obscenity charges in a trial that helped define free speech protections for literature in America.

The store itself is on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, occupying a three-story building with creaking floors and a basement poetry section that feels like a sacred space. The selection is politically engaged, heavily weighted toward poetry, small press literature, progressive politics, and international writing in translation. It’s a bookstore with a point of view, which I find infinitely more interesting than one that tries to stock everything for everyone.

What I appreciate most about City Lights is its commitment to literature that challenges the mainstream. The shelf labels alone are an education: “Stolen Continents,” “Muckraking,” “Commodity Aesthetics.” You won’t find a bestseller display at the front of the store. You’ll find books you’ve never heard of, by writers from countries you might not be able to locate on a map. This is a bookstore that takes its role as a cultural institution seriously, and visiting it feels like an act of intellectual engagement.

Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

The Marylebone flagship of Daunt Books is the most beautiful bookstore I’ve ever been inside. It’s housed in an Edwardian building with long oak galleries, skylights, and William Morris-print stained glass. The architecture would be enough to recommend it, but the books match the setting.

Daunt’s organizing principle is unique: the back room is arranged by country. Rather than separating fiction from non-fiction, each country section brings together novels, history, travel writing, cookbooks, and anything else related to that part of the world. Looking for books about Japan? You’ll find Murakami next to a history of the Meiji Restoration next to a Japanese cookbook, all on the same shelves. This arrangement encourages a kind of lateral browsing that other organizational systems don’t. You go in looking for one thing and come out with something completely different but equally wonderful.

The front room is more conventionally organized, with excellent new fiction and non-fiction displays and staff picks that I’ve learned to trust over many visits. Daunt has expanded to several locations across London, but the Marylebone shop remains the essential one. Go early on a weekday if you can. On Saturday afternoons it’s packed.

El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires

El Ateneo is a bookstore in a former theater, and the effect is exactly as dramatic as that sounds. The building was constructed in 1919 as the Teatro Grand Splendid, a 1,050-seat theater that later became a cinema. In 2000, it was converted into a bookstore, preserving the original frescoed ceiling, ornate balconies, and crimson stage curtains. The theater boxes have been turned into reading nooks. The stage is a cafe. You browse for books beneath a painted dome of angels and classical figures.

It sounds like it could be gimmicky, a bookstore trading on spectacle rather than substance. But El Ateneo is also a very good bookstore. The selection, primarily in Spanish, covers fiction, history, philosophy, art, and Argentine literature with real depth. The staff is knowledgeable and the prices are reasonable. I speak only enough Spanish to get by, but on my visit I found several books in translation and a beautiful edition of Borges’s collected fictions that I carried home in my luggage.

What El Ateneo represents, beyond its physical beauty, is the idea that a bookstore can be a civic space. A place where a city gathers, not to shop but to participate in cultural life. Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than almost any other city in the world, and El Ateneo is the grandest expression of a reading culture that permeates the entire city.

Treadwell’s, London

Treadwell’s is a tiny bookshop near the British Museum that specializes in esotericism, mythology, folklore, and what the owners describe as “the encyclopaedia of the encyclopaedia.” It’s a niche shop, and that’s exactly why I love it. The selection is deeply curated by people who genuinely know their subject. You’ll find academic texts on alchemy next to contemporary books about tarot next to medieval grimoire facsimiles next to poetry collections inspired by myth.

I include Treadwell’s because it represents something about independent bookstores that chain stores and online retailers can never replicate: passionate expertise in a specific domain. The people who work at Treadwell’s can recommend books about Hermetic philosophy or Scandinavian folklore or the history of witchcraft trials with the same confidence and specificity that a great wine shop can recommend a bottle of Burgundy. This kind of deep, specialized knowledge is the independent bookstore’s competitive advantage, and Treadwell’s deploys it brilliantly.

The Strand, New York City

The Strand advertises “18 miles of books,” and while I haven’t measured, the claim feels plausible. This is New York’s most famous independent bookstore, occupying a massive space on Broadway near Union Square. The ground floor is new books, curated with the kind of intelligence you’d expect from a store that’s survived in Manhattan since 1927. The basement is review copies and bargain books, a treasure hunter’s paradise where you can find nearly new hardcovers for a few dollars. The upper floors are rare and collectible books.

The Strand’s buyer is legendary in the industry for selecting a stock that balances commercial appeal with genuine literary quality. The staff pick shelves are worth the trip alone. I’ve discovered more books through Strand staff picks than through any review publication. There’s also something about the physical experience of the Strand, the sheer density of books, the narrow aisles, the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by more reading material than you could get through in a lifetime, that creates a productive disorientation. You go in with a plan and leave with five books you’d never heard of.

As a publisher, I have a particular appreciation for the Strand’s commitment to stocking small press titles alongside the big publishers. When we send copies of a new ScrollWorks title like The Last Archive or Echoes of Iron, we know they’ll be given a fair shot on the shelves alongside books from publishers with ten times our marketing budget. That’s what independent bookstores do for small publishers: they level the field.

Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice

This one is eccentric enough that I debated including it. Libreria Acqua Alta (the “High Water Bookshop”) stores its books in gondolas, bathtubs, and waterproof bins because the shop floods regularly during Venice’s acqua alta tides. There’s a staircase made of ruined books. There’s a cat sleeping on a pile of Italian novels. The whole place looks like what would happen if a bookstore and a junk shop had a beautiful, chaotic child.

But here’s the thing: beyond the Instagram-friendly quirks, it’s actually a solid used bookshop with a strong selection of Italian literature, art books, and Venice-related titles. The owner, Luigi Frizzo, is a character in the best possible sense, opinionated about books and happy to recommend them. I spent an hour there on my last visit to Venice and left with a stack of Italian-language poetry that I’m still working through, slowly, with a dictionary.

I include Libreria Acqua Alta because it embodies something I value in bookstores: personality. This is a shop that could only exist in one place, run by one person, shaped by one set of enthusiasms. It couldn’t be franchised. It couldn’t be replicated. It’s specific and strange and completely itself. The best bookstores always are.

Munro’s Books, Victoria, British Columbia

Founded in 1963 by Jim Munro and his then-wife Alice Munro (yes, the Nobel Prize-winning short story writer), Munro’s Books is housed in a heritage building on Government Street in Victoria. The interior is gorgeous: high ceilings, neoclassical columns, and a layout that manages to feel both grand and intimate. It’s one of the finest independent bookstores in Canada, and it would be a world-class bookstore in any city.

The selection is strong across the board, with particularly good Canadian literature, poetry, and children’s book sections. The staff recommendations are excellent. And there’s a quality to the browsing experience at Munro’s that’s hard to describe: a sense of unhurriedness, of being given permission to take your time, to pick up books and read the first few pages, to change your mind, to wander. Not all bookstores communicate this. Some are beautiful but feel like galleries where you’re afraid to touch anything. Munro’s invites you in.

Livraria Lello, Porto, Portugal

Livraria Lello is often called one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and the claim is justified. The interior, designed in 1906 by the engineer Xavier Esteves, features a massive carved wooden staircase that splits and curves upward to a second floor, stained glass ceilings, and elaborately decorated walls. It’s said to have inspired J.K. Rowling’s depiction of Diagon Alley and Flourish and Blotts, which may or may not be true (Rowling lived in Porto in the early 1990s while writing the first Harry Potter book).

The bookstore now charges a small entry fee (redeemable against a book purchase), which keeps the crowd manageable and ensures that most visitors are there to buy books rather than just take photographs. The selection is weighted toward Portuguese literature, art, and architecture, with a reasonable English-language section. I bought a beautiful edition of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry there, which felt appropriate given the setting.

What strikes me about Livraria Lello, beyond its obvious beauty, is that it’s survived. Porto has been through economic upheavals, wars, and the digital disruption that threatened all bookstores. Livraria Lello adapted (the entry fee was controversial but probably saved the business) and endured. There’s something encouraging about that. Beauty and books and stubborn persistence, all under one roof.

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Chicago

If you’re an academic or a serious non-fiction reader, Seminary Co-op is the bookstore of your dreams. Located near the University of Chicago, it has what I consider the best curated non-fiction selection in North America. Philosophy, history, political theory, science, literary criticism: every section reflects a deep understanding of the field and a willingness to stock the important books rather than just the popular ones.

Seminary Co-op is organized as an actual cooperative, owned by its members (membership costs $30 and grants a share in the business). This structure gives it independence from the commercial pressures that shape chain store inventory. The buyers can stock books they believe in rather than books they think will sell the most copies. This results in a selection that’s challenging, intellectually serious, and occasionally surprising.

Its sister store, 57th Street Books (in the basement of a building a few blocks away), handles fiction, children’s books, and more general-interest titles with equal intelligence. Together, the two stores represent the best of what academic-adjacent bookstores can be: intellectually ambitious without being exclusionary, well-organized without being sterile, and deeply committed to the idea that books are tools for thinking.

Why Independent Bookstores Matter

I’ve described ten bookstores that I love, but I could have described a hundred. Every city I’ve visited has at least one independent bookshop worth knowing about, from the tiny single-room shops in small towns to the sprawling multi-floor stores in major cities. They differ in size, specialization, and personality, but they share something fundamental: they’re places where human judgment, rather than an algorithm, determines what you encounter.

Amazon’s recommendation engine is sophisticated, but it’s based on purchase history and collective patterns. It shows you what people like you have bought. An independent bookstore’s buyer, on the other hand, is a person with taste, knowledge, and the willingness to take risks on books that don’t have obvious commercial appeal. They’ll stock a debut novel because they believe in it, or a translated work because they think it deserves a wider audience, or a small press title because the writing is remarkable. They make these choices based on having read the books, or at least having read enough to form a judgment about them.

At ScrollWorks, our relationship with independent bookstores is personal. We know the buyers. We talk to them about our upcoming titles. We send them advance copies and ask for their honest reactions. When an indie bookseller decides to hand-sell one of our books, recommending it face-to-face to customers, it can make a real difference in the book’s trajectory. Some of our best-selling titles found their audience through exactly this kind of personal recommendation from booksellers who read the book and believed in it.

If you have an independent bookstore in your neighborhood, go in. Browse. Buy something. Talk to the staff. Let them recommend something you wouldn’t have found on your own. These places exist because people care about books enough to stake their livelihoods on selling them. They deserve our support, and they reward it with the kind of reading experiences that an algorithm will never replicate.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I read a short story last week that has been living in my head ever since. It was eight pages long. I read it in under fifteen minutes, standing in my kitchen while waiting for water to boil. When the kettle clicked off, I did not move. I stood there, rereading the last paragraph, feeling something I cannot quite name. Then I made my tea and went about my day. But the story stayed.

A novel has never done that to me in fifteen minutes. A novel needs hours. It builds slowly, earns its emotional payoffs through accumulation, asks for patience and commitment. I love novels. I read them constantly. But there is something a short story can do that a novel cannot, and I think we have collectively undervalued that something for decades.

Short story collections are the hardest books to sell. Every publisher knows this. Every agent knows this. Every bookseller knows this. Readers browse past them. Reviewers give them less attention. Bookstores shelve them in smaller quantities. The assumption is that readers want novels, that the short story is a lesser form, a stepping stone on the way to the “real” achievement of a novel. This assumption is wrong, and I want to make the case for why.

The Compression Argument

A short story operates under extreme constraints. The writer has, typically, between 2,000 and 10,000 words to create a world, populate it with characters, set something in motion, and arrive at an ending that feels both surprising and inevitable. There is no room for waste. Every sentence has to earn its place. Every detail has to do multiple jobs.

This compression produces a different kind of power than what a novel generates. A novel can afford to wander, to explore tangents, to develop a character slowly over 300 pages. A short story cannot. It has to be precise. And precision, when done well, can hit harder than expansion.

Think of it this way: a novel is a symphony. A short story is a song. Both are valid musical forms. Both require skill and artistry. But nobody would argue that a three-minute song is inherently less worthy than a forty-minute symphony. They accomplish different things. The economy of a great song, the way it distills an emotion into a melody and a handful of verses, is its own kind of achievement. The same is true of a great short story.

Raymond Carver understood this. His best stories strip away everything nonessential until what remains is pure nerve. A story like “Cathedral” uses the simplest language and the most ordinary setup (a man, his wife, her blind friend) to arrive at a moment of genuine transcendence. The whole story is maybe 5,000 words. It has changed how I think about empathy and connection. That is a lot of work for 5,000 words to do.

Why the Market Undervalues Them

If short stories are this good, why do they sell so poorly? The answer is partly structural and partly cultural.

Structurally, the publishing industry is organized around novels. Agents pitch novels. Editors acquire novels. Marketing teams build campaigns around novels. The entire apparatus is geared toward a form that is easy to describe in a single sentence (“A woman discovers her family’s secret” or “A detective investigates a disappearance”). A short story collection resists this kind of summary because it contains multiple stories, each with its own characters and concerns. How do you write jacket copy for twelve different stories? Awkwardly, usually.

Culturally, there is a persistent belief among many readers that short stories are unsatisfying. “I just get invested in the characters and then it’s over,” I hear frequently. This complaint reveals something interesting about reading expectations. We have been trained, by decades of novel-centric culture, to expect sustained immersion. We want to live inside a fictional world for days. A short story does not offer that. It offers something different: a concentrated encounter, a single vivid experience, a snapshot rather than a feature film.

The complaint also misunderstands what short stories are doing. The best short stories are not miniature novels that end too soon. They are their own thing. They are complete. The apparent abruptness of their endings is a feature, not a bug. When Alice Munro ends a story at a moment of ambiguity, she is not running out of space. She is trusting the reader to carry the story forward in their imagination. That trust is one of the most generous things a writer can offer.

The Masters and What They Teach Us

Let me talk about specific writers, because the case for short stories is best made through examples.

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, making her one of the very few writers to win primarily for short fiction. Her stories, set mostly in rural Ontario, are miracles of compression. A single Munro story can cover decades of a character’s life, moving back and forth in time with a fluidity that most novelists cannot achieve. She finds the moments where a life turns, the decisions and accidents that determine everything after, and she renders them with a clarity that feels almost forensic.

Flannery O’Connor wrote stories that are unlike anything else in American literature. Violent, funny, deeply strange, and animated by a moral seriousness that never announces itself directly. Her stories are thirty or forty pages long, and they contain more ideas per paragraph than most novels contain in their entirety.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote stories that are barely stories at all, by conventional standards. They are more like philosophical thought experiments disguised as fiction. But they have influenced more writers, across more genres and languages, than almost any other body of work in the twentieth century. Science fiction, literary fiction, detective fiction, postmodern fiction: Borges touched all of them, and he did it almost entirely in short form.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize and introduced millions of readers to the Indian-American immigrant experience. The collection is a masterclass in how short stories can explore identity and belonging with more nuance than a single novel, because each story approaches the theme from a different angle, with different characters, in different circumstances.

George Saunders has spent his career writing stories that are simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, often in the same paragraph. His collections, including Tenth of December and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, demonstrate that the short story is perfectly suited to satirizing contemporary American life. The form’s brevity allows Saunders to sustain a level of comic invention that would be exhausting at novel length.

These writers did not choose short stories because they could not write novels (several of them, in fact, also wrote novels). They chose short stories because the form was right for what they wanted to say. The form shaped the content, and the content justified the form.

Short Stories and Modern Life

Here is a practical argument for reading more short stories: they fit modern life better than novels do.

I do not mean this as an endorsement of our shortened attention spans, though that is part of the reality. I mean that the rhythms of contemporary life, with their constant interruptions and competing demands on our time, are more hospitable to short fiction than to long fiction. A novel requires sustained attention over multiple sittings. If you can only read for twenty minutes before bed, and your mind is scattered from a full day of work and parenting and screen time, a novel can feel like an obligation. A short story can feel like a gift.

Twenty minutes is enough to read a complete short story. Start to finish. Beginning, middle, end. You close the book having had a full literary experience, not a partial one. You do not need to remember where you left off or re-read the previous chapter to remind yourself what was happening. The story is self-contained. It respects your time.

This makes short story collections ideal for certain reading situations. Commutes. Lunch breaks. Waiting rooms. The gap between putting kids to bed and falling asleep yourself. These are all situations where starting a novel feels pointless (you will lose the thread) but reading a short story feels perfect (you can finish something).

I know parents of young children who stopped reading novels entirely for three or four years, not because they lost interest, but because they never had enough consecutive time to sustain the experience. Short story collections kept them reading. The form literally saved their relationship with literature during a period when novels were inaccessible.

The Art of the Collection

A good short story collection is more than a bunch of stories stapled together. It has a shape. The stories talk to each other. Themes recur and develop. Characters or settings may reappear. The order of the stories matters. A well-sequenced collection creates a cumulative effect that no individual story achieves on its own.

This is something publishers think about carefully, or should. When we work with authors at ScrollWorks, the sequencing of a short story collection gets as much editorial attention as the structure of a novel. Which story opens the collection? It needs to be strong enough to hook the reader but not so unusual that it misrepresents what follows. Which story closes it? That final story carries the emotional weight of everything before it. Getting this right is an art form in itself.

The linked short story collection, where all the stories share a setting, a set of characters, or a community, occupies an interesting middle ground between a collection and a novel. Books like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge use the short story form to build a novelistic world piece by piece, with each story adding a new facet. These books appeal to both novel readers and short story readers, and they demonstrate that the boundary between the two forms is more porous than we usually pretend.

What Short Stories Do That Novels Cannot

I have been making the case that short stories deserve equal respect. Let me go further and argue that there are specific things short stories do better than novels.

Short stories are better at capturing single moments of revelation. The epiphany, that sudden flash of understanding that changes how a character (and the reader) sees the world, is the natural territory of the short story. Joyce called these moments “epiphanies” and structured his collection Dubliners around them. A novel can build to a revelation, but a short story can be a revelation. The entire form converges on a single point of clarity.

Short stories are better at ambiguity. A novel, by virtue of its length, tends to resolve things. Plot threads get tied up. Questions get answered. Characters arrive somewhere. A short story can end in uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be the point. The reader is left holding an unresolved emotion, turning it over in their mind, unable to set it down. That lingering quality is one of the short story’s greatest strengths.

Short stories are better at exploring marginal perspectives. A novel needs a character who can sustain 300 pages of narrative. A short story can give voice to someone who exists on the margins, whose experience might not fill a novel but is vivid enough to fill twenty pages. This makes the short story a naturally democratic form. It can accommodate voices and lives that the novel market tends to overlook.

Short stories are better at formal experimentation. Trying an unconventional narrative structure, an unusual point of view, or an experimental style is less risky in a fifteen-page story than in a 300-page novel. This is why the short story has historically been the laboratory where literary innovation happens first. Stream of consciousness, metafiction, flash fiction, fragmented narratives: all of these were developed and refined in short stories before being applied to longer forms.

How to Read Short Stories

If you are not a regular short story reader, you might need to adjust your approach. Short stories reward a different kind of attention than novels do.

Read them slowly. This sounds counterintuitive given that they are short, but the compression of the form means that every paragraph carries more weight than a paragraph in a novel. If you read a short story at novel speed, you will miss things. Slow down. Let the sentences land.

Read them twice. The first time, read for the experience. Let the story wash over you. Then go back and read it again, paying attention to how it is built. Notice the structure. Notice what the writer chose to include and, more importantly, what they chose to leave out. The second reading often reveals a completely different story hiding inside the first one.

Do not rush from one story to the next. Give each story room to breathe. If you have just read a powerful story, sit with it for a while before moving on. The urge to consume the collection quickly works against the form. Short stories are meant to be savored individually, like courses in a meal, not crammed together like snacks.

Pay attention to endings. Short story endings are where the art shows most clearly. A great ending will recontextualize everything you have just read. It will make you want to go back to the beginning and start again with new eyes. If the ending seems abrupt or confusing, that might be intentional. Ask yourself: what is the writer trusting me to understand?

Where to Start

If you want to explore short fiction but do not know where to begin, here are some entry points organized by what you might already enjoy.

If you like literary fiction with emotional depth, start with Alice Munro’s Runaway or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Both are accessible, beautifully written, and deal with human relationships in ways that will feel immediately relevant.

If you like something stranger and more experimental, try George Saunders’ Tenth of December or Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble. These collections push the boundaries of what short fiction can do while remaining deeply engaging and often very funny.

If you like genre fiction, the short story has a rich tradition in science fiction (Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is extraordinary), horror (Shirley Jackson’s collected stories), and crime fiction (the short stories of Patricia Highsmith remain thrilling decades later).

If you want to explore international short fiction, try Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Yoko Ogawa (Japan), or Julio Cortazar (Argentina). Translation opens up a world of short fiction that you will not find on the English-language bestseller lists.

And if you want to support independent publishing while exploring new voices, our own catalog at ScrollWorks includes authors who bring the precision and emotional intensity of the short story tradition to their longer work. Still Waters by Elena Marsh has the compressed power of a short story collection spread across a novel-length narrative, and The Last Archive by Catherine Voss reads with the kind of sentence-level care that the best short fiction demands.

A Publisher’s Commitment

I want to end by saying something about what publishers owe the short story form. We have not done enough. The commercial pressures of the industry push us toward novels because novels sell more copies, generate more review attention, and fit more easily into existing marketing frameworks. Short story collections are published, yes, but often with lower advances, smaller print runs, and less marketing support.

This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Short story collections do not sell well partly because they are not marketed well. They are not marketed well because they do not sell well. Breaking this cycle requires publishers to invest in the form with the same commitment they bring to novels. That means competitive advances for story collections, real marketing budgets, thoughtful cover design that makes collections look as appealing as novels on the shelf, and editorial engagement that respects the specific demands of the form.

At ScrollWorks, we are working to do better on this front. We believe the short story is one of the most powerful tools in literature’s kit, and we want to publish and promote it accordingly. The readers are out there. They just need to be reminded that a great short story can do in fifteen minutes what some novels take weeks to accomplish. That is not a limitation. That is a superpower.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team champions literary fiction in all its forms. Visit our catalog to find writing that respects your time and rewards your attention.

People sometimes imagine that publishing a book goes something like this: a writer finishes a manuscript, sends it to a publisher, and a few weeks later it appears on shelves. The reality is that the journey from finished manuscript to finished book takes twelve to eighteen months, involves dozens of people, and consists of stages that most readers never think about.

We’re going to walk through the entire process, step by step, using our actual timeline and workflow. This is how it works at a small independent press like ScrollWorks. The process at a large publisher is broadly similar but involves more people, more meetings, and longer lead times at some stages. The fundamentals are the same.

Stage one: acquisition (month one)

Before the process begins, we have to decide to publish the book. This decision, described in more detail in our earlier post about editorial selection, involves reading the manuscript, discussing it as a team, and making an offer to the author or their agent.

The offer includes an advance against royalties, the royalty rate, the planned format (hardcover, paperback, or both), the rights we’re acquiring (North American English, world English, or world rights), and a tentative publication date. These terms are negotiated, sometimes quickly and sometimes over weeks, depending on the complexity of the deal and whether other publishers are also interested.

Once the author accepts our offer, we sign a contract. Publishing contracts are dense, detailed documents that cover everything from royalty accounting to reversion of rights to the handling of subsidiary rights like audio and translation. A good literary agent earns their commission at this stage by negotiating terms that protect the author’s interests. Authors without agents should have the contract reviewed by a publishing attorney.

With the contract signed, the book is officially on our list. We assign it to an editor, slot it into a season on our publishing calendar, and start the long process of turning a manuscript into a book.

Stage two: developmental editing (months two through five)

Developmental editing is the most intensive and least visible part of the publishing process. It’s where the big-picture work happens: restructuring, cutting, expanding, rethinking.

The editor reads the manuscript carefully, usually twice, and prepares an editorial letter. This letter, which can run five to fifteen single-spaced pages, lays out the editor’s assessment of the manuscript’s strengths and weaknesses and proposes specific changes. It might address structural issues (the second act sags, the conclusion doesn’t pay off the setup), character problems (this character’s motivation is unclear, these two characters sound too similar), pacing concerns (this section is too long, this one moves too fast), and tonal questions (the humor in chapter seven feels out of place given the gravity of chapter eight).

The author takes the editorial letter and revises. This can take weeks or months, depending on the scope of the changes. Some manuscripts need one round of developmental revision. Others need three or four. Catherine Voss and her editor did four rounds on The Last Archive, each round addressing progressively finer issues as the big structural questions were resolved.

Developmental editing is a collaboration, not a dictation. The editor proposes; the author decides. A good editor knows the difference between a suggestion that serves the book and a suggestion that serves the editor’s taste. Not every editorial note is right, and a good author pushes back when they disagree. The best editorial relationships involve genuine creative tension: two smart people who both want the book to be as good as possible, occasionally disagreeing about what “good” means.

This stage is invisible to readers, but it’s where most of the real editorial value is created. A well-edited book doesn’t feel edited. It feels inevitable, as if the words couldn’t have been arranged any other way. That feeling of inevitability is the product of months of revision.

Stage three: line editing and copyediting (months five through seven)

Once the developmental revision is done and everyone agrees the manuscript is structurally sound, we move to line editing. This is sentence-level work: tightening prose, clarifying ambiguities, improving transitions, cutting redundancies. A line editor reads every sentence with the question: is this the best way to say this?

At ScrollWorks, line editing is usually done by the same editor who handled the developmental edit, because that person has the deepest understanding of the manuscript. At larger houses, it’s sometimes handed off to a different editor. Either approach can work, but we prefer continuity.

After line editing comes copyediting. The copyeditor is a different person entirely, and their role is distinct from the developmental or line editor’s. A copyeditor checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, and consistency. They ensure that a character described as having blue eyes in chapter three doesn’t have green eyes in chapter twelve. They verify facts. They flag potential legal issues (libel, copyright infringement). They enforce the publisher’s house style guide.

Good copyeditors are meticulous, detail-oriented professionals whose work is largely thankless. When they do their job well, nobody notices. When they miss something, everyone notices. A copyediting error in a published book (a misspelled name, an incorrect date, an inconsistency that slipped through) is a small failure that feels disproportionately large because it’s visible to every reader.

The copyedited manuscript goes back to the author for review. Authors can accept or reject (with explanation) any copyediting change. This is called the “author review” or “author pass,” and it’s the author’s last opportunity to make substantive changes to the text before the book moves into production.

Stage four: cover design (months four through eight)

Cover design typically runs in parallel with the editing process. We start thinking about the cover around month four, though the final design may not be approved until month eight or later.

The process begins with a design brief. The editor and the marketing team write a document that describes the book’s tone, audience, competitive titles, and any visual ideas they have. This brief goes to the designer, who may be in-house or freelance. At ScrollWorks, we work with a roster of freelance designers whose styles we know well. We try to match the designer to the book: some designers excel at typographic covers, others at illustration, others at photography-based designs.

The designer produces initial concepts, usually two to four options. These go to the editor, the publisher, and the marketing team for discussion. Often the author is consulted at this stage too. Cover meetings can be contentious. Everyone has opinions about covers, and not everyone’s opinions align. The editor might prefer the most literarily apt design; the marketing team might prefer the most commercially viable one. These aren’t always the same cover.

After a concept is selected, the designer refines it through several rounds of revision. Typography is adjusted. Colors are tweaked. The spine and back cover are designed. The jacket flap copy (the text on the inside flaps of a hardcover) is written, usually by the editor or a copywriter, and designed to fit.

The final cover has to work at full size on a bookstore table, at thumbnail size in an online listing, and in black-and-white in a newspaper review. These are different use cases that impose competing constraints. A design that looks gorgeous at full size might be illegible at thumbnail. A design that reads well in black-and-white might be boring in color. Good cover designers navigate these trade-offs skillfully.

The cover for Echoes of Iron went through six rounds of revision before everyone was satisfied. The final design works because it communicates the book’s historical weight while still feeling contemporary and accessible. Getting that balance right required patience and collaborative goodwill from the designer, the editor, and the author.

Stage five: interior design and typesetting (months seven through nine)

While the cover is being finalized, the interior of the book is designed and typeset. Interior design involves choosing the typeface, setting the margins, designing the chapter openers, and establishing the overall visual rhythm of the book.

These decisions may sound minor, but they have a real impact on the reading experience. A well-designed interior is invisible; you read the book without thinking about the design. A poorly designed interior is distracting: the font is too small, the margins are too narrow, the leading (the space between lines) is too tight. You don’t consciously notice these things, but they accumulate into a feeling of discomfort.

Typesetting is the process of flowing the text into the designed layout. This used to be done by hand with metal type. Now it’s done digitally, usually in Adobe InDesign, but the skill involved is still substantial. A good typesetter handles word spacing, line breaks, hyphenation, and page breaks with an attention to visual harmony that’s closer to craftsmanship than to data entry.

The typeset pages are output as a PDF, which is reviewed by both the publisher and the author. This review catches any issues that arose during the typesetting process: bad page breaks (a chapter that ends with a single line at the top of a page), widows and orphans (isolated lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph), and any remaining textual errors.

Stage six: proofreading (months nine through ten)

After the typeset pages are reviewed and corrected, they go to a proofreader for a final check. The proofreader reads the typeset PDF against the copyedited manuscript, looking for any errors introduced during typesetting, as well as any errors that survived the earlier rounds of editing.

Proofreading is the last line of defense. After this stage, the book goes to the printer, and any errors that remain will be printed in thousands of copies. The pressure is real, and good proofreaders are worth their weight in gold.

Despite multiple rounds of editing and proofreading, errors occasionally make it into published books. We’ve never published a completely error-free book, and neither has any other publisher we know of. The goal is not perfection (which is impossible in a 300-page document) but a level of accuracy that doesn’t distract or mislead the reader.

Stage seven: printing and binding (months ten through twelve)

The corrected typeset PDF and the final cover files are sent to the printer. We work with printers in the United States, though some publishers use overseas printers (particularly in China) for color-heavy books where the cost savings are substantial.

Before the full run is printed, the printer produces a proof copy (sometimes called a “blue line” or “advance copy” in older terminology, though now it’s usually a digital proof or a printed sample). We review this carefully, checking color reproduction on the cover, paper quality, binding, and trim. If everything looks right, we approve the proof and the full run proceeds.

Printing a typical hardcover run of 3,000 to 5,000 copies takes two to three weeks. The books are then shipped to our distributor’s warehouse, where they’re received, cataloged, and stored until orders come in.

The printing and binding process has its own vocabulary that most people outside publishing never encounter. Signatures (the folded sheets of paper that make up the book’s interior), smyth-sewing (the method of binding signatures together with thread), dust jackets (the removable paper cover on a hardback), and case stamping (the printing or foiling on the actual hardcover boards). These details vary by format and budget, but each contributes to the physical quality of the finished book.

Stage eight: advance copies and pre-publication marketing (months ten through thirteen)

While the full print run is being completed, advance copies are produced. These are early copies of the finished book, sent to reviewers, booksellers, and media contacts months before the official publication date.

Major review outlets (Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal) need copies three to four months before publication. If we miss their deadlines, we miss the reviews, and pre-publication reviews are one of the most important drivers of bookstore orders. This is why the production timeline is so rigid: a delay at any stage can cascade into missed review deadlines, which can mean fewer bookstore orders, which can mean lower sales.

Advance copies also go to booksellers at independent bookstores. These are the people who write shelf talkers, plan staff picks, and organize author events. Getting books into their hands early is one of the most effective marketing strategies for a small press.

During this pre-publication period, our publicist is pitching the book to media outlets, podcasts, newspapers, and online publications. The author may be doing interviews and writing essays tied to the book’s themes. Social media campaigns are launched. Pre-order links go live.

For Still Waters, Elena Marsh wrote three personal essays that were published in online magazines in the months before the book came out. Each essay was related to the book’s themes but stood on its own as a piece of writing. This kind of pre-publication content builds awareness and gives potential readers a taste of the author’s voice before they commit to buying the book.

Stage nine: publication and beyond (months thirteen through eighteen and onward)

Publication day is anticlimactic. By the time the official pub date arrives, the book has been in the hands of reviewers and booksellers for months. It’s been available for pre-order. The marketing campaign is already in full swing. The pub date is more of a symbolic milestone than a practical one, though it’s the date that bookstores use to determine when to display the book on their “new releases” tables.

In the first few weeks after publication, we’re watching sales data closely. How are bookstore orders? How are online sales? Which regions are strongest? Is the book selling better in hardcover or ebook? This data informs our decisions about whether to increase (or decrease) our marketing spend, whether to go back to press for a second printing, and how to position the book going forward.

Author events (readings, signings, festival appearances) typically happen in the first three months after publication. These are logistically complex and expensive to organize, but they’re valuable for building relationships with bookstores and creating local buzz.

The paperback edition, if there is one, usually comes out twelve months after the hardcover. This creates a second moment of visibility for the book and captures a different segment of the market: readers who prefer paperbacks, either for price or portability reasons.

Beyond the first year, the book enters what the industry calls the “backlist.” Backlist titles continue to sell, sometimes for years or decades, but at a slower pace and with minimal marketing support. A healthy backlist is one of the most valuable assets a publisher can have, because backlist sales require almost no incremental investment.

The people involved

Let me tally up the people who touch a single book during this process. The acquiring editor. The developmental editor (sometimes the same person). The line editor. The copyeditor. The proofreader. The cover designer. The interior designer. The typesetter. The publicist. The marketing coordinator. The sales team. The printer. The distributor’s warehouse staff. The bookstore buyer. The bookseller. And, of course, the author.

That’s at least fifteen to twenty people involved in bringing a single book to market. Each of them has skills and expertise that contribute to the quality of the finished product. When a reader picks up a book and it feels right (the cover is inviting, the text is error-free, the paper feels good, the prose is polished), that feeling is the product of all those people doing their jobs well.

When you buy a book, you’re not just paying for the author’s words. You’re paying for the entire team that made those words into an object you want to hold, and a reading experience you want to have. That team is usually invisible, which is both the goal and the injustice of good book-making.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial and production team. Questions about our publishing process? Visit our contact page.

I have a confession. Until about three years ago, I read almost exclusively literary fiction. If a book wasn’t written in the style I’d been trained to admire in my MFA program (lyrical prose, unreliable narrators, ambiguous endings), I mostly ignored it. Nonfiction was for the bus. Genre fiction was for other people. I was, to be blunt about it, a snob.

I’m not proud of this. I’m also not sure it was entirely my fault. The literary world I came up in had strong and mostly unspoken hierarchies about what counted as serious reading. These hierarchies shaped my reading habits in ways I didn’t examine until I had to.

What changed was a combination of things: working at a publishing house that publishes both fiction and nonfiction, a long illness that left me too tired for the kind of close reading literary fiction demands, and a friend who kept recommending books I would never have picked up on my own. The result was a gradual, sometimes reluctant expansion of my reading life that has made me a better editor, a better reader, and, I think, a more interesting person to talk to at parties.

This is my case for reading outside your comfort zone. Not as a moral imperative or a self-improvement project, but as a practical strategy for getting more out of books.

The comfort zone problem

Everyone has a reading comfort zone. It’s the set of genres, styles, and subjects you default to when you’re browsing a bookstore or scrolling through an online catalog. There’s nothing wrong with having one. Comfort zones exist because the human brain likes predictability. When you pick up a familiar kind of book, you know roughly what you’re getting, and that predictability is pleasurable.

The problem is that comfort zones shrink over time if you don’t actively work against the contraction. You start by reading broadly, maybe as a teenager or young adult when everything is new. Then you find what you like. Then you read more of what you like. Then algorithms start reinforcing your preferences. Then your friends, who tend to read similar things, reinforce them further. Before long, your reading life is a narrowing channel, and the books outside it become invisible to you.

This narrowing has consequences that go beyond missing individual books. It affects how you think. Reading within a single genre or style trains you to see the world through a single lens. Literary fiction trains you to notice interior states and linguistic texture. Mystery fiction trains you to notice patterns and inconsistencies. Science writing trains you to think in terms of evidence and mechanism. History trains you to think in terms of contingency and context. Each lens reveals things the others don’t. If you only have one lens, you’re only seeing part of what’s there.

The genre boundary is fake

One of the things I’ve come to believe strongly is that the boundaries between literary fiction and genre fiction, and between fiction and nonfiction, are much less meaningful than the publishing industry pretends.

These boundaries exist for commercial reasons. Bookstores need to organize their shelves. Publishers need to know which buyers to pitch to. Marketing needs to identify a target audience. Categories make the business of selling books more efficient. But they don’t describe anything fundamental about the books themselves.

Consider: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is shelved in literary fiction. It’s also a Western. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is literary fiction. It’s also science fiction. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is literary fiction. It’s also an alternate history. The categorization tells you more about the marketing strategy than about the book.

At ScrollWorks, our catalog spans categories deliberately. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss is literary fiction with elements of mystery. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield is historical fiction that reads like literary fiction. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo is nonfiction that reads with the narrative drive of a novel. Still Waters by Elena Marsh is memoir that has the structural elegance of a well-crafted novel.

These books resist easy categorization, and that’s part of what makes them interesting. They borrow tools and techniques across genre lines. They assume their readers are capable of following them wherever they go, rather than staying within the safe boundaries of a single category.

What happened when I started reading nonfiction

The first nonfiction book I read seriously, as opposed to skimming on the bus, was The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A friend had been recommending it for two years. I kept putting it off because it was a history of cancer, and why would I want to read 600 pages about cancer?

I picked it up during a week when I was sick and too fuzzy-headed for fiction. Within fifty pages, I was hooked. Not because the subject matter was pleasant, but because Mukherjee is a storyteller. He structures the history of cancer research as a narrative with characters, conflicts, reversals, and moments of genuine drama. The book uses every tool I associate with good fiction (vivid scenes, psychological complexity, narrative arc) in the service of a nonfiction subject.

This was a revelation. I’d been operating under the assumption that nonfiction was for information and fiction was for experience. That assumption was wrong. The best nonfiction provides both, and it does so using many of the same techniques that fiction uses.

After Mukherjee, I read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Then Rebecca Solnit’s essays. Then Ed Yong’s science writing. Each book expanded my sense of what prose could do. And, less expectedly, each book made me a better reader of fiction, because I was developing new ways of paying attention that transferred across genres.

What fiction readers can learn from nonfiction

If your reading is heavily weighted toward fiction, here’s what nonfiction can teach you.

It can teach you about structure. The best nonfiction writers are brilliant architects of information. They have to be, because their material doesn’t come pre-organized into a plot. They have to create a structure that makes complex information comprehensible and engaging. Reading how they do this will make you notice structural choices in fiction that you might otherwise take for granted.

It can teach you about the world. This is obvious, but it’s worth stating. Fiction creates worlds; nonfiction describes the one we live in. Both are valuable. But if you read only fiction, your understanding of how the world actually works is limited to what fiction writers (who are not always well-informed about practical matters) choose to include. Reading history, science, economics, or sociology gives you a denser, more textured understanding of the world that enriches your reading of fiction.

It can teach you about evidence. Good nonfiction argues. It makes claims and supports them. Reading nonfiction trains you to evaluate arguments, to notice when a claim is well-supported and when it isn’t. This skill transfers to fiction, where authors make implicit arguments about human nature, morality, and society. Being able to evaluate those arguments, rather than just absorbing them, makes you a more active and critical reader.

What nonfiction readers can learn from fiction

The exchange goes both ways.

Fiction teaches empathy in a way that nonfiction rarely does. When you read a novel, you inhabit another consciousness. You see the world through someone else’s eyes, feel their emotions, follow their reasoning. Psychologists have studied this effect and found that reading literary fiction improves people’s ability to understand others’ mental states. Nonfiction can describe the experience of being someone else. Fiction lets you live it, if only for a few hundred pages.

Fiction teaches you about ambiguity. The best fiction doesn’t resolve neatly. It leaves you with questions, with competing interpretations, with a sense that the world is more complicated than any single explanation can capture. Nonfiction, by its nature, tends toward resolution. It wants to explain, to clarify, to make things understood. Fiction is comfortable with not-understanding, with contradiction, with the irreducible messiness of human experience. Spending time in that space is good for you.

Fiction teaches you about language. The best fiction writers are among the most skilled users of the English language. They attend to rhythm, sound, connotation, and the precise weight of individual words in ways that most nonfiction writers don’t. (There are exceptions; Joan Didion and James Baldwin are nonfiction writers who attended to language as carefully as any novelist.) Reading good fiction attunes your ear to prose style, and that attunement enriches everything you read afterward.

Practical ways to expand your reading

If you’re persuaded that broadening your reading is worth doing, here are some strategies that worked for me.

Alternate. For every book in your comfort zone, read one outside it. If you just finished a literary novel, follow it with a work of popular science. If you just finished a business book, follow it with a short story collection. The alternation keeps you from falling entirely into either zone, and the contrast often makes both books more interesting.

Follow recommendations from people with different tastes. If everyone in your social circle reads the same kinds of books, seek out someone who doesn’t. A friend who reads military history. A colleague who reads romance novels. A family member who reads science fiction. Ask them for their single favorite book in their genre, and start there. The books people love most are usually the best entry points.

Let one book lead to another. This is my favorite method. When you read a nonfiction book that mentions a novel, read the novel. When you read a novel set in a historical period you know nothing about, read a history of that period. Let curiosity pull you across boundaries rather than forcing yourself to cross them on principle. The reading will feel more natural because it’s driven by genuine interest.

After reading Echoes of Iron, several readers told us they went and read the historical sources James Whitfield drew on. And readers of The Cartographer’s Dilemma have told us that David Okonkwo’s writing sent them to novels about exploration and colonialism that they never would have found otherwise. That chain reaction, one book leading to another across categories, is how the best reading lives are built.

Read short things in unfamiliar genres before committing to full-length books. If you’ve never read science fiction, start with a Ted Chiang story collection rather than a 900-page space opera. If you’ve never read memoir, start with a long essay by an author whose voice appeals to you. A short, excellent introduction to a genre is better than a long, mediocre one, because it shows you what the genre is capable of at its best.

Visit your local independent bookstore and ask for help. (I wrote a whole separate piece about why booksellers are so good at this.) Tell them you usually read X and want to try Y. They’ll have suggestions. Their suggestions will almost certainly be better than anything an algorithm would surface, because they’ll be tailored to you rather than to a statistical profile.

The risk of discomfort

I should acknowledge that reading outside your comfort zone is, by definition, uncomfortable. You’ll encounter styles that feel alien. You’ll read books that don’t work for you. You’ll start things you don’t finish. This is normal, and it’s not a failure. Not every book in an unfamiliar genre will be your thing. The point isn’t to love everything you read. It’s to give yourself the chance to discover things you love that you didn’t know existed.

When I first started reading popular science, I bounced off several books before finding the writers whose style clicked for me. The first mystery novel I tried felt formulaic and frustrating. The second was a revelation. The third was forgettable. That’s a normal pattern. Don’t judge a genre by its worst examples, and don’t give up after one bad experience.

There’s also the discomfort of encountering perspectives that challenge your own. This is different from genre discomfort, and it’s more valuable. Reading books by people whose experiences and worldviews are different from yours is uncomfortable because it forces you to confront the limits of your own perspective. This discomfort is productive. It’s the feeling of your mind expanding, which is not always a pleasant sensation in the moment but is reliably worthwhile in retrospect.

What this looks like on our list

One of the things we try to do at ScrollWorks is publish books that themselves cross boundaries, making it easier for readers to follow.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is a memoir, but its prose is so carefully crafted that fiction readers find it immediately congenial. If you’ve never read memoir, this is a gentle entry point because the writing operates in a register that literary fiction readers will recognize.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is nonfiction about science and culture, but it reads with the narrative momentum of a good novel. Several readers have told us it was the first nonfiction book they’d read in years, and that it changed their assumptions about what nonfiction could be.

Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive is literary fiction, but it engages with questions about knowledge and preservation that will appeal to readers of idea-driven nonfiction. If you usually read books about ideas and rarely read novels, this is a novel that will feel intellectually satisfying in the way you’re accustomed to.

We don’t publish these books because they’re genre-crossing. We publish them because they’re good. But the genre-crossing nature of our list is something we’re aware of and glad about, because we believe that the most interesting books are the ones that refuse to stay in their lane.

A last thought

Three years into my expanded reading life, I still read mostly literary fiction. That’s still my home base, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having one. The difference is that I now leave home regularly. I read science writing, history, memoir, the occasional thriller, and whatever my friends insist I try. My reading life is messier and less coherent than it used to be. It’s also richer.

I think the richness comes from the connections. When you read across categories, you start to see links that are invisible within a single genre. A novel about family secrets connects to a psychology book about intergenerational trauma, which connects to a history of immigration, which connects to a poetry collection about home and displacement. Each connection deepens your understanding of all the books in the chain.

Reading is not a competition and it’s not a performance. It’s a way of being alive, of paying attention to the world and the people in it. The wider your attention, the more you see. It’s that simple.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.

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

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

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

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

Year one was mostly terror

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

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

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

The distribution lesson

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

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

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

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

The hire that changed everything

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

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

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

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

The book that almost broke us

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

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

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

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

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

What we got right

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

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

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

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

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

What we got wrong

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

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

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

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

The surprises

Some things we genuinely didn’t see coming.

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

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

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

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

What we’d do differently

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

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

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

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

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

What the next ten years look like

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the people I work with in publishing don’t talk about money. Not in the personal sense, anyway. We talk about book pricing, advances, and royalty structures all day long, but when it comes to our own finances, there’s an awkward silence. As if caring about literature and caring about your bank account are somehow incompatible.

I used to share that squeamishness. Then, about five years ago, I realized I was thirty-eight years old with no retirement savings, no real understanding of how investing worked, and a vague hope that things would “work out.” That hope, I’ve come to believe, is not a financial strategy.

So I started reading. Not the flashy “get rich quick” stuff, and not the dense academic papers that assume you already know what a bond yield curve is. I read books that met me where I was: confused, a little embarrassed, and starting from close to zero.

Here are five that actually changed how I think about money. Not how I fantasize about money, or how I worry about money, but how I think about it, with something approaching clarity.

1. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

The Psychology of Money is the book I recommend to everyone who asks me where to start. Not because it’s the most comprehensive (it isn’t) or the most technical (definitely not), but because it reframes the entire conversation in a way that makes everything else easier to absorb.

Housel’s central insight is that financial success has less to do with how smart you are and more to do with how you behave. This sounds like a platitude until you read the specific, well-researched examples he uses to illustrate it. He tells the story of Ronald Read, a janitor and gas station attendant who died with $8 million in the bank because he saved consistently and invested patiently for decades. He contrasts this with stories of brilliant financiers who went broke because they couldn’t control their impulses.

What I took from this book was permission to be boring with money. Not clever, not sophisticated, not trying to time the market or pick winning stocks. Just boring. Save consistently. Invest in index funds. Don’t panic when the market drops. Wait. This is, according to Housel, what actually works for most people. The fact that it’s unglamorous is a feature, not a bug.

The writing is clean and unpretentious. Each chapter is a self-contained essay that you can read in fifteen minutes. It’s the kind of book you can hand to a friend who’s never thought seriously about money and watch them come back with a shifted perspective. I’ve done this at least six times.

One thing Housel does particularly well is acknowledge luck. A lot of financial writing implicitly assumes that outcomes are determined entirely by skill and discipline. Housel is honest about the role of chance, which makes his advice feel more trustworthy. He’s not pretending that everyone who follows his principles will get rich. He’s saying these principles improve your odds, and that’s the best anyone can honestly offer.

2. Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne

I’ll be upfront about this one: Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners is published by ScrollWorks, so I’m not a disinterested party. But I’m including it because it’s the book that finally made me understand cryptocurrency, after half a dozen failed attempts with other resources.

My previous attempts to understand Bitcoin followed a pattern. I’d read an article or watch a video, feel like I was grasping it, and then hit a wall of jargon (blockchain, hash rate, proof of work) that sent me back to confused. The technical explanations assumed knowledge I didn’t have, and the non-technical ones were so vague that they left me feeling like I still didn’t understand what Bitcoin actually is.

Alexander Hawthorne’s approach is different. He starts with the question that most Bitcoin explainers skip over: why does this thing exist in the first place? What problem is it trying to solve? Before getting into any technical details, he builds a clear picture of the monetary system that Bitcoin was designed as a response to. This context makes everything that follows more comprehensible, because you understand the why before you tackle the how.

The book is genuinely written for beginners. Hawthorne doesn’t assume you know what inflation really means (as opposed to the vague sense that “prices go up” that most of us operate with). He doesn’t assume you understand how banks work, or what the Federal Reserve does, or why any of it matters. He builds the foundation first, then constructs the Bitcoin explanation on top of it.

What I appreciate most is that Hawthorne isn’t a zealot. He doesn’t promise that Bitcoin will replace the dollar or make you rich. He presents it as one possible approach to certain financial problems, with honest discussion of the risks and uncertainties. After reading it, I felt informed enough to make my own decision about whether to invest, rather than being sold on someone else’s conviction. That’s the difference between education and evangelism, and Hawthorne stays on the right side of that line.

If you’ve been curious about Bitcoin but found every explanation either too technical or too breathless, this is the book to start with.

3. Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

Your Money or Your Life was first published in 1992 and has been updated several times since. It’s the oldest book on this list, and in some ways the most radical.

The core concept is what Robin and Dominguez call “life energy.” Every dollar you earn represents a certain amount of your finite time on earth. When you spend money, you’re spending life energy. This framework sounds simple, maybe even obvious, but when you actually apply it to your spending habits, it’s disorienting.

The book asks you to calculate your real hourly wage, not your nominal salary, but the actual amount you earn per hour when you factor in commuting time, work-related expenses, decompression time, and all the other hidden costs of employment. For most people, this number is significantly lower than they think. And once you know it, every purchase takes on a different weight. That $50 restaurant meal isn’t $50. It’s three hours of your life. Do you want it badly enough to trade three hours for it? Maybe. But at least you’re making the trade consciously.

The program the book lays out is demanding. It asks you to track every penny you spend for months, categorize your spending, and evaluate each category against your values. It’s tedious work, and I didn’t stick with every element of it. But the conceptual reframe, thinking about money as stored time rather than abstract currency, permanently changed how I make spending decisions.

The book’s weakness is that it was written in an era of relatively high interest rates, and some of the specific financial advice (particularly around bonds) is dated. The revised editions have addressed this somewhat, but the details of the investment strategy matter less than the philosophical framework. The framework is timeless, even if the specifics need updating.

4. The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins

The Simple Path to Wealth started as a series of letters JL Collins wrote to his daughter about money. That origin shows in the tone, which is warm, direct, and unpretentious. It reads like advice from a smart uncle who actually knows what he’s talking about.

Collins’s thesis is aggressively simple: invest in low-cost index funds, avoid debt, and let time do the work. He argues, persuasively, that most of what the financial industry sells you is unnecessary complexity designed to generate fees. You don’t need a financial advisor. You don’t need to pick stocks. You don’t need to understand options trading or technical analysis. You need one or two index funds and the discipline to contribute to them regularly.

This book made me angry in a productive way. Angry at the financial industry for making money seem more complicated than it is. Angry at myself for not starting earlier. And angry at the culture that treats financial literacy as something that should be acquired by osmosis rather than taught explicitly.

Collins is clear about his biases. He’s a Boglehead (a follower of Vanguard founder John Bogle’s philosophy of passive investing), and he doesn’t pretend to be neutral about it. His recommendation is specifically the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, and he makes his case for it with data and logic rather than just enthusiasm.

The chapters on the mathematics of wealth accumulation are the ones I’ve returned to most. Collins shows, with simple arithmetic, how compound returns work over decades. The numbers are not exciting on a year-to-year basis. But over twenty or thirty years, they’re extraordinary. His point is that getting rich slowly is actually getting rich, while trying to get rich quickly is usually just gambling.

I read this book four years ago, opened a Vanguard account within a week, and have been contributing to it monthly ever since. No other book on this list produced such immediate, concrete action. That’s worth something.

5. I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

I Will Teach You to Be Rich has a terrible title. It sounds like an infomercial. I almost didn’t read it because of the title, and I would have missed one of the most practical personal finance books I’ve encountered.

Sethi’s approach is different from the others on this list. Where Collins and Robin focus on frugality and cutting expenses, Sethi focuses on systems and automation. His argument is that willpower is unreliable, so your financial plan should not depend on it. Instead, set up automated systems that move money into savings and investments before you have a chance to spend it. Automate your bill payments. Automate your transfers. Make the right financial behavior the default, and let human laziness work in your favor for once.

The book is organized as a six-week program. Week one: set up your accounts. Week two: automate your savings. Week three: start investing. And so on. Each step is specific enough to actually follow. Sethi tells you which accounts to open, what to say when you call your bank to negotiate a lower interest rate, and how to set up the automatic transfers. This level of specificity is rare in personal finance books, and it’s what makes the book useful rather than just informative.

Sethi is also refreshingly honest about spending. Unlike some personal finance writers who treat every non-essential purchase as a moral failing, Sethi says: spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut ruthlessly on the things you don’t. If you love good coffee, buy the expensive coffee. If you don’t care about cars, drive a beater. The point is conscious choice, not universal deprivation.

The book’s tone might not work for everyone. Sethi is brash and occasionally cocky. His humor is the humor of a smart person who knows he’s smart. If that annoys you, you might bounce off the book even though the substance is sound. I found the tone entertaining, but I can see how others might not.

What I took from this book, more than any specific tactic, was the idea that managing money well shouldn’t require constant attention and discipline. It should require a few hours of setup followed by a system that runs itself. That idea alone was worth the $16 I paid for the paperback.

What these books have in common

Looking at this list as a whole, a few themes emerge.

First, all five books are accessible. None of them require a finance background to understand. They’re written for regular people who want to make better decisions about money, and they respect the reader enough to explain things clearly without dumbing them down.

Second, they all emphasize behavior over knowledge. Knowing the right thing to do with your money is relatively easy. Actually doing it is hard. Each of these books addresses the behavioral dimension of finance in its own way: Housel through stories, Robin through philosophical reframing, Collins through simplification, Sethi through automation, and Hawthorne through building genuine understanding of a complex new asset class.

Third, none of them promise quick results. This is the surest sign that a financial book is worth reading. Anything that promises to make you rich quickly is either a scam or a gamble. These books promise something more modest and more honest: a framework for making better decisions over time, with the understanding that “over time” means years and decades, not weeks and months.

Fourth, they’re all well-written. This matters to me, and I suspect it matters to you if you’re reading a publishing company’s blog. Financial writing doesn’t have to be dry. Housel writes with the clarity of a good journalist. Sethi writes with the energy of a good teacher. Robin writes with the conviction of someone who’s lived her philosophy. Good writing makes complex ideas stick, and sticking is what matters when you’re trying to change long-term behavior.

What I’d add to the reading list

Five books is an arbitrary number, and there are others I considered including.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel is the academic foundation for the index-investing approach that Collins advocates. It’s denser and more data-heavy, but if you want to understand why passive investing works, this is the primary source.

The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason is a short, parable-based book that’s been in print since 1926. Its advice is basic (save ten percent of everything you earn, make your money work for you), but the framing is memorable. It’s a good entry point for someone who has never thought about personal finance at all.

And if you’re interested in the broader economic context that shapes personal finance, David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma isn’t a finance book per se, but its exploration of how we map and mismap the world extends naturally to how we think about economic systems. The chapter on how data visualization shapes economic policy changed how I read financial news. It made me more skeptical of charts and graphs that present complex realities as simple stories, which is a useful skepticism to have when you’re making decisions about your own money.

The point of all this

I started reading about money because I was scared. Scared of not having enough, scared of not understanding how any of it worked, scared of being forty-five and still winging it. Five years later, I’m not scared anymore. I’m not rich, either. But I have a plan, I understand the plan, and I’m executing it consistently. That feels like enough.

If you’re in the place I was five years ago, confused and reluctant, start with one of these books. Any one of them. Don’t try to read all five at once (that would be ironic, given what we said about slow reading in our last post). Just pick the one that speaks to where you are right now, and give it your attention. The rest will follow.

Money isn’t the most interesting thing in the world. It isn’t the most important thing, either. But understanding it well enough to make good decisions about it frees up mental space for the things that are interesting and important. And for those of us who work in publishing, where the pay is modest and the love of the work has to carry some of the weight, that freedom matters more than most.

Written by Sarah Chen, Senior Editor at ScrollWorks Media.