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

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

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

The False Binary

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

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

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

What Cross-Genre Publishing Teaches Us

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

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

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

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

The Books Between Categories

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

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

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

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

How It Affects the Books We Choose

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

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

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

The Catalog as Conversation

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

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

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

The Business Case (Such As It Is)

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

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

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

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

What We’re Looking For, Regardless of Category

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

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

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

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

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I spent a morning last month talking with a public librarian in Portland who told me something that stuck with me. “Publishers think we are their competition,” she said. “We think we are their best customers.” Both sides have a point, and the fact that they cannot agree on something so basic tells you a lot about the state of this relationship.

Libraries and publishers need each other. This has always been true, but the digital era has strained the partnership in ways that neither side fully anticipated. Ebook lending policies, shrinking acquisition budgets, consolidation in the publishing industry, and the growing role of library systems as community hubs have all complicated what used to be a fairly straightforward transaction: publisher makes book, library buys book, patron reads book.

I want to look at this relationship honestly, from the perspective of a small independent publisher that works with libraries regularly and values them enormously, but also has to pay authors and keep the lights on. There are real tensions here. There are also real opportunities, and I think both sides are leaving value on the table by failing to communicate effectively.

The Ebook Licensing Mess

Let me start with the most contentious issue, because avoiding it would be dishonest. Ebook licensing for libraries is a disaster. The current system pleases almost nobody.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. When a library buys a physical book, it owns that copy. It can lend it as many times as it wants, for as long as the book holds together. First sale doctrine protects this. But ebooks do not work that way. Publishers license ebooks to libraries, and those licenses come with restrictions. Some expire after a set number of loans (typically 26). Some expire after a set time period (usually two years). Some cost two or three times what a consumer would pay for the same ebook.

From the library’s perspective, this is outrageous. They are paying premium prices for a product that disappears after a while, and they have to buy it again. Their budgets are already stretched thin. Many public libraries have seen their funding flatline or decline in real terms over the past decade. Spending $55 on a single ebook license that expires in two years means something else does not get purchased.

From the publisher’s perspective, the pricing reflects a genuine fear. A physical book can only be in one person’s hands at a time. An ebook, theoretically, could be in millions of hands simultaneously. If libraries could buy one copy and lend it unlimited times, why would anyone buy the ebook? Publishers worry that unlimited library lending would cannibalize retail sales, particularly in the first weeks after publication when most revenue is generated.

Both sides have legitimate concerns. The problem is that the current licensing models were designed by publishers without meaningful input from librarians, and they reflect publisher anxieties more than reader realities. The data on whether library lending actually reduces retail sales is mixed at best. Several studies, including one by OverDrive in partnership with publishers, have found that library borrowers are also heavy book buyers. They are not choosing between borrowing and buying. They are doing both.

What would a better system look like? I think it involves tiered pricing that accounts for library size and usage patterns, longer license terms, and genuine collaboration on data sharing so both sides can make decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. More on that later.

How Libraries Actually Sell Books

Here is something that publishers sometimes forget, or at least undervalue: libraries are discovery engines. For many readers, especially those who cannot afford to buy books regularly, the library is where they encounter new authors and new titles. A reader discovers a novelist through a library loan, falls in love with the writing, and then buys that author’s next book. Or buys a copy of the same book as a gift. Or recommends it to five friends who buy their own copies.

This discovery function is hard to quantify, which is why it gets undervalued. But think about it from a marketing standpoint. Libraries have staff who are, effectively, professional book recommenders. Librarians read widely, know their communities, and actively match books with readers. No algorithm does this as well as a good librarian. And they do it for free, from the publisher’s perspective.

I have seen this play out directly with our own titles at ScrollWorks Media. When Still Waters by Elena Marsh got picked up by several library systems in the Pacific Northwest, we saw a noticeable bump in retail sales in those same regions about two months later. Correlation is not causation, obviously. But the timing was suggestive, and it matched what librarians told us: people were borrowing the book, enjoying it, and then buying copies for themselves or others.

For midlist and debut authors, library support can make the difference between a book that finds an audience and one that vanishes without a trace. The big-name authors will sell regardless. But the books that need help, the ones by writers who do not yet have a built-in readership, benefit enormously from library circulation. Publishers who restrict library access to protect short-term revenue may be undermining long-term author development.

The Acquisition Budget Crisis

Library funding in the United States has been under pressure for years. According to the American Library Association, about 60% of public libraries reported flat or decreased operating budgets in recent years. Staff costs and facility maintenance eat up the majority of those budgets, leaving acquisition funds, the money used to buy books and other materials, as one of the few flexible line items.

This means collection development librarians are making increasingly difficult choices. Do they buy the new bestseller that twenty patrons have already requested, or do they take a chance on an unknown debut novelist? Do they renew an expensive ebook license or use that money for physical copies that will last longer? Do they prioritize adult fiction or children’s materials?

Publishers can help here, and some already do. Offering library-specific pricing that is closer to retail prices, providing longer lending windows, and creating bundling deals that let libraries get more for their acquisition dollars are all options. Independent publishers like us are generally more flexible on library pricing than the Big Five, partly because we understand that every library copy is a potential gateway to a paying reader.

We have also found that working directly with library wholesalers like Baker & Taylor and Ingram (rather than going through intermediaries) lets us offer better terms. The fewer hands the money passes through, the more of it reaches the people who make and buy books.

Programming and Partnership

Beyond lending, libraries have become community programming hubs in ways that publishers have been slow to appreciate. Author events, book clubs, reading challenges, writing workshops, literacy programs: libraries host all of these, and they represent enormous opportunities for publisher collaboration.

When a library invites an author to speak, it is not just hosting an event. It is creating a marketing moment for the publisher. The audience is pre-qualified; these are people who already read and who trust the library’s curatorial judgment. The conversion rate from “attended an author event at the library” to “bought a book” is remarkably high. I have heard estimates ranging from 30% to 60%, depending on the event and the author.

Yet many publishers do not have dedicated library marketing staff. They do not send advance copies to library systems for programming consideration. They do not coordinate with libraries on event scheduling or promotion. This is money and attention left on the ground.

At ScrollWorks, we have started building direct relationships with library systems in our key markets. When we publish a new title like The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo, we send copies to library programming coordinators along with a brief pitch for why the book would work well as a book club selection or author event. The response rate has been encouraging. Libraries want to partner with publishers. They just need publishers to meet them halfway.

Data Sharing (or the Lack Thereof)

One of the biggest missed opportunities in the library-publisher relationship is data sharing. Libraries collect enormous amounts of data about reading patterns: what gets borrowed, what gets waitlisted, what gets abandoned, which demographics favor which genres. This information would be extraordinarily valuable to publishers for acquisition decisions, marketing targeting, and print run planning.

But libraries are, rightly, protective of patron privacy. Librarian culture has a deep commitment to confidentiality that dates back decades, rooted in the very real history of government attempts to surveil reading habits. Many state laws explicitly protect library records from disclosure. This commitment is admirable and should not be compromised.

The challenge is finding ways to share aggregate, anonymized data that helps publishers without exposing individual patrons. This is technically feasible. A library system could report that a particular title was borrowed 340 times in six months, or that literary fiction borrowing in their system increased 12% year over year, without identifying any specific patron. Some library systems already share this kind of data through their annual reports, but the information is often delayed and not standardized in a way that publishers can easily use.

A standardized reporting framework, developed jointly by library and publisher associations, could change the game. If publishers could see, in near-real-time, how their titles were performing in library circulation, they could make better decisions about everything from marketing spend to reprint quantities. And libraries could use the data to demonstrate their value to funders and taxpayers, which helps with the budget problem I mentioned earlier.

The Consolidation Problem

The publishing industry has consolidated dramatically over the past two decades. The Big Five (soon to be Big Four, then possibly Big Three) control an increasingly large share of the market. This consolidation affects libraries in several ways, almost none of them positive.

Larger publishers have more negotiating leverage on licensing terms. They can set prices that libraries find punitive, and libraries have limited alternatives because they need those titles. When Macmillan implemented its controversial library ebook embargo in 2019 (limiting new ebook purchases to one copy per system for the first eight weeks), libraries pushed back hard, and eventually the policy was rescinded during the pandemic. But the episode revealed the power imbalance in the relationship.

Independent publishers, by contrast, tend to have more collaborative relationships with libraries. We are smaller, more flexible, and more willing to experiment with pricing and access models. When a library system tells us that a particular pricing structure does not work for them, we can adjust. We do not have layers of corporate bureaucracy between the conversation and the decision.

This is actually an argument for libraries to increase their investment in independent press titles. By diversifying their collections away from Big Five dominance, libraries can support a healthier publishing ecosystem while also offering their patrons a wider range of voices and perspectives. Some library systems have already started doing this, creating dedicated indie press collections or allocating a percentage of their acquisition budget specifically to independent publishers.

International Perspectives

It is worth noting that the library-publisher relationship works differently in other countries, and some of those models offer lessons for the U.S. market.

In several Scandinavian countries, authors receive payment every time their book is borrowed from a library, through a system called Public Lending Right (PLR). The payments come from government funds, not from library budgets, so they do not reduce acquisition capacity. This system aligns incentives beautifully: authors benefit from library circulation, libraries are not penalized for lending, and the government invests in literary culture. The U.K., Canada, and Australia have similar schemes.

The United States does not have a PLR system, and establishing one would require federal legislation and funding. But the concept is worth discussing because it addresses one of the core tensions: the fear that library lending reduces author income. If authors were compensated for library loans (even modestly), the argument for restrictive ebook licensing would lose much of its force.

In Germany, fixed book pricing laws (Buchpreisbindung) prevent discounting, which means libraries pay the same price as retail customers but are also guaranteed stable pricing. This system eliminates the adversarial pricing negotiation that characterizes the U.S. market and creates a more level playing field.

What Libraries Can Do Better

This is not a one-sided conversation. Libraries also have room to improve in how they work with publishers.

Communication is the biggest gap. Many publishers, especially smaller ones, have no idea how library acquisition decisions get made. The process is opaque. Who decides what gets purchased? What criteria do they use? How can a publisher get a title considered? For independent publishers without established distributor relationships, getting books into library systems can feel like shouting into a void.

Libraries could help by being more transparent about their acquisition processes and by creating clearer channels for publisher outreach. Some library systems have done this well, with dedicated pages on their websites explaining how publishers can submit titles for consideration. More should follow their lead.

Libraries could also do a better job of promoting the books they buy. It sounds basic, but a book sitting spine-out on a crowded shelf is essentially invisible. Face-out displays, staff picks, themed collections, and digital newsletters highlighting new acquisitions all help. They help patrons discover books, and they help publishers see a return on the library’s investment in their titles. When a library buys Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield and then buries it in the general fiction stacks, nobody wins.

What Publishers Can Do Better

Publishers need to start treating libraries as partners rather than as a necessary nuisance or, worse, as a threat to retail sales. Here are specific steps.

Ebook licensing terms need to improve. The current models are unsustainable for libraries and generate ill will that hurts publishers in the long run. A library system that feels exploited by a publisher’s licensing terms is not going to go out of its way to promote that publisher’s books.

Publisher catalogs and metadata need to be library-friendly. MARC records, which libraries use for cataloging, are often incomplete or inconsistent in what publishers provide. Making it easy for libraries to add your books to their systems is a basic courtesy that too many publishers neglect.

Author tours should include library stops. Not instead of bookstore events, but alongside them. The audiences are different and complementary. A bookstore event sells books that evening. A library event builds an audience that buys books for years.

Finally, publishers should actively advocate for library funding. When library budgets get cut, acquisition budgets get cut, and publishers lose customers. This is directly in our financial interest, yet the industry rarely mobilizes around library funding the way it mobilizes around, say, copyright legislation.

A Practical Proposal

I want to end with something concrete rather than just complaints and exhortations. Here is what I think a productive library-publisher partnership could look like in practice.

First, create regional library-publisher councils that meet quarterly. Include acquisition librarians, publisher marketing staff, and authors. Use these meetings to share data, coordinate programming, and address pricing concerns before they become adversarial.

Second, develop a shared ebook licensing framework with input from both sides. Base it on actual circulation data rather than worst-case publisher scenarios. Include provisions for small press titles that need library support to find their audience.

Third, create a national “Library Recommends” program, similar to how bookstores have staff picks. Library staff selections carry tremendous credibility with readers. Formalizing this into a recognized program with marketing support from publishers would benefit everyone.

Fourth, push for Public Lending Right legislation in the United States. This would require sustained lobbying from both library and publisher associations, but it would resolve the fundamental tension around library lending and author compensation.

None of this will happen quickly. But the alternative, continued mutual suspicion and incremental erosion of the relationship, benefits nobody. Readers lose access. Authors lose visibility. Publishers lose customers. Libraries lose relevance. We can do better, but only if we stop treating each other as adversaries and start building something together.

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team is committed to building strong library partnerships. If you are a librarian interested in our catalog, visit our books page or contact us directly.

Every year around December, our editorial team does an informal round-robin where each of us names the book we re-read that year. Not a new release. Not something we read for work. The book we returned to because we wanted to, because something in our year made us reach for it again. The choices say a lot about who we are and what we needed.

Re-reading is an underappreciated practice. We live in a culture obsessed with the new, with reading lists and TBR piles and the anxiety of falling behind on the latest releases. But there’s a different kind of value in going back. A book you’ve already read can surprise you. You’ve changed since the last time, and the book meets that changed version of you in unexpected places. Sentences that meant nothing at twenty-five suddenly hit hard at forty. Plot points that once felt slow now feel exactly right.

Here are the books our editors re-read this year, and why.

Sarah’s Pick: “Stoner” by John Williams

Sarah, our managing editor, picks this book almost every other year. I used to tease her about it. I don’t anymore, because she finally convinced me to read it, and now I understand.

“Stoner” is a novel about a quiet man who becomes a college English professor in Missouri. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. William Stoner grows up on a farm, discovers literature in college, becomes a teacher, has a difficult marriage, raises a daughter, has an affair, has a feud with a colleague, and dies. Nothing dramatic happens. There are no twists, no revelations, no moments of cinematic action.

And yet every time Sarah re-reads it, she cries. “It’s the most honest book about what it means to have a life,” she told me once. “Not a remarkable life. Just a life. The way most of us actually live.” She’s right. Williams writes about the accumulation of ordinary days with such precision and compassion that by the end, Stoner’s unremarkable existence feels as weighty and significant as any epic. The novel asks whether a quiet life, dedicated to work and learning and small moments of beauty, is enough. The answer it gives is complicated and deeply moving.

Sarah says she re-reads it when she needs to be reminded that paying attention to small things matters. As an editor who spends her days caring about commas and paragraph breaks and the exact right word in a sentence, I think she finds validation in Stoner’s quiet devotion to his work. Find it on Amazon.

Marcus’s Pick: “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

Marcus handles our non-fiction line, which makes his fiction pick interesting. Bulgakov’s wild, satirical novel about the Devil visiting Soviet Moscow is about as far from non-fiction as you can get. The book is chaotic in the best way, jumping between a retelling of Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Christ and the havoc the Devil and his entourage (including a giant cat who rides the Moscow tram system) wreak on Moscow’s literary establishment.

“I re-read it because nothing else feels like it,” Marcus said. “Every time I think I’ve figured out what the book is doing, it does something else. It’s funny and terrifying and sad all at the same time, sometimes in the same paragraph.” He’s on his sixth or seventh read-through and says he still finds passages he doesn’t remember, still catches references he missed before.

I think Marcus also responds to the book’s history. Bulgakov wrote it knowing it would never be published in his lifetime. He wrote it for the drawer, as the Russian expression goes. There’s something about the freedom of writing without any expectation of publication that comes through in the text. It’s unruly and personal and entirely itself. For someone who works in an industry where commercial considerations shape everything, that kind of pure artistic expression must be refreshing. Find it on Amazon.

Priya’s Pick: “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Priya edits our literary fiction, and her pick this year was “Beloved.” She’s read it at least ten times, she says, and she never approaches it casually. “I have to clear space for it,” she told me. “I can’t read it on the subway or in bits and pieces. I need a weekend where I can sit with it.”

Morrison’s novel about Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her dead daughter, is one of those books that operates on every level simultaneously. It works as a ghost story, as historical fiction, as a psychological portrait, as an act of witness. The language is dense and musical and demanding. Morrison does not make it easy for you. She expects you to work, to sit with confusion, to let images accumulate meaning over pages and chapters.

Priya says that what changes each time she reads it is what she notices about the secondary characters. “The first time, you’re so consumed by Sethe’s story that everyone else blurs. But Paul D, Denver, Baby Suggs, they’re all carrying their own impossible weight. Each re-read, I spend more time with someone different.” This year, she said, she was struck by Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing, the passage about loving your own flesh. She said it made her put the book down and sit in silence for a long time.

I asked Priya if she thought “Beloved” influenced her editorial work. She laughed. “Everything I edit, I’m measuring against Morrison, at least a little bit. It’s not fair to the authors. But it keeps my standards where they should be.” Find it on Amazon.

James’s Pick: “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

James is our production manager, and his pick always leans toward comedy. This year it was Toole’s posthumously published novel about Ignatius J. Reilly, one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Ignatius is a slothful, pompous, medieval-minded man living with his mother in New Orleans, railing against modernity while eating hot dogs and writing a barely comprehensible philosophical treatise on Big Chief tablets.

“I re-read it because it makes me laugh out loud on every page,” James said. “Actual, physical laughter. How many books do that?” He has a point. Genuine comedy is rare in literary fiction. Plenty of novels are “wry” or “witty” in a restrained, smile-inducing way. Very few are actually funny in the way that a great standup set is funny, where you find yourself making involuntary sounds of amusement. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is that kind of funny.

But James also appreciates the book’s sadness. Toole killed himself before it was published. His mother spent years trying to get it into print, eventually persuading the novelist Walker Percy to read it. The gap between the book’s exuberant comedy and its author’s despair gives it an extra dimension. “You can’t separate the book from that story,” James said. “The funniest book I’ve ever read was written by a man in profound pain. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but it means something.”

It’s worth noting that James’s taste for comedic writing has influenced our publishing program. He’s always advocating for books that are genuinely funny, arguing (correctly, I think) that the market underestimates how much readers want to laugh. Find it on Amazon.

My Pick: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m the one writing this, so I get to talk about my own pick last. This year I went back to Ishiguro’s novel about Stevens, an English butler taking a road trip through the countryside while reflecting on his years of service at Darlington Hall.

I first read this book in college, and I remember being bored by it. A butler driving through England and thinking about silver polishing? I was twenty-one and wanted books that felt urgent and dramatic. I picked it up again in my thirties and it destroyed me. Stevens is a man who has sacrificed his entire emotional life in service to a concept of dignity and professionalism that may have been mistaken all along. He missed his chance at love. He served a master whose political activities were, it becomes clear, deeply misguided. And he cannot quite bring himself to admit any of this, even to himself.

What gets me every time is the gap between what Stevens says and what he means. Ishiguro writes the most devastating novel about regret and wasted life, and he does it through a narrator who will not, cannot, say directly what he feels. You have to read between every line. The restraint is what makes it so powerful. When Stevens finally breaks down at the end, on a bench by the sea at the end of the pier in Weymouth, the emotion is overwhelming precisely because it’s been held back for so long.

I re-read it this year because I was thinking about work-life balance, about how much of myself I put into this publishing house, about whether the sacrifices are worth it. Stevens is an extreme case, but his fundamental question, “Did I spend my life well?”, is universal. I don’t think the book answers the question. I think it makes you sit with it, which is more valuable than any answer.

When I finished it this time, I called my mother. She seemed surprised to hear from me on a Wednesday evening. I didn’t explain why I was calling. I just wanted to talk. Find it on Amazon.

Why Re-Reading Matters for What We Publish

These picks aren’t just personal indulgences. They shape our editorial sensibility. When Sarah re-reads “Stoner” and is moved by its commitment to the ordinary, she brings that appreciation to the manuscripts she evaluates. When Priya measures everything against Morrison, she’s maintaining a standard of linguistic ambition that filters into our literary fiction program. When Marcus is refreshed by Bulgakov’s anarchic creativity, he’s more likely to champion bold, unconventional proposals.

The books we re-read are, in a way, the foundation of the books we publish. They’re our touchstones, the works we return to when we need to remember why we got into this business in the first place. Publishing can be exhausting and discouraging. Sales figures disappoint. Books you believed in don’t find their audience. The market rewards things you find mediocre while ignoring things you find brilliant. In those moments, going back to a book you love is like recharging a battery.

I see this reflected in our own catalog. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss has that same quality of careful, accumulated detail that makes “Stoner” so effective. Still Waters by Elena Marsh shares some of Morrison’s willingness to let language do complex, multilayered work. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield has the historical sweep and emotional specificity that the best re-readable novels share. These connections aren’t always conscious, but they’re real.

The Case for Going Back

I want to make a broader argument for re-reading, beyond its influence on our editorial work. We live in an era of infinite content. There are more books published every year than any person could read in a lifetime. The pressure to keep up, to stay current, to have an opinion on the latest releases, can be relentless.

But there’s diminishing returns to always reading the new. Some of the new books you read this year, you’ll barely remember next year. They’ll blur together into a vague impression of “I read a lot this year.” The books you re-read, though, deepen. They become part of your mental furniture. You know them in a way you can never know a book you’ve read only once.

Vladimir Nabokov, who was famously opinionated about reading, once said that you can’t really read a book, only re-read it. His argument was that the first time through, you’re too busy following the plot, processing the basic mechanics of what’s happening, to really appreciate how the book works. Only on a second (or third, or fourth) reading do you start to see the architecture, the patterns, the quiet brilliance of specific sentences and structural choices.

I think he was overstating the case (Nabokov overstated most cases), but there’s truth in it. My experience of “The Remains of the Day” on second reading was so radically different from my first that they might as well have been different books. The first time, I read the surface. The second time, I read the depths. Both experiences were valid, but the second one was richer in ways the first couldn’t have prepared me for.

If you haven’t re-read a book in a while, I’d encourage you to try it. Pick something you loved years ago and go back. You might be disappointed; some books don’t hold up, and that’s useful information too. But you might also find that the book has grown, or rather, that you have, and the book was waiting for you to catch up.

What We’re Re-Reading Next Year

We’ve already started making predictions about next year’s picks, though of course the whole point is that you can’t plan these things. The book you need to re-read finds you, usually at the right moment.

Sarah says she might finally go back to “Middlemarch,” which she hasn’t touched since graduate school. Marcus is threatening to re-read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the original Spanish, which would be ambitious given that his Spanish is, by his own admission, “functional at best.” Priya is considering “Song of Solomon,” another Morrison, because she says she’s been circling back to Morrison’s earlier work lately. James won’t commit to anything, which is very on-brand for James.

As for me, I’ve been eyeing my copy of “The Great Gatsby.” I read it in high school, like everyone, and dismissed it as a book about rich people behaving badly. I suspect I’d read it very differently now. The way Fitzgerald writes about longing and loss and the distance between who we are and who we want to be, I think I’m ready for that in a way I wasn’t at seventeen.

Whatever we choose, the practice itself is what matters. Taking time to go back, to let a familiar book speak to your current self, to resist the tyranny of the new. That’s a reading habit worth cultivating. It reminds us that the best books aren’t consumed and discarded. They’re companions. They travel with us, and they change as we change, and they’re always there when we need them.

We’d love to hear what you re-read this year. Drop us a line, or tell us on social media. The conversations about old favorites are always the best ones.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Every editor I know has a book (or three, or seven) that rearranged something inside their head. Not books they admire from a professional distance, but books that grabbed them by the collar at exactly the right moment and said, “This is what writing can do.” We asked the ScrollWorks Media editorial team to share theirs. The answers surprised me, and I have worked with these people for years.

What follows are personal stories. These are not reviews or recommendations in the usual sense. They are accounts of collision, those moments when a particular book met a particular person at a particular time, and the person came out different. I think that is the most interesting thing about reading: it is never just about the book. It is about what you bring to it and what you are ready to receive.

Clara: “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson

Clara is our senior editor. She has worked on every title in our catalog, from The Last Archive to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners. She is precise, patient, and occasionally terrifying when she finds a dangling modifier. So when she told me that the book that changed her life was Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, I was not surprised by the choice, but I was surprised by the story around it.

“I read it when I was twenty-two and temping at an insurance company,” she told me. “I had an English degree that felt useless and no idea what to do with it. I picked up Housekeeping at a used bookstore because it cost a dollar fifty.”

What struck her was not the plot, which she described as almost beside the point, but the sentences. Robinson writes with a density and precision that rewards slow reading. Every sentence carries weight. For Clara, this was a revelation about what editorial attention could do.

“I started paying attention to sentences differently after that book,” she said. “Not just what they communicated, but how they were built. The engineering of them. I realized that editing was not about fixing mistakes. It was about understanding how language works at the level of individual words and helping a writer get closer to what they actually mean.”

She applied to her first publishing job within a month of finishing the novel. Twenty years later, she still rereads it every few years. “It gets better every time,” she said. “Or maybe I get better at reading it. I honestly cannot tell the difference.”

David: “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro

David handles our non-fiction titles and brought The Cartographer’s Dilemma into our catalog. He is the kind of editor who sends you a three-page email about a single chapter and somehow makes you grateful for it. His pick was Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, a book that runs over 1,200 pages and somehow feels too short.

“I read it the summer after college,” David told me. “I was living in New York, interning at a magazine that no longer exists, making no money. I found a copy at the Strand that was falling apart. The spine was cracked and someone had underlined passages in the first hundred pages before apparently giving up.”

What got him was the scope. Caro spent seven years on the book, conducting hundreds of interviews and reading thousands of documents. David had never considered that a single book could contain that much research, that much ambition, and still be readable.

“It showed me that non-fiction could be as compelling as any novel,” he said. “Caro was not just presenting facts. He was constructing a narrative about power, about cities, about how one person can reshape the physical world that millions of people live in. The writing itself is extraordinary, but what really got me was the commitment. The idea that you could spend years of your life trying to understand one thing, and that the effort would be worth it.”

David credits that book with his decision to move into non-fiction editing. “Every time I work with an author who has done serious research, I think about Caro. I think about what it means to really do the work. And I hold our books to that standard, even if they are shorter and the subjects are different.”

Maren: “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Maren is our newest editor, but she brought a perspective that has already influenced how we approach acquisitions. She came to publishing from academia and still has the scholar’s instinct for close reading. Her pick was Beloved, which she first encountered in a college seminar.

“My professor assigned it without any warning about what it was,” Maren said. “I think that was deliberate. She wanted us to come to it without preconceptions. I read the first fifty pages in my dorm room and then sat there for a long time trying to understand what had just happened to me.”

Morrison’s novel does something that Maren had not previously believed fiction could do. It makes history physical. The past in that book is not a memory or a lesson. It is a presence, something that occupies space and demands acknowledgment. For Maren, this reframed her entire understanding of what stories are for.

“I had been studying literature like it was a puzzle to solve,” she said. “Morrison showed me it was something else entirely. A novel could be an act of witness. It could hold pain and beauty in the same sentence and not resolve the tension between them. After that, I could not go back to reading as an academic exercise. I needed to be part of making books happen.”

Maren’s influence is visible in our recent acquisitions. She championed Still Waters by Elena Marsh, a book that shares Morrison’s interest in how the past lives inside the present. “I am not comparing anyone to Morrison,” Maren was quick to add. “But I look for that quality. That willingness to sit with difficult material and trust the reader to sit with it too.”

James: “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel”

James is our copy editor, and he is the person in our office most likely to have an opinion about the Oxford comma. (He is against it, which starts arguments roughly once a month.) His pick surprised everyone: Isaac Babel, the Russian-Jewish writer who produced some of the most compressed, violent, and beautiful short fiction of the twentieth century.

“I found Babel in my late twenties,” James said. “I had been reading a lot of American minimalism. Carver, Hemingway, that whole tradition. And then someone handed me Babel and I realized that what I thought was spare writing was actually quite wordy compared to what this man could do in three pages.”

Babel wrote about the Russian Civil War, about Jewish life in Odessa, about violence and beauty existing in the same breath. His sentences are short, precise, and often shocking in their juxtapositions. A description of a sunset might be followed by a description of a killing, and both would be rendered with the same careful attention.

“What Babel taught me about editing,” James said, “is that every word has to earn its place. Not just in the sense of cutting filler, which is the obvious lesson. But in the sense that word choice is moral. The words you use to describe something shape how the reader understands it. Babel chose his words with a precision that I find almost frightening. And that made me a better copy editor, because I started asking not just ‘Is this grammatically correct?’ but ‘Is this the right word?’”

James brought this sensibility to his work on Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, where the historical setting demanded careful attention to language. “You cannot have a character in the 1800s using a word that was not coined until 1950,” he said. “Babel made me obsessive about that kind of thing, and I am grateful for it.”

Rachel: “The Journalist and the Murderer” by Janet Malcolm

Rachel runs our marketing and publicity. She is not an editor in the traditional sense, but she reads more than anyone else in the office, and her understanding of how books find their audiences has shaped ScrollWorks in ways that are hard to overstate. Her pick was Janet Malcolm’s slim, devastating book about the ethics of journalism.

“I read it in college,” Rachel said, “and it ruined me for lazy non-fiction forever.” Malcolm’s argument, that the relationship between a journalist and their subject is inherently exploitative, applies equally well to publishing. The relationship between a publisher and an author involves trust, power, and the tension between commercial interests and artistic integrity.

“Malcolm made me think about honesty,” Rachel said. “Not just factual honesty, but structural honesty. The way you present information shapes what the reader believes. That is true in journalism, and it is true in book marketing. When I write jacket copy or a press release, I am making choices about how to frame a book. Malcolm made me take that responsibility seriously.”

Rachel also credits Malcolm with her belief that short books can have outsized impact. “It is under 200 pages. It says more about ethics and storytelling than most books three times its length. When I am evaluating a manuscript’s commercial potential, I never assume that longer is better. Sometimes the most powerful thing a book can do is make its point and stop.”

What These Choices Tell Us

I spent a long time thinking about these selections after the conversations. A few patterns emerged that I find interesting.

First, nobody picked a recent book. The most recent title in this group was published in 1990. I do not think this means recent books are worse. I think it means the books that shape you tend to arrive early, when you are still forming your ideas about what reading and writing can be. By the time you are a working professional, you have a framework. These are the books that built the framework.

Second, nobody picked a book from their own specialty. Clara, who edits fiction, picked a novel, but not one that represents the kind of fiction she typically acquires. David, our non-fiction editor, picked a biography that is far outside the scope of anything we would publish. The books that shaped them professionally were not templates for their work. They were expansions of their sense of what was possible.

Third, every story involved a specific physical copy. A dollar-fifty paperback. A falling-apart copy from the Strand. A book assigned without warning in a college seminar. This matters. The circumstances of reading, where you were, what your life was like, what you were struggling with, become part of the book’s meaning. I think publishers sometimes forget this. We think of books as products, but they are also events. They happen to people in particular moments, and the moment shapes the reading as much as the text does.

How This Shapes ScrollWorks

I asked these questions partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to understand something about our own editorial identity. Why does ScrollWorks feel the way it does? Why do we gravitate toward certain kinds of books and pass on others?

The answers are in these origin stories. Clara’s devotion to sentence-level craft shows up in every editorial letter she writes. David’s belief in thorough research is why our non-fiction titles, from The Cartographer’s Dilemma to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, are as rigorously fact-checked as we can make them. Maren’s insistence that fiction can bear witness influenced her editorial direction on Still Waters. James’s word-level precision keeps our prose honest. Rachel’s Malcolm-trained skepticism keeps our marketing honest too.

A publishing house is, in the end, the sum of the people who work there and the reading that made them who they are. Our catalog is the visible output. The invisible input is every book that every person on our team has ever loved, argued with, thrown across the room, or stayed up too late finishing.

I did not share my own origin-story book here, partly because this piece is already long and partly because the editor in me knows that ending with someone else’s voice is stronger than ending with my own. But if you are curious: ask me at a book event sometime. I will tell you about a battered copy of a novel I found in a train station in another country, in another decade, when I was someone else entirely. It is a good story. All the best reading stories are.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Every author I’ve worked with has had the same fear when they first get their editorial letter. They worry that the editor wants to rewrite their book. That the red ink is going to obliterate what they actually wrote and replace it with something the editor prefers. I understand this fear. You’ve spent months or years on a manuscript, and now someone you’ve never met is going to take it apart. It feels like handing over your diary and asking a stranger to “fix” it.

But here’s the thing that takes most first-time authors a while to understand: editing and rewriting are fundamentally different activities, and a good editor never crosses the line between them. At ScrollWorks Media, we’re very deliberate about this distinction, because we believe it’s the difference between helping an author realize their vision and replacing that vision with our own.

I want to walk through what this actually looks like in practice, because I think the editing process is poorly understood outside the industry. Writers hear horror stories about editors who gutted a manuscript, or they hear fairy tales about editors who “discovered” a masterpiece in a pile of slush. The reality is more mundane and, I think, more interesting than either extreme.

What Editing Actually Means

Let me start with definitions, because the word “editing” covers a lot of ground. At most publishing houses, including ours, the editing process has several distinct phases, each with its own purpose and its own relationship to the author’s original text.

Developmental editing comes first. This is the big-picture pass, where an editor reads the entire manuscript and responds to it as a whole. The developmental editor isn’t looking at individual sentences. They’re looking at structure, pacing, character arcs, thematic coherence, and the overall shape of the narrative. Their feedback typically arrives as a long letter (ours run anywhere from five to fifteen pages) that describes what’s working, what isn’t, and suggests possible directions for revision.

The word “suggests” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. A developmental editor proposes; the author disposes. When I write an editorial letter for a book like The Last Archive, I might say something like “the middle section loses momentum because we spend too long in the library scenes before the discovery.” I’m identifying a problem. I’m not prescribing a specific solution. Catherine Voss might agree with my diagnosis but solve it in a completely different way than I would have imagined. That’s how it should work.

Line editing comes next. This is closer to the sentence level, where an editor works through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph, looking at prose rhythm, word choice, clarity, and consistency of voice. A line editor might flag a passage where the language goes flat, or where a metaphor doesn’t quite land, or where the author has used the same sentence construction three times in a row. Again, the editor identifies the issue. The author fixes it in their own way.

Copyediting is the final editorial pass before the manuscript goes to production. The copyeditor checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, factual accuracy, internal consistency (did the character’s eyes change color between chapters three and seven?), and adherence to whatever style guide the publisher uses. This is the most rule-bound phase of editing, the one closest to what people imagine when they think of an editor with a red pen.

Each of these phases involves a different kind of attention, and they all share one common principle: the editor is working in service of the author’s book, not their own preferences.

Where the Line Gets Blurry

In theory, the distinction between editing and rewriting is clean. In practice, it gets complicated. Here’s an example that comes up more often than you’d think.

Suppose a novel has a subplot that isn’t working. The protagonist’s relationship with her sister is supposed to echo and complicate the main plot, but the sister’s character is underdeveloped and their scenes together feel perfunctory. As a developmental editor, I might identify this problem and suggest that the sister needs more dimension, that her scenes need to be doing more than they’re currently doing.

That’s editing. I’ve identified a weakness and pointed the author toward it.

But what if the author comes back and says “I agree the subplot isn’t working, but I don’t know how to fix it. Can you help?” This is where things get tricky. I might sketch out some possibilities: maybe the sister has her own secret that intersects with the main plot, maybe their shared history needs to be more specific, maybe one of their scenes should be cut and another expanded. Am I editing at this point, or am I starting to rewrite?

I’d argue I’m still editing, as long as I’m offering options rather than dictating outcomes. The moment I start writing actual scenes, composing dialogue, generating new prose to be inserted into the manuscript, I’ve crossed the line into rewriting. And at ScrollWorks, we don’t do that. We believe the words in a published book should be the author’s words, shaped and refined through collaboration, but fundamentally theirs.

Other publishers draw this line differently. Some editors are famous for their heavy hand, for reshaping manuscripts so dramatically that the published book is as much the editor’s creation as the author’s. I won’t name names, but this happens more often than the industry likes to admit, especially with debut novelists who are too intimidated to push back. It produces polished books, sometimes. But I think it does the author a disservice in the long run, because they never fully develop their own editorial instincts.

The Editor’s Job: Asking Better Questions

I once heard an editor describe her job as “asking the questions the author forgot to ask.” I’ve never heard a better summary. When I read a manuscript, my primary tool isn’t instruction. It’s inquiry. Why does this character make this choice? What does this scene accomplish that no other scene accomplishes? Is this the right moment for this revelation, or would it land harder earlier, or later?

These questions are designed to provoke the author into re-seeing their own work. The best editorial relationships I’ve had, including the one with James Whitfield during the development of Echoes of Iron, have been conversations. Genuine back-and-forth exchanges where the editor and the author are both thinking hard about the same problems, approaching them from different angles, and arriving at solutions neither would have found alone.

Whitfield is a good example because he came to us with a manuscript that was structurally ambitious. The chronology was non-linear, with multiple timelines that converged in the final act. My initial read was that two of the timelines were pulling their weight and the third was dragging. I said as much in my editorial letter. But I didn’t tell him to cut the third timeline. Instead, I asked: what is this timeline doing that the other two can’t do? What does the reader gain from it that they couldn’t gain another way?

Whitfield went away and thought about it for three weeks. When he came back, he’d found a way to weave the third timeline more tightly into the other two, so that it earned its place in the narrative. His solution was better than anything I would have suggested if I’d been prescriptive about it. That’s the power of editing as inquiry rather than instruction.

What Rewriting Looks Like (And Why We Avoid It)

If editing is asking questions, rewriting is providing answers that the author didn’t generate. And it takes many forms, some of them subtle.

The most obvious form is when an editor literally writes new material for the book: new paragraphs, new scenes, new dialogue. This happens more in non-fiction than in fiction, partly because non-fiction manuscripts sometimes arrive with gaps in their research or argumentation that the author hasn’t figured out how to fill. An editor who writes a bridging paragraph to connect two sections has crossed into rewriting. At ScrollWorks, we’d send the manuscript back to the author and say “this transition isn’t working; here’s what it needs to accomplish. You write it.”

A subtler form of rewriting happens at the sentence level. When a line editor starts rearranging an author’s sentences, substituting their preferred vocabulary for the author’s word choices, or smoothing out stylistic quirks that are actually part of the author’s voice, that’s rewriting disguised as editing. I’ve seen this happen to debut authors who have distinctive but unconventional prose styles. The editor “cleans up” the writing until it’s competent, professional, and indistinguishable from a hundred other competent, professional books.

This is a real loss, and I feel strongly about it. When we edited Elena Marsh’s Still Waters, our line editor had to exercise real discipline. Marsh writes in long, recursive sentences that circle back on themselves and gradually accumulate meaning. A less attentive editor might have broken those sentences up, “fixed” them according to standard rules of clarity and brevity. But those sentences are the book’s heartbeat. They mirror the way memory actually works, returning to the same moments again and again, each time with slightly more understanding. To “fix” them would have been to destroy what makes the book distinctive.

The lesson: an editor needs to understand what the author is trying to do before they can evaluate whether the author is doing it well. This requires reading with empathy and curiosity, entering the author’s world on its own terms rather than imposing your own aesthetic preferences.

How Authors Can Make the Most of the Editing Process

Since many of our readers are writers themselves, let me offer some practical advice on working with an editor. I’ve been on both sides of this relationship, and I’ve learned a few things about what makes it productive.

First, don’t respond to editorial feedback immediately. When you get your editorial letter, read it once, feel whatever you’re going to feel (anger, despair, defensiveness, these are all normal), and then put it away for at least a week. Come back to it when you’ve had time to process. You’ll be amazed at how differently the feedback reads when your ego isn’t in the driver’s seat.

Second, distinguish between feedback that makes you uncomfortable because it’s wrong and feedback that makes you uncomfortable because it’s right. These feel very similar in the moment. The former usually provokes a clear, articulable objection: “The editor missed the point of that scene” or “That suggestion would contradict the book’s central argument.” The latter provokes a vaguer, more visceral resistance. Something like “I don’t want to deal with that” or “But that would mean rewriting the whole second act.” When you feel that second kind of resistance, pay attention. It usually means the editor has found something real.

Third, push back when you disagree, but push back with reasons, not feelings. “I don’t like that suggestion” isn’t helpful to anyone. “I think the slow pacing in chapter five is intentional because it mirrors the protagonist’s depression, and speeding it up would undermine the reader’s experience of that mental state” is a substantive response that an editor can engage with. You might be right. You might be wrong. But at least the conversation is about the book and not about anyone’s ego.

Fourth, keep a separate document of editorial suggestions you’ve rejected and your reasons for rejecting them. This serves two purposes. It forces you to articulate your reasoning (which sometimes reveals that you don’t actually have a good reason), and it gives you a record you can refer back to if the same issue comes up in later rounds of editing.

The Ghost in the Machine: Ghostwriting and Its Discontents

I should address the elephant in the room. Ghostwriting exists. It’s common. And it’s the most extreme form of rewriting: someone else writes the entire book, and the “author” puts their name on it. Celebrity memoirs, many business books, and a surprising number of bestselling novels are ghostwritten to some degree.

I have opinions about this. ScrollWorks doesn’t work with ghostwriters, and we never will. I think there’s something fundamentally dishonest about putting one person’s name on another person’s words and presenting it as an authentic literary work. I understand the business logic. A famous person’s name sells books, and famous people don’t always have the skill or the time to write them. But I think it degrades the relationship between reader and writer. When you pick up a book, you’re entering into a kind of trust with the person whose name is on the cover. You’re trusting that they wrote it, that the ideas and the language and the perspective are genuinely theirs. Ghostwriting violates that trust.

This is a minority opinion in publishing, and I’m fine with that. Your mileage may vary. But it informs everything about how we approach editing at ScrollWorks. We edit books. We don’t rewrite them. The author’s name on the cover means the author wrote the book, with editorial support that sharpened and refined the work without replacing it.

When Editing Fails

I want to be honest about something: the editing process doesn’t always work. Sometimes an author and an editor are simply mismatched. Their sensibilities are too different, their visions for the book too divergent. When this happens, the author can feel bulldozed and the editor can feel ignored, and the book suffers.

I’ve had this experience exactly once at ScrollWorks, and it was painful. The author and I agreed on the big picture but couldn’t agree on anything at the sentence level. I kept flagging prose that felt overwrought, and the author kept insisting it was intentional heightened language. Neither of us was wrong, exactly. We just had incompatible ideas about what the book should sound like. In the end, we brought in a different editor whose aesthetic was closer to the author’s, and the book was better for it.

The lesson I took from that experience: the right editor for a book isn’t necessarily the most skilled editor available. It’s the editor who understands what the book is trying to be. Skill matters, obviously. But sympathy with the material matters more. An editor who doesn’t connect with a book’s sensibility will make it more competent but less alive, and competence without life is the most depressing thing in publishing.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma worked in part because his editor was genuinely passionate about the subject matter. They could push each other because they shared a foundation of mutual enthusiasm. That’s the ideal: an editorial relationship built on shared investment in the book’s success, where both parties feel ownership of the outcome even though only one name goes on the cover.

The Author Always Has the Last Word

I want to end with what I consider the most important principle in our editorial process: the author always has the last word. Always. If there’s a disagreement between an author and an editor at ScrollWorks, and neither party can persuade the other, the author wins. Full stop.

This isn’t because the author is always right. They’re not. Sometimes they make choices that I think weaken their book, and those choices make it into the published version, and I wince every time I see them. But the alternative, an editorial process where the publisher has final say over the contents of a book, leads to a kind of institutional voice that I find deeply unappealing. I’d rather publish books with imperfections that reflect the author’s genuine choices than polished books that reflect the publisher’s taste.

This philosophy isn’t universal in publishing. Plenty of editors and publishers would disagree with me, and some of them produce excellent books. But for us, at this press, with the kinds of books we publish, it’s the right approach. We believe that the best books come from a collaborative process where the editor’s intelligence serves the author’s vision. Editing makes books better. Rewriting makes them someone else’s.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I have a confession. There are at least forty books on my shelves right now that I have never read. Some have been sitting there for years, spines uncracked, pages still stiff with that new-book smell that faded long ago. A few of them I bought with tremendous excitement, convinced I would start reading that very evening. I did not. And yet, if you asked me whether I regret buying any of them, I would say no without hesitation.

This behavior has a name. The Japanese call it tsundoku, a word that combines “tsunde” (to stack things) with “oku” (to leave for a while). It describes the act of acquiring reading material and letting it pile up without reading it. The word dates back to the Meiji era, which means people have been doing this for well over a century. Probably much longer, in fact. As soon as books became affordable enough for ordinary people to buy them, ordinary people started buying more than they could read.

I want to explore why we do this. It goes deeper than simple consumerism or poor impulse control. When you buy a book you never read, something interesting is happening in your brain, something connected to identity, aspiration, and the peculiar way we humans relate to knowledge itself.

The Aspirational Self on Your Bookshelf

Every unread book on your shelf is a vote for the person you want to become. That copy of War and Peace you picked up in 2019? It says: I am the kind of person who reads Russian literature. The behavioral economics textbook gathering dust near the window? That belongs to Future You, the one who finally understands why markets behave irrationally.

Psychologists have a concept called “possible selves,” first proposed by Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius in the 1980s. We carry around mental images of who we could become, both hoped-for versions and feared versions. These possible selves influence our behavior in profound ways. When you buy a book about meditation, you are not really buying a book. You are purchasing a ticket to a calmer version of yourself. The transaction feels meaningful even if you never board the train.

This is why bookstores feel different from other retail spaces. Walking through one, you are surrounded by possible selves. The travel section whispers about the adventurer you could be. The cooking aisle suggests a version of you who makes homemade pasta on weeknights. The literary fiction shelves promise a more thoughtful, more cultured existence. Each book is a small, affordable piece of an identity upgrade.

Compare this to buying, say, running shoes. Those also represent an aspirational self (the fit, disciplined runner). But running shoes cost more, take up more space, and their unused status is harder to ignore. An unread book blends quietly into a shelf. It still looks like it belongs there. Nobody walking into your apartment will know whether you finished it.

The Comfort of Optionality

There is a second psychological force at work here, and it has to do with options. Behavioral economists talk about “option value,” the benefit we derive from having choices available even when we do not exercise them. An unread book has option value. It sits there, patiently offering itself up for any future evening when you might want it.

I think about this often when I look at my own shelves. The unread books are not dead weight. They are a curated buffer against boredom, against intellectual stagnation, against that particular restlessness that comes when you finish one book and have nothing lined up next. My tsundoku pile is a safety net. Knowing it exists brings a kind of comfort that has nothing to do with actually reading.

This connects to research on the “paradox of choice” by Barry Schwartz, though perhaps not in the way you would expect. Schwartz argued that too many choices can cause paralysis and dissatisfaction. And yes, sometimes I stare at my unread pile and feel overwhelmed about what to pick next. But the solution is never to have fewer books. The solution, for me at least, is to grab whichever one my hand lands on first and commit to fifty pages before deciding.

The option value explains why digital books have not eliminated tsundoku. If anything, e-readers have made it worse. When a Kindle book costs $2.99 on a flash sale, the barrier to purchase essentially disappears. I know people with four hundred unread ebooks. The pile is invisible, which removes even the mild social pressure of a visible stack, but the psychological satisfaction of acquisition remains intact.

The Collector’s Instinct

Some of what drives tsundoku is simply the human instinct to collect. We are gatherers by nature. For most of human history, accumulating resources meant survival. That instinct has not vanished just because we live in cities and order groceries online. It has redirected itself toward objects that carry meaning, and books carry more meaning per square inch than almost anything else you can own.

A book collection tells a story about its owner. I have watched people browse someone else’s bookshelves with the intensity of detectives examining a crime scene. “Oh, you have this one!” they say, pulling out a title and immediately forming opinions. A bookshelf is an autobiography written in other people’s words. It reveals your interests, your intellectual history, your guilty pleasures, your pretensions. The unread books are part of that narrative. They represent chapters of your life that have not happened yet.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this in The Black Swan. He described the library of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, which contained thirty thousand volumes. Eco had read only a fraction of them. A visitor might look at those unread books and think, “What a waste.” But Taleb argued the opposite. The unread books, what he called an “antilibrary,” were more valuable than the read ones. They represented the vast territory of what you do not know, a constant reminder of your own ignorance. An antilibrary keeps you humble. It keeps you curious.

I find this idea genuinely useful. When I look at the unread books on my shelves, I do not feel guilt (well, not much). I feel something closer to anticipation. Each one is a door I have not opened yet. The fact that some doors may stay closed forever does not diminish the pleasure of having them available.

The Ritual of Buying

Here is something that does not get discussed enough: the act of buying a book is itself an experience worth having. Walking into a bookstore, browsing the shelves, picking something up, reading the first paragraph, making a decision. That process activates reward circuits in the brain. Dopamine spikes not when you receive the reward, but when you anticipate it. The moment of purchase is the peak of anticipation. Reading the book is the reward, but by then the dopamine has already done its work.

Online book buying triggers similar circuits, though differently. The recommendation algorithms are specifically designed to produce that “yes, I want that” feeling. You see a cover, read a blurb, check the reviews, and within thirty seconds you have clicked “Buy Now.” The book will arrive tomorrow. You will put it on the shelf. You will feel good about this. Whether you ever read it is, neurologically speaking, almost beside the point.

This is not cynicism. I am not saying the reading does not matter. Of course it does. But I think we should be honest about the fact that buying books and reading books are two separate pleasures, each valid in its own way. The book industry somewhat depends on this gap. If people only bought books they actually read, publishers would sell roughly 40% fewer copies. I am making that number up, but I suspect the real figure is not far off.

Social Signaling and Intellectual Identity

We might as well talk about the elephant in the room. Some book buying is performative. People buy books to be seen buying them, or to be seen owning them. The rise of “bookstagram” and BookTok has intensified this. Beautiful stacks of color-coordinated hardcovers arranged on shelves or nightstands. Haul videos where people show off twenty new purchases. The books themselves are almost secondary to the image they project.

I do not want to be too harsh about this, because I think there is value in any culture that makes reading seem attractive and desirable. If a teenager buys a book because a BookTok creator made it look cool, and that teenager actually reads it and discovers a love of fiction, that is a good outcome. The social signaling served a purpose.

But there is a less cheerful side. The pressure to have read certain books, to have opinions about them, to keep up with what is new and talked about, can turn reading from a pleasure into an obligation. And when reading feels like an obligation, buying becomes a substitute. You cannot always find time to read the book, but you can always find time to buy it. The purchase becomes a stand-in for the experience, a way to participate in the conversation without doing the homework.

I see this in myself. When a book generates enormous buzz and everyone in my circles is discussing it, I feel compelled to buy it immediately. Sometimes I read it. Sometimes it joins the pile. The purchase alleviates the anxiety of being left out, even if the reading does not follow.

The Economics of Aspiration

Here is where it gets interesting from a business perspective. Publishers and booksellers have always understood, at least intuitively, that they are selling aspiration as much as content. Think about how books are marketed. A nonfiction title promises to change how you think, transform your habits, revolutionize your approach to work or relationships. The cover design, the endorsement quotes, the subtitle, all of it is engineered to activate the aspirational buyer.

We publish books at ScrollWorks Media, and I will be honest: we think about this. When we were developing Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, we knew the audience included people who wanted to understand cryptocurrency but felt intimidated by it. The book is a genuine, thorough guide. But the act of buying it also signals something: I am the kind of person who takes the initiative to learn about new financial systems. Some buyers will read every page. Some will read the first three chapters. Some will put it on the shelf and feel slightly smarter for owning it. All of those outcomes are fine with us, because in each case, the reader has taken a step toward engaging with an idea that matters.

The same applies to fiction, though the aspiration is different. When someone picks up The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, they are partly buying the experience of the story and partly buying membership in a certain kind of readership. Literary fiction, in particular, carries strong identity signals. Owning it says something. Reading it says something more. But owning it is not nothing.

Is Tsundoku Actually a Problem?

Some people feel genuine distress about their unread piles. Marie Kondo would probably suggest keeping only the books that “spark joy” and donating the rest. Minimalist lifestyle advocates might argue that unread books are clutter, representing deferred decisions rather than intentional choices. And for some people in some circumstances, they would be right. If your unread pile is causing you anxiety, if you feel buried under obligations every time you look at it, then yes, it might be worth thinning the herd.

But I think for most readers, tsundoku is benign. It might even be beneficial. Here is my reasoning.

First, the financial cost is usually modest. Books are one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available. A paperback costs less than a movie ticket. Even if you buy one book a month that you never read, you are spending maybe $15 on a small piece of aspirational pleasure. There are far more expensive and far less enriching habits.

Second, unread books sometimes get read. I have had books sit on my shelf for five years before the right moment arrived. A conversation, a recommendation, a change in my life circumstances, and suddenly the book I bought half a decade ago becomes exactly what I need. If I had followed minimalist advice and donated it, I would have missed that moment. The shelf life of an unread book is effectively infinite. It does not expire. It waits.

Third, as Taleb suggested, an antilibrary is intellectually healthy. It keeps you aware of how much you have yet to learn. In an age where algorithms feed us the same types of content over and over, a diverse pile of unread books is a form of resistance against intellectual narrowing.

The Guilt Problem

Still, the guilt is real for many people, and I do not want to dismiss it. Where does it come from? I think it stems from a cultural narrative that equates book ownership with a promise to read. When someone gives you a book, there is an implicit contract: you will read this. When you buy a book for yourself, you make that contract with yourself. Breaking it, even silently, feels like a small failure.

The solution, I think, is to rewrite the contract. Stop thinking of a book purchase as a commitment to read. Think of it as an investment in possibility. You are not promising to read this book. You are giving yourself the option to read it whenever, if ever, the time is right. The book is a seed. Some seeds germinate. Some do not. A gardener does not feel guilty about every seed that fails to sprout.

This reframing has genuinely helped me. I used to feel a low-grade anxiety about my unread pile, a sense that I was falling behind on some invisible reading schedule. Now I see the pile as a garden of possibilities. Some books I will read this year. Some I will read in ten years. Some I will never read, and they will eventually find their way to a friend or a used bookstore, where they will become someone else’s possibility.

Why the Publishing Industry Should Care

If you work in publishing, understanding tsundoku is not optional. The psychology of aspiration buying directly affects how you market books, design covers, write jacket copy, and price your titles.

Consider pricing. A book priced at $28 hardcover faces a higher aspiration threshold than one priced at $16 paperback. The $28 book needs to promise a bigger identity payoff to justify the expense. This is partly why hardcover nonfiction titles tend to have such ambitious subtitles (“How One Idea Changed Everything,” “The Hidden Forces That Shape Our World”). The subtitle is doing aspiration work, giving the potential buyer a bigger possible self to invest in.

Cover design matters enormously too. A beautiful cover turns a book into an object worth displaying, which adds to its value even if unread. I have seen readers choose between two editions of the same book based purely on which cover would look better on their shelf. This is not vanity. This is the collector’s instinct and social signaling working together, and smart publishers understand it.

At ScrollWorks, we put real thought into the physical presentation of our books. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield has a cover that holds its own on any shelf, and that matters. A book that looks good unread is a book that gets bought. A book that gets bought has a chance of getting read. And a book that gets read has a chance of changing someone’s mind or heart, which is, after all, the whole point.

The Digital Tsundoku

I mentioned e-readers earlier, but digital tsundoku deserves its own discussion because it operates differently from the physical version. When you accumulate unread ebooks, you lose the visual reminder. There is no stack growing taller on your nightstand. The books exist as a number on a screen, easy to ignore, easy to forget entirely.

This changes the psychology in interesting ways. Physical tsundoku has a self-limiting mechanism: you run out of shelf space. Digital tsundoku has no natural limit. I know one avid reader who has over 1,200 unread ebooks, accumulated over a decade of daily deal purchases. She estimates she will live long enough to read maybe 200 of them. She is fine with this.

The aspiration dynamic works the same way digitally, but the social signaling is diminished. Nobody can see your Kindle library. This means digital tsundoku is purer in some sense; it is about your relationship with yourself, your possible selves, without the performative layer. You buy that ebook about astrophysics for an audience of one: yourself.

There is also the phenomenon of free ebook hoarding. When a book is free, the only cost is the few seconds it takes to download. People accumulate hundreds of free ebooks they will never read. The option value is there, but the aspiration weight is almost zero. It costs nothing to become, hypothetically, a person who reads Romanian poetry.

What Our Unread Books Say About Us

I have come to believe that our unread books reveal as much about us as the ones we have finished. Maybe more. The read books tell you where someone has been. The unread books tell you where they want to go.

Look at your own shelf. What patterns do you see in the unread pile? For me, there is a cluster of books about history, particularly the kind of deeply researched narrative history that I love in theory but find requires more sustained attention than I often have after a long workday. There are several novels by authors I admire but have not gotten to yet. There is a book about woodworking that represents a hobby I have been meaning to start for three years.

Each of these is a thread connecting my present self to a possible future self. The history books connect to the version of me who is more patient, more willing to sit with complex ideas. The novels connect to the version of me who reads more widely, who is better at empathy. The woodworking book connects to the version of me who makes things with his hands. None of these future selves are guaranteed. But having the books on the shelf keeps them alive as possibilities.

This, I think, is the deepest reason we buy books we never read. We are not failing to follow through on a commitment. We are maintaining a relationship with our own potential. The unread book is a form of hope, a small, rectangular, affordable piece of hope that sits quietly on a shelf and waits for us to be ready.

So the next time someone looks at your shelves and says, “Have you actually read all of these?” you can smile and answer honestly. “No,” you can say. “And that is exactly the point.”

The ScrollWorks Media editorial team explores the culture of reading and books. Browse our full catalog to find your next unread treasure, or the one after that.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time staring at book covers. This is, technically, part of my job at ScrollWorks Media, but I’d probably do it anyway. There’s something almost hypnotic about the way a single image and a handful of words can make you reach for a book you know nothing about, or make you walk right past a story you’d actually love. Covers do that. They sort us before we even realize we’re being sorted.

The publishing industry has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover.” We say it like a proverb, but every publisher, every designer, every bookseller knows the truth: people absolutely judge books by their covers. They do it in under three seconds. And those three seconds can mean the difference between a bestseller and a book that quietly goes out of print.

So what separates the covers that work from the ones that don’t? I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I have opinions. Strong ones. Let me walk you through them.

The First Rule: Legibility at Thumbnail Size

Here’s a reality that too many designers ignore: most people will first encounter your cover as a tiny rectangle on a screen. Maybe it’s an Amazon listing. Maybe it’s a social media post. Maybe someone texted a friend a screenshot of their Kindle library. Whatever the case, your cover has to work at the size of a postage stamp.

This means the title needs to be readable. I know that sounds obvious, but pick any random page of new releases on Amazon and count how many covers have titles you literally cannot read at thumbnail size. Thin serif fonts in muted colors against busy backgrounds. Script lettering that dissolves into a smudge. I’ve seen covers where I genuinely could not determine the title without clicking through to the product page. That’s a failure. Full stop.

When we were working on the cover for The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, one of our early concepts had this gorgeous archival photograph with the title in a small, elegant typeface along the bottom. It looked beautiful as a full-size print. At thumbnail? The title vanished. We went back and made the type larger, bolder, and placed it against a cleaner background area. It lost some of that initial elegance, but it gained something more important: people could actually tell what the book was called.

Genre Signals: Speaking the Reader’s Language

Every genre has a visual vocabulary. Romance readers expect certain color palettes and compositional choices. Thriller readers have been trained to recognize bold sans-serif type, dark backgrounds, and high-contrast imagery. Literary fiction tends toward more restrained, artful compositions. Science fiction leans into certain kinds of illustration styles.

These aren’t arbitrary conventions. They’re a communication system that has developed over decades of bookselling. When a reader scans a shelf, whether physical or digital, genre signals help them quickly identify the kind of book they’re looking for. A cover that ignores these signals isn’t being brave or original. It’s being confusing.

I’ve heard designers say they want to “break the mold” or “challenge expectations.” I understand the impulse. But consider this: if you put a pastel watercolor landscape on the cover of a political thriller, you haven’t challenged anything. You’ve just ensured that thriller readers scroll past it and landscape painting enthusiasts pick it up by mistake, only to be disappointed. Nobody wins.

The trick is to work within genre expectations while still finding room for distinctiveness. Look at the best thriller covers from any given year. They all speak the same visual language, but the good ones find a way to say something slightly different within that language. Maybe it’s an unusual color choice that still reads as “thriller.” Maybe it’s an unexpected image that nonetheless signals danger or intrigue. The constraint is where the creativity happens.

Typography as the Unsung Hero

I’d argue that typography matters more than imagery on most book covers. Controversial opinion? Maybe. But think about how many iconic covers are, at their core, type-driven. The stark white covers of the early Penguin paperbacks. The bold minimalism of a lot of contemporary literary fiction. Even image-heavy covers live or die by their type treatment.

Bad typography can ruin a good image. I’ve seen covers with stunning photography or illustration completely undermined by a font choice that felt generic, or a type layout that competed with the image instead of complementing it. The author’s name crammed into a corner. The title set in a trendy font that will look dated in eighteen months.

Good typography, on the other hand, can elevate a simple concept into something memorable. Think about the covers that stick in your mind. Chances are, the type treatment is doing heavy lifting. The spacing between letters, the weight of the font, the position on the page, the relationship between the title and the author’s name. These decisions might seem minor, but they accumulate into an overall impression that either says “this is a professional, carefully made book” or “this was designed in a hurry by someone with access to a free font website.”

At ScrollWorks, we typically go through fifteen to twenty type explorations before settling on a direction. For Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, the final cover uses a typeface with a slightly weathered texture that hints at the historical setting without going full “old-timey” (a trap many historical fiction covers fall into). That typeface took weeks to find. It was worth every hour.

Color: Less Than You Think, More Than You Know

Color theory on book covers is one of those topics that can quickly become overly academic. I’ll spare you the lecture on complementary palettes and color psychology. Instead, here’s what I’ve observed after years of looking at what actually sells.

Restraint works. The covers that catch my eye tend to use two or three colors, not twelve. A limited palette creates clarity, and clarity creates impact. When everything is colorful, nothing stands out. When you commit to a specific color story, the whole composition becomes more focused and intentional.

There are also practical considerations that designers sometimes forget. Your cover will appear on websites with white backgrounds, on e-readers with gray backgrounds, in social media feeds surrounded by photos and ads. It needs to hold its own in all of these contexts. Covers with very light edges can disappear against white backgrounds. Covers with very dark palettes can look muddy on lower-quality screens.

One trend I’ve noticed in the past few years: the return of bold, saturated color. After a long period where muted tones dominated (especially in literary fiction), we’re seeing more covers willing to use red, orange, bright blue. I think this is partly a response to the digital shelf. In a sea of gentle pastels, a hit of strong color gets noticed.

The Covers That Fail (and Why)

Let me be specific about common failures. I see these constantly, and they frustrate me every time.

The “everything cover” tries to represent every element of the plot on the front. There’s a house and a woman and a dog and a sunset and mountains and a letter and maybe a key somewhere. The designer apparently read the entire manuscript and decided to include it all. The result is visual chaos. A good cover picks one idea, one mood, one focal point, and commits to it. You don’t need to summarize the book. You need to intrigue someone enough to read the description.

The “stock photo special” is easy to spot. It’s a cover built around a generic stock photograph with some text slapped on top. You’ve seen the same image on three other books because it’s from a popular stock library. The model on the cover looks like they’re posing for a shampoo ad. There’s no specific connection between the image and the content of the book. It just vaguely gestures at the genre.

The “DIY disaster” is increasingly common with the rise of self-publishing. I want to be careful here because I have genuine respect for self-published authors, and I understand that budgets are tight. But a poorly designed cover actively hurts your book. Readers have been trained to associate certain production values with quality. A cover that looks homemade, even if the book inside is excellent, creates an immediate credibility problem. If you’re self-publishing and can’t afford a professional designer, there are affordable cover design services and pre-made cover options that will serve you far better than trying to do it yourself in Canva.

The “trend chaser” is a cover that so perfectly mimics a current trend that it becomes indistinguishable from dozens of other books. A few years ago, every other thriller had a cover featuring a figure walking away from the viewer on a misty road. Before that, it was close-up faces with one eye obscured. These trends start with a few effective covers, get copied endlessly, and eventually become visual noise. By the time you copy a trend, it’s probably already fading.

What the Best Covers Share

The covers I admire most, the ones that make me want to pick up a book immediately, tend to share a few qualities.

They have a single strong concept. You can describe the cover in one sentence. “It’s a red door in a white wall.” “It’s a child’s hand reaching for something just out of frame.” “It’s nothing but the title in massive bold type.” Simplicity creates memorability.

They create an emotional response. The best covers make you feel something before you’ve read a single word of the book. Unease. Curiosity. Warmth. Sadness. That emotional hook is what converts a browser into a buyer. I remember the first time I saw the cover for Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” the UK edition with the cassette tape. It made me feel nostalgic and vaguely unsettled at the same time. I bought the book on the spot.

They respect the book’s content without being literal. A great cover captures the tone and spirit of a book without trying to illustrate a specific scene. When we designed the cover for Still Waters by Elena Marsh, we avoided depicting any specific moment from the story. Instead, we focused on evoking the atmosphere: the stillness, the sense of something hidden beneath a calm surface. The reader’s imagination fills in the rest, and that’s more powerful than any literal depiction could be.

They look intentional. Every element feels considered. Nothing looks accidental or arbitrary. The spacing is precise. The color choices are specific. The image, if there is one, feels selected rather than settled for. This quality of intentionality is hard to quantify, but you recognize it instantly. It’s the difference between a cover that says “someone cared about this” and one that says “someone needed to get this done by Friday.”

The Design Process: How It Actually Works

People outside the industry sometimes imagine that a book cover designer reads the manuscript, has a flash of inspiration, and produces a perfect cover. The reality is far messier and more iterative than that.

At most publishers, including ours, the process starts with a creative brief. The editor, sometimes in consultation with the author, provides the designer with information about the book’s content, tone, target audience, and comparable titles. “It’s a literary thriller set in 1970s Berlin, aimed at readers who liked X and Y, and we want it to feel sophisticated but accessible.” That kind of thing.

The designer then produces a round of initial concepts, usually three to five different directions. These might range from photographic to illustrative, minimal to complex, type-driven to image-driven. The point of this first round is to explore the space of possibilities, not to nail the final design.

Then comes the feedback. From the editor. From the publisher. From the sales team (who have strong opinions about what sells in specific markets). Sometimes from the author, though the degree of author involvement varies widely. The designer takes this feedback, refines one or two directions, and produces a second round. This process might go through three, four, sometimes six or more rounds before everyone agrees on a direction.

Then comes the finessing. Adjusting the tracking on the title. Finding exactly the right shade of blue. Tweaking the crop of the photograph. Designing the spine and back cover. Creating versions for different formats (hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook). Making sure everything works at every size.

A single book cover might represent forty to sixty hours of work. Sometimes more. It’s a craft that requires both artistic sensibility and commercial awareness, and the best designers manage to honor both without compromising either.

The Digital Shelf Changed Everything

I want to come back to the digital shelf because I don’t think we can talk about book cover design in 2026 without addressing it. The shift from physical browsing to online browsing has fundamentally changed what makes a cover effective.

In a physical bookstore, you can see a cover at full size. You can pick it up, feel the paper stock, notice the foil stamping or embossing. The cover exists as a physical object with texture and dimension. Subtle details reward close inspection.

Online, your cover is a rectangle of pixels, often very small, surrounded by other rectangles of pixels. The browsing experience is faster and more ruthless. People scroll quickly. The decision to click or keep scrolling happens almost unconsciously. In this environment, subtlety is a liability and boldness is an asset.

This has led to some trends that I have mixed feelings about. Covers have gotten simpler, which is often good. Type has gotten bigger, which is usually good. But there’s also been a homogenization, a smoothing out of rough edges and idiosyncratic choices in favor of clean, Instagram-friendly aesthetics. The covers that look great as square crops in a social media post are sometimes less interesting as full-size designs.

I think the best designers are finding ways to work within the constraints of the digital shelf without being completely defined by them. A cover can be bold and simple enough to work at thumbnail size while still having enough depth and detail to reward closer inspection. It takes more skill, but it’s possible.

Covers and Reader Expectations

Something that doesn’t get discussed enough: covers set expectations. If your cover promises one kind of book and the content delivers another, readers feel betrayed. I’ve seen this happen with misleading genre signals (a romance-style cover on a literary novel, for instance) and it almost always backfires in reviews.

The cover for The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo went through several iterations precisely because of this concern. Early concepts leaned heavily into adventure imagery, maps and compasses and that sort of thing. But the book, while it involves cartography, is really a meditative exploration of identity and belonging. A swashbuckling cover would have attracted the wrong readers and disappointed them. We landed on something quieter and more contemplative, which better represented what was actually between the covers.

This is where the sales team and the editorial team sometimes clash. Sales wants the cover that will generate the most clicks and purchases. Editorial wants the cover that most accurately represents the book. In the best cases, these are the same cover. In difficult cases, finding the overlap requires honest conversation about who the book is actually for and what they’re actually looking for.

Practical Advice for Authors

If you’re an author, here’s what I wish more writers understood about the cover process.

Trust your designer. Professional book cover designers know things about visual communication, market positioning, and printing technology that you probably don’t. Your instinct to put your favorite scene on the cover might not serve the book’s commercial interests. Be open to directions you didn’t expect.

Provide useful feedback. “I don’t like it” is not helpful. “The color palette feels too cold for a book about family warmth” is helpful. “The type feels too aggressive for the story’s gentle tone” is helpful. Try to articulate what isn’t working and why, rather than just reacting.

Look at the competition. Before your cover design process starts, spend time on Amazon looking at the covers of comparable books. Note what you respond to and what you don’t. Share this research with your designer. “I want something in the spirit of these five covers” is a useful starting point.

Don’t design by committee. If you have a trusted friend or partner whose taste you respect, sure, show them the options. But don’t post cover concepts in a Facebook group and let forty strangers vote. Group design feedback tends to converge on the safest, most inoffensive option, which is rarely the most effective one. Strong covers sometimes polarize people. That’s okay. It means they’re making an impression.

Remember that the cover isn’t for you. This is perhaps the hardest thing for authors to accept. The cover’s job is to sell the book to readers who haven’t read it yet. Your personal aesthetic preferences matter less than what will connect with your target audience. I’ve had authors who hated their covers and then watched those covers drive strong sales. The cover worked. That’s what matters.

Looking Forward

Cover design continues to evolve. AI image generation tools are entering the conversation, and I have complicated feelings about that. They can produce striking images quickly and cheaply, which is appealing for publishers watching budgets. But they also raise questions about originality, about the value of human creative decision-making, and about the livelihoods of illustrators and photographers whose work has been ingested by these systems without their consent.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve chosen to continue working with human designers and artists. That’s a decision rooted in both principle and pragmatism. We believe that the best covers come from a human being engaging deeply with a book’s content and making intentional creative choices. We also believe that readers increasingly care about the ethics of how the things they buy are made, and we want our production process to reflect that.

The book cover, for all its commercial function, remains an art form. It’s a tiny canvas with enormous constraints and even more enormous responsibilities. When it works, when a cover and a book come together in that perfect way, it feels like a small miracle. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the miracle never comes easily. It comes from skill, from taste, from patience, and from caring enough to go back and try again when the first fifteen attempts aren’t quite right.

Next time you pick up a book, take a moment to look at the cover. Really look at it. Notice the type. Notice the color. Notice what the image is doing and what it’s choosing not to do. There’s a whole world of intention packed into that small rectangle. Someone spent weeks making those choices, and those choices are part of why the book ended up in your hands.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

When we first sat down to discuss publishing a book about Bitcoin, half the room thought we were out of our minds. The other half thought we were late. Both groups had a point, honestly. Cryptocurrency publishing has been a minefield of hype, outdated information, and books that read like they were written by engineers for other engineers. We wanted something different. We wanted a book my mother could read and actually finish.

That book became Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne, and getting it from concept to its Amazon listing taught us more about publishing, audience, and courage than any project we had taken on before.

The Idea Nobody Wanted to Champion

I should back up. ScrollWorks Media has always leaned literary. Our catalog includes The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield, and Still Waters by Elena Marsh. We are comfortable with prose, character arcs, and the quiet drama of well-told stories. Non-fiction was newer territory for us, and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo had only recently pushed us into that space.

So when someone on our acquisitions team floated a cryptocurrency title, the initial reaction was skepticism. Crypto books have a shelf life measured in months. The regulatory environment shifts constantly. And frankly, the category has a reputation problem. Too many titles promise readers they will get rich. Too many are thinly disguised sales pitches for specific coins or platforms.

But Alexander Hawthorne’s proposal was different. He was not selling a dream. He was explaining a technology. His sample chapters read like a patient friend sitting across from you at a coffee shop, walking you through something complicated without ever making you feel stupid. That voice sold us.

Finding the Right Author

Alexander came to us through a referral from a financial journalist we had worked with on a different project. He had spent years in fintech, but what set him apart was his experience teaching. He had run workshops for small business owners, retirees, and college students. He knew the exact moment when people’s eyes glaze over during a Bitcoin explanation, and he knew how to pull them back.

We talked for three months before signing a contract. That might sound excessive, but we needed to be sure of a few things. First, that he could sustain the accessible tone for an entire book. Some writers are great in short form but lose their voice over 200 pages. Second, that he was willing to update the manuscript right up to publication. In crypto, a six-month-old explanation of fees or wallets can already be wrong. Third, that he would not try to sneak in investment advice. We were publishing an educational book, not a get-rich-quick guide.

He passed every test. His first full draft came in clean, clear, and genuinely funny in places. I remember reading his analogy comparing blockchain to a neighborhood where every house has a copy of the same ledger taped to the refrigerator. It was the first time I had read a blockchain explanation and actually smiled.

The Editorial Process Was Unlike Anything We Had Done

Editing fiction is hard. You are dealing with voice, pacing, character consistency, and the thousand invisible threads that hold a narrative together. But editing a technology book for a general audience introduced problems we had never faced.

For starters, our editorial team did not have deep crypto expertise. We brought in two technical reviewers, one from academia and one who ran a Bitcoin node out of his apartment in Portland. They disagreed on almost everything. The academic wanted more precision. The node operator wanted more practical advice. Balancing their feedback while keeping Alexander’s conversational voice intact was like conducting an orchestra where half the musicians wanted to play jazz and the other half wanted classical.

Then there was the accuracy problem. Alexander submitted his final draft in November. By January, two exchanges he had referenced had changed their fee structures, a regulatory ruling had shifted the tax implications he discussed, and one wallet app he recommended had been acquired by a company with a questionable reputation. We had to make updates at every stage, including one change during the final proofread that made our production manager visibly twitch.

We also wrestled with the question of how deep to go. The book is called “for Absolute Beginners” for a reason. But where exactly is the line between accessible and oversimplified? Alexander and our lead editor, Clara, went back and forth on this for weeks. There were chapters that got rewritten three times. The section on mining was particularly painful. Every version either explained too much or too little. The final version uses a metaphor about competitive puzzle-solving that Clara initially hated but eventually admitted was probably the best option.

Cover Design and the Problem of Credibility

We knew the cover had to walk a tightrope. Too techy, and it would scare off the exact audience we were targeting. Too slick, and it would look like another crypto-bro manifesto. Too conservative, and it would disappear on the shelf next to books with Bitcoin symbols and lightning bolts.

Our designer, Mika, went through fourteen concepts. Fourteen. I have never seen her do that for any other title. The problem kept coming back to semiotics. A Bitcoin symbol anywhere on the cover triggered associations with speculation and volatility. But leaving it off entirely confused potential readers about what the book was even about.

The final cover uses a simple, almost minimalist design with warm colors and clean typography. It communicates approachability. Several early reviewers mentioned that the cover was part of why they picked it up, which tells me Mika earned every late night she spent on those fourteen versions.

Marketing a Crypto Book Without the Hype

This was arguably our biggest challenge. The cryptocurrency space is noisy. Social media is full of promoters, skeptics, and people screaming about price movements. We did not want to participate in any of that. Our book was not about getting rich. It was about understanding a technology that, whether you like it or not, is becoming part of the financial infrastructure.

We decided early on that our marketing would target people who were curious but intimidated. Parents who had heard their kids talk about Bitcoin. Small business owners who kept seeing “We Accept Crypto” signs. Retirees whose financial advisors had started mentioning digital assets. These people did not want hype. They wanted clarity.

Our approach was educational content marketing. Alexander wrote guest posts for personal finance blogs, not crypto blogs. We pitched him to podcasts that covered technology for general audiences, not Bitcoin-specific shows. We ran a small campaign on social media that focused entirely on questions: “Do you know what a blockchain actually does?” and “Have you ever wanted to ask about Bitcoin but felt embarrassed?” The response to those question-based posts was significantly higher than anything promotional.

We also learned that bookstores were confused about where to shelve the book. Some put it in Technology. Others in Business. A few in Personal Finance. We started including suggested shelf placement in our communications with booksellers, which helped. I had never thought about shelf placement as a marketing decision before this project, but it matters enormously for discoverability.

Reader Feedback Surprised Us

Within the first month, we started getting emails. Not the usual polite “I enjoyed your book” notes that trickle in after a release. These were different. People were writing to tell us they finally understood something. A retired teacher in Ohio said she had tried three other Bitcoin books and given up on all of them. A small business owner in Texas said he used the book to have an informed conversation with a vendor who wanted to accept cryptocurrency. A college student said she bought it for her dad because he kept asking her about Bitcoin and she was tired of trying to explain it.

The most moving email came from a woman in her seventies who said her grandson had been trying to teach her about Bitcoin for two years. After reading Alexander’s book, she was the one explaining it to friends at her book club. That email got pinned to our office bulletin board.

We also heard from people who had specific questions that went beyond the book’s scope. That feedback is already shaping our thinking about follow-up projects. There is clearly a demand for accessible explanations of other financial technologies, from decentralized finance to digital payment systems. We are paying attention.

What We Got Wrong

I want to be honest about this because I think publishers too often present their projects as seamless successes. We made mistakes.

We underestimated the print timeline. Because we were making updates so late in the process, our print run was delayed by three weeks. That pushed us past a key review window, and we missed coverage in two publications that had been interested. In digital publishing, those three weeks might not matter much. In print, they can mean the difference between a review and silence.

We also should have built a glossary from the start rather than adding one late. Alexander’s early drafts defined terms in context, which worked beautifully for reading straight through. But readers who wanted to look something up later had to search for where a term was first explained. The glossary was a late addition, and while it works, it would have been better if it had been part of the structural plan from day one.

Our initial ebook formatting had issues with the diagrams. We had assumed our standard ebook production workflow would handle the illustrations, but the technical diagrams needed special attention on smaller screens. We had to do a second round of ebook formatting, which cost time and money we had not budgeted for.

And honestly, our first round of social media marketing was too cautious. We were so afraid of being associated with crypto hype that we undersold the book. It took us a few weeks to find the right tone: confident about the book’s quality and clear about its purpose, without resorting to the breathless language that dominates the space.

The Publishing Industry and Crypto: A Complicated Relationship

Publishing a cryptocurrency book taught us something broader about how the industry handles fast-moving topics. Traditional publishing cycles are slow. A book typically takes 12 to 18 months from signed contract to shelf. For a technology that changes quarterly, that timeline is a real problem.

Some publishers have responded by rushing crypto books to market, and the quality suffers. Others avoid the category entirely, ceding it to self-published titles that range from excellent to dangerously misleading. We tried to find a middle path: careful enough to be trustworthy, fast enough to be relevant. Whether we succeeded is for readers to decide, but I think the approach was sound.

I have also noticed that many publishers treat crypto content as a subcategory of either technology or finance, when it is really something new. It sits at the intersection of computer science, economics, political philosophy, and cultural change. Categorizing it too narrowly limits who discovers it. We tried to position Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners as a book for anyone who wants to understand the modern world a little better, not just for people interested in investing or technology.

What This Project Taught Us About Our Own Identity

Before this book, ScrollWorks Media was a literary publisher that happened to have one non-fiction title. After it, we are something more. Not a crypto publisher, certainly. But a house that is willing to follow good ideas into unexpected territory.

The experience of working with Alexander reinforced something we already believed but had not tested so directly: voice matters more than category. A well-written book is a well-written book, whether it is a novel about archival mysteries like The Last Archive or a plain-English guide to digital currency. The editorial skills that make fiction sing (clarity, rhythm, empathy for the reader) are the same skills that make non-fiction work.

We are also more comfortable now with the idea that a book can be both timely and lasting. Alexander wrote about Bitcoin’s fundamentals in a way that should remain relevant even as specific platforms and regulations change. The philosophical questions he raises about money, trust, and decentralization are not going away. If anything, they are becoming more pressing.

Looking Forward

We are already in conversations about Alexander’s next project. I cannot say much about it yet, but I can say it continues the same mission: making complex financial topics accessible without dumbing them down. We are also looking at other areas where there is a gap between expert knowledge and public understanding. Our experience with The Cartographer’s Dilemma showed us that readers are hungry for non-fiction that respects their intelligence while meeting them where they are.

If you are curious about the book that started this whole adventure, you can find Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners on Amazon. And if you have read it, we would genuinely love to hear what you think. The best feedback we have received has come directly from readers, and it has shaped how we think about every project that follows.

Publishing a cryptocurrency book was a gamble for a house like ours. I am glad we took it. Not because it was easy or because we did everything right, but because it expanded what we believe we can do. And in publishing, that kind of expansion is worth more than any single title’s sales numbers.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

I read about forty debut manuscripts a month. Most of them don’t make it past the first chapter, and that’s not because the writers lack talent. It’s because the manuscripts arrive without a clear sense of what they’re doing, or who they’re for, or why this particular story needs to exist right now. When I tell people what I do at ScrollWorks Media, the question I get most often is some version of “what are you looking for?” And the honest answer is complicated, because it changes depending on the day, the season, and what we’ve already committed to publishing. But there are patterns. After years of reading first-time submissions, I can point to specific qualities that make me stop skimming and start paying attention.

Let me be direct about something before I get into specifics. Publishing is subjective. What I’m about to describe reflects the editorial philosophy at ScrollWorks, which won’t match every publisher’s priorities. We’re a small press. We publish literary fiction, thoughtful non-fiction, and work that sits in the spaces between genre categories. If you’re writing military thrillers or paranormal romance, we’re probably not the right home for your book, and that’s fine. Know your market.

Voice Is the Thing We Can’t Teach You

The single most important quality in a debut manuscript is voice. I know that sounds vague, and I wish I had a more precise way to put it. Voice is the thing that makes a reader feel like they’re in the presence of a specific human intelligence. It’s the reason you can open a Toni Morrison novel to any page and know who wrote it. Or why you can distinguish Joan Didion from Janet Malcolm even when they’re covering similar subject matter.

For first-time authors, voice often gets buried under the weight of trying to sound “literary” or “professional.” I can’t tell you how many manuscripts I’ve read where the writer clearly has something interesting to say but has smothered it under layers of careful, competent, utterly lifeless prose. They’ve read the advice columns that say “show don’t tell” and “avoid adverbs,” and they’ve followed every rule so diligently that all the personality has been squeezed out.

I want to read something that sounds like a person wrote it. Not a person imitating their favorite author, but a person thinking on the page. When we acquired The Last Archive by Catherine Voss, what grabbed me first wasn’t the plot or the concept. It was the way Voss writes about memory: with this mixture of scientific precision and genuine bewilderment that felt completely her own. That’s voice. You can hear the writer behind the words.

How do you develop it? I think the honest answer is: you write a lot, and you stop trying to sound like someone else. Read widely, yes. Study the writers you admire. But then sit down and write the way you actually think. If you tend toward long, winding sentences, don’t fight that instinct just because some workshop leader told you to write short. If you’re funny, be funny. If you’re earnest, be earnest. The worst manuscripts I read are the ones where I can feel the writer performing a version of themselves they think a publisher wants to see.

A First Chapter That Does Real Work

I’ll be honest: I make most of my initial decisions in the first ten pages. That’s not fair to the writer who needs fifty pages to find their footing, but it’s the reality of reading forty manuscripts a month alongside everything else this job requires. Your opening chapter needs to accomplish several things at once, and doing them well is harder than it sounds.

First, it needs to establish a question. Not necessarily a mystery or a suspense hook, but a question that makes me curious enough to keep reading. In fiction, that might be a character in an unusual situation, or a familiar situation rendered in an unfamiliar way. In non-fiction, it might be an argument I haven’t encountered before, or a fresh angle on something I thought I understood. The question doesn’t have to be dramatic. Some of the best openings are quiet. But there has to be something unresolved that pulls me forward.

Second, the first chapter needs to demonstrate control. I want to see that the writer knows what they’re doing, even if I don’t fully understand where we’re headed yet. This shows up in the details they choose to include and, more importantly, in what they leave out. Amateur manuscripts tend to over-explain. They give me the character’s full backstory in chapter one, or they describe every object in a room, or they explain the political context of their world-building in dense expository paragraphs. Professional-feeling manuscripts trust the reader. They give me just enough to orient myself and then get on with the story.

Third, and this one is underrated: the first chapter needs to establish the emotional register of the book. If this is going to be a dark, heavy novel, I should feel that darkness in the opening. If it’s going to be wry and observational, I should get a sense of that voice immediately. Too many manuscripts open with a dramatic prologue that doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the book. That disconnect is jarring, and it makes me distrust the writer’s judgment.

Stakes That Feel Personal, Not Manufactured

Here’s something I see constantly in debut fiction: world-ending stakes. The fate of the kingdom, the survival of humanity, the apocalypse. And sure, those can work if you’re writing epic fantasy or science fiction. But even in genre work, the most effective stakes are usually personal. I care about what happens to a character I’ve come to know, not about abstract threats to abstract populations.

The manuscripts that stick with me are the ones where the stakes are specific and human. A woman trying to figure out if her marriage is worth saving. A historian discovering that the archive he’s built his career on has been fabricated. A teenager deciding whether to leave the only town she’s ever known. These are small stories in terms of scale, but they feel enormous because the writer has made me care about the people involved.

James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is a good example from our catalog. The “stakes” of that novel, in a plot summary sense, might sound modest. But Whitfield builds his characters with such patience and specificity that every decision they make carries real weight. That’s the kind of stakes I’m talking about. I should feel the cost of what a character stands to lose, and I should feel it in my chest, not just understand it intellectually.

For non-fiction, the equivalent is: why should I care about this subject? If you’re writing about the history of cement or the economics of the shrimp industry, you need to make me understand, on a gut level, why this matters. The best non-fiction writers do this by connecting their specific subject to broader questions about how we live, what we value, or what we’ve gotten wrong. David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma does exactly this: it takes a seemingly niche subject and reveals its surprising connections to questions of power, identity, and how we choose to represent the world.

Structural Awareness (Even If the Structure Is Unconventional)

I don’t need a manuscript to follow a conventional three-act structure. Some of the most interesting books we’ve published play with form, chronology, and perspective in ways that would make a screenwriting textbook author break out in hives. But I do need to see that the writer has thought about structure, that they’ve made deliberate choices about how information is revealed to the reader and when.

The difference between a manuscript that’s intentionally non-linear and one that’s just poorly organized is usually obvious by page thirty. An intentionally fragmented narrative has a logic to its disorder. You might not see the full pattern until later, but each fragment feels placed with care. A disorganized manuscript, on the other hand, just feels like the writer started typing and never went back to figure out how the pieces fit together.

For first-time authors, I’d actually recommend erring on the side of clarity. There’s nothing wrong with a clean, linear narrative if the voice and characters are strong. Experimental structure requires an even higher level of craft to pull off, because you’re asking the reader to do more work. If you’re going to demand that extra effort from your audience, the payoff needs to be substantial. Don’t experiment with form just to prove you can. Experiment because the story demands it.

One structural issue I see repeatedly in debut manuscripts: the saggy middle. The opening is tight and compelling, the ending is satisfying, but somewhere around page 120 the book loses its way. Scenes start to repeat the same emotional beats. Subplots multiply without advancing the main narrative. Characters have conversations that don’t move anything forward. This is where outlining, even loose outlining, can save you. You don’t need to know every scene before you start writing, but you should have a sense of what each section of the book is accomplishing.

Research That Disappears Into the Story

This applies to both fiction and non-fiction, and it’s one of the clearest markers of a mature writer versus a beginner. When you’ve done extensive research for a book, the temptation is to show it all. You spent three months learning about 18th-century shipbuilding, and by God, the reader is going to learn about it too. Every detail, every term, every fascinating fact you uncovered in those dusty library books.

The best writers resist this temptation. Their research informs the texture of the world, the accuracy of the details, the authenticity of the characters’ behavior. But it doesn’t announce itself. The reader feels grounded in a real, specific place without being lectured about it. I sometimes describe this as the “iceberg principle,” though I realize Hemingway said it first and better: the dignity of an iceberg is in the seven-eighths that’s underwater.

In non-fiction, the challenge is different but related. You obviously need to present your research; that’s the whole point. But the presentation matters enormously. I’ve read non-fiction manuscripts that were essentially annotated bibliographies: one source after another, strung together with transitional sentences, without any interpretive framework or authorial perspective to give the facts meaning. Good non-fiction writers have a point of view. They’ve thought about what the evidence means, they have opinions about it, and they’re willing to make arguments.

Alexander Hawthorne’s Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners is a recent example of research done right. Hawthorne clearly understands the technical details of cryptocurrency, but the book never reads like a textbook. He’s made conscious choices about what to explain, what to simplify, and what to skip entirely, all in service of his specific audience: people who are curious but intimidated by the subject.

A Query Letter That Gets Out of Its Own Way

I should say something about query letters, because they’re the first thing I see before I ever look at a manuscript page. Most query letters are bad in predictable ways. They’re either too long (I’ve received queries that were essentially three-page synopses) or too short (a single paragraph that tells me nothing). They compare the manuscript to bestsellers in ways that feel delusional (“my novel is the next Gone Girl meets The Great Gatsby”). Or they spend more time on the author’s biography than on the book itself.

Here’s what a good query letter does: it tells me the genre, the approximate word count, and what the book is about. That last part sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed how many queries I read where I finish and still can’t tell you what actually happens in the book. For fiction, give me the protagonist, their situation, the central conflict, and a hint of what makes your treatment of this material distinctive. For non-fiction, give me the subject, your angle, your qualifications to write about it, and a sense of your audience.

Keep it under a page. Write it in the same voice as your book. Don’t grovel (“I know you’re very busy and I’m so grateful for your time”) and don’t posture (“My novel will revolutionize the literary fiction market”). Just be direct, be clear, and let the work speak for itself.

Revision History Matters More Than You Think

I never ask first-time authors how many drafts they’ve done, but I can usually tell. A first or second draft has a particular energy: it’s alive and messy and full of potential, but it also tends to be undisciplined. Scenes that go on too long. Characters who haven’t quite come into focus. Prose that’s uneven, brilliant in places and clunky in others. A manuscript that’s been through six or seven rounds of revision has a different quality. The seams are less visible. The pacing feels intentional. Individual sentences have been fussed over.

I don’t expect perfection from a debut. We have editors here at ScrollWorks, and working with authors to sharpen their manuscripts is a significant part of what we do. But I do want to see evidence that the writer is willing to revise, that they’ve gone beyond their first instinct and pushed the material further. If a manuscript feels like a first draft, it tells me the writer might not have the patience for the editorial process that publishing requires.

One practical suggestion: before you submit, print your manuscript and read it on paper. I know that sounds old-fashioned, but it works. You’ll catch things on paper that you miss on screen: awkward rhythms, repeated words, sections where your attention drifts. If your own attention drifts while reading your own book, imagine what happens to a stranger reading it for the first time.

Honesty Over Cleverness

I want to end on something that might sound contradictory after all this craft talk. The quality I value most in a debut manuscript, above structure and voice and stakes and everything else, is honesty. I mean emotional honesty. I mean the willingness to write something that feels true, even if it’s uncomfortable or strange or doesn’t fit neatly into a genre category.

The manuscripts I remember years later are the ones where I felt the writer was telling me something real. Not necessarily autobiographical (fiction is fiction, after all), but emotionally authentic. Elena Marsh’s Still Waters hit me that way. There’s a fearlessness in that book, a willingness to sit with difficult emotions without rushing toward resolution, that felt genuinely brave. That kind of honesty can’t be faked, and it can’t be taught in a workshop.

I think first-time authors sometimes get so caught up in the mechanics of writing a publishable book that they forget why they wanted to write in the first place. They started with something burning, some question or obsession or memory that demanded to be put into words. And then, somewhere in the process of learning about craft and structure and market positioning, that original fire got dampened. The best debuts are the ones where you can still feel the heat.

What Won’t Make Me Read Past Page One

Since I’ve been talking about what works, let me be equally honest about what doesn’t. These aren’t aesthetic judgments. They’re practical realities of reading a high volume of submissions.

Manuscripts with excessive typos and formatting errors get set aside immediately. I’m not talking about the occasional misspelling. I’m talking about manuscripts that look like they were never proofread: inconsistent formatting, missing quotation marks, paragraphs that change font mid-sentence. This tells me the writer didn’t care enough to prepare the manuscript for a professional reader, and if they didn’t care about that, I have less confidence they’ll care about the revision process.

Manuscripts that open with weather get a hard look. I know this is an old complaint, but it persists because writers keep doing it. “The rain came down in sheets as Sarah stared out the window.” Unless the weather is genuinely doing something in the scene, in the way that the heat functions in Camus’s The Stranger, it’s usually just throat-clearing. Start with the character, the situation, the voice. Start with something only your book can offer.

Manuscripts that try to be everything at once exhaust me. If your novel is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a political thriller, a family saga, a meditation on climate change, and a love letter to the American Southwest, I’m going to wonder if you know what your book is about. Focus is a virtue. You can contain multitudes without trying to address every theme that interests you in a single manuscript.

And manuscripts that feel designed by committee, that read like the author was ticking boxes on a list of what the market wants, get a pass from me every time. I can smell calculation in prose, and it bores me. Write the book that only you can write. That’s always going to be more interesting than a book designed to fit a trend that will probably be over by the time your book comes out.

The Reality of the Slush Pile

I want to close with a note of genuine encouragement, because I realize this piece might read as discouraging. The reality is that we find books in the slush pile. Not often, but it happens, and when it does, it’s the best part of this job. There’s nothing quite like opening an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown writer and feeling that electric recognition: this person can write. This is something special.

Publishing is difficult to break into. The odds are long, rejection is constant, and the financial rewards are modest even when things go well. If you’re writing because you want to be famous or wealthy, I’d gently suggest considering another field. But if you’re writing because you have something to say and you believe in the strange, ancient power of putting words on a page and sending them out into the world, then keep going. Revise ruthlessly. Read everything. Be honest on the page. And send us your manuscript when it’s ready. We’re paying attention.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.

Every summer, our editorial team at ScrollWorks Media runs into the same problem: we read far more books than we can reasonably recommend, and narrowing the list down feels like choosing a favorite child. But this year, we decided to do something different. Instead of producing a tidy, impersonal list, we asked each of our editors to select the books they are most excited about this summer and to tell you, honestly and personally, why each one matters to them.

The result is a reading guide that reflects the genuine passions of the people who spend their days working with words. You will find books from our own catalog alongside titles from other publishers, because good editors read widely and recommend generously. Some of these picks are brand new, and some have been on our shelves for a while, waiting for the right season to be rediscovered. All of them are books we believe will reward your time and attention, whether you are reading on a beach, in a hammock, or on a crowded commuter train pretending to be somewhere else entirely.

Pour yourself something cold, find a comfortable spot, and let us introduce you to your summer reading stack.

Elena’s Pick: The Last Archive by Catherine Voss

Chosen by Elena Torres, Senior Editor, Literary Fiction

I have been editing literary fiction for twelve years, and I can count on one hand the number of manuscripts that made me cancel my evening plans because I could not stop reading. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss was one of them. When the manuscript arrived on my desk, I opened it expecting to read ten pages and make notes for the editorial meeting. Three hours later, I was still at my desk, the office empty around me, completely submerged in Voss’s meticulously constructed world.

The novel follows Maren Lund, a young Danish archivist assigned to catalog a deteriorating collection of Cold War-era documents in a fictional Eastern European state. What begins as a quiet, procedural story about the painstaking work of preservation gradually transforms into something far more dangerous. Maren discovers that certain files have been systematically altered, and the people responsible are still very much alive and very much interested in ensuring the truth stays buried.

What makes The Last Archive exceptional is not the plot, though it is genuinely gripping, but the way Voss writes about knowledge itself. The novel asks what it means to preserve a record of the past, who gets to decide which version of history survives, and what happens to a society that allows its archives to be corrupted. These are not abstract philosophical questions in Voss’s hands. They are life-and-death stakes for a character you come to care about deeply.

This is the kind of book that changes the way you look at libraries, at filing cabinets, at the quiet people who dedicate their careers to keeping records intact. It is also a cracking good thriller that will keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. If you like literary fiction that actually makes you think, this is it.

Marcus’s Pick: Echoes of Iron by David Okonkwo

Chosen by Marcus Chen, Editor, Historical Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction

I grew up in a family that told stories around the dinner table, long, winding narratives about relatives I had never met and places I had never been. That early exposure to oral storytelling shaped my entire career, and it is why Echoes of Iron by David Okonkwo hit me so hard. This is a novel that understands, in its bones, how stories travel across generations and how the stories we inherit shape the people we become.

Set in Nigeria during the final decades of British colonial rule and spanning forward to the present day, Echoes of Iron follows three generations of the Adeyemi family. The patriarch, Emeka, is a blacksmith whose forge becomes an unlikely meeting place for independence activists. His daughter, Ngozi, becomes a journalist in newly independent Lagos. And his grandson, Tunde, is a London-based academic wrestling with what it means to study his own family’s history from the comfortable distance of a university office.

Okonkwo writes with a rhythmic, almost musical prose style that reflects the oral traditions his characters inhabit. The forge scenes are extraordinary: you can feel the heat, smell the charcoal, hear the ringing of hammer on iron. But the novel is equally powerful in its quieter moments, particularly the scenes between Tunde and his aging mother, where the gap between lived experience and academic understanding becomes achingly real.

I edited this book, so I am admittedly biased, but I have also read it four times now, and each reading reveals new layers. If you loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, this is a book that belongs on the same shelf. It is a stunning achievement in historical fiction, and it deserves a wide readership this summer and beyond.

Priya’s Pick: Still Waters by Elena Marsh

Chosen by Priya Nair, Editor, Memoir and Personal Essays

I spend my professional life immersed in personal narratives, and the question I ask of every memoir that crosses my desk is simple: does this writer have the courage to be truly honest? Most do not. Most retreat behind polished prose and tidy resolutions that make the messy business of living look neater than it is. Elena Marsh, in Still Waters, does not retreat from anything.

Still Waters is a memoir about grief, but that description does not begin to capture what it actually does. After the sudden death of her husband during a family vacation at a lake house in Vermont, Marsh finds herself unable to leave the property. What was supposed to be a two-week stay becomes a year-long vigil, as she gradually transforms the house into a space where she can dismantle her grief and examine its components with the precision of a naturalist cataloging specimens.

Marsh writes about the natural world with the attentiveness of Annie Dillard and about emotional pain with the unflinching honesty of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. But her voice is entirely her own: wry, self-aware, occasionally very funny, and always deeply compassionate toward the person she was in those dark months. There is a passage about watching ice form on the lake in November that is one of the most beautiful things I have read in years, and I will not spoil it here except to say that it manages to be simultaneously about water, about time, and about the slow, almost imperceptible process of learning to live in a world that has fundamentally changed.

This is not a sad book, though it contains sadness. It is a brave book, a book about paying attention to the world when everything in you wants to look away. If you read one memoir this summer, make it this one.

James’s Pick: The Cartographer’s Dilemma by James Whitfield

Chosen by James Oduya, Editor, Science and Culture

I have a weakness for books that make you see familiar things in entirely new ways, and The Cartographer’s Dilemma by James Whitfield does exactly that. The next time you open a map on your phone, you will think about this book, and you will never look at navigation the same way again.

Whitfield, a geographer and historian of cartography, takes us on a sweeping journey through the history of mapmaking, from the earliest known maps scratched into Babylonian clay tablets to the satellite-powered digital maps that now guide our every movement. Along the way, he reveals the hidden assumptions, political agendas, and outright fabrications that have shaped every map ever drawn. Maps, he argues, are never neutral descriptions of physical space. They are arguments about what matters, who belongs, and how power is distributed across territory.

The book is full of fascinating stories. There is the tale of the phantom islands that appeared on European maps for centuries, some of them persisting into the twentieth century, despite the fact that no one had ever set foot on them. There is the account of how the Mercator projection, the map most of us grew up with, systematically distorts the size of countries near the equator, making Europe and North America appear far larger relative to Africa and South America than they actually are. And there is a gripping chapter about the Cold War cartographic arms race, when both superpowers poured resources into mapping each other’s territory with obsessive precision.

What elevates The Cartographer’s Dilemma above a simple history of maps is Whitfield’s ability to connect the past to the present. His chapters on digital mapping and GPS are genuinely alarming in places, exploring how the companies that control our navigational tools also control what we see and what we miss. If Google Maps decides a neighborhood does not warrant detailed coverage, that neighborhood effectively becomes invisible. Whitfield is not a technophobe, but he is a rigorous questioner, and his questions about who benefits from our current mapping infrastructure are ones we all need to be asking.

It’s the kind of book that fills your head with things you want to tell people about. Good summer reading if you like ideas.

David’s Pick: Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners by Alexander Hawthorne

Chosen by David Reese, Editor, Finance and Technology

I know what you are thinking: a book about Bitcoin is not summer reading. I would have agreed with you before I read Alexander Hawthorne’s Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners. But this is not the book you are imagining. It is not a breathless manifesto from a cryptocurrency evangelist, nor is it a technical manual that requires a computer science degree. It is, quite simply, the clearest and most honest explanation of Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency landscape that has ever been written for a general audience.

Hawthorne, a former financial journalist who covered the 2008 banking crisis, comes to the subject with exactly the right combination of skepticism and genuine curiosity. He does not tell you that Bitcoin will change the world, but he also does not dismiss it. Instead, he walks you through the technology from the ground up, using analogies and explanations so precise that you will genuinely understand what a blockchain is, how mining works, and why anyone would use a digital currency, all within the first hundred pages.

The real strength of this book, though, is in its second half, where Hawthorne addresses the questions that most cryptocurrency books avoid. What are the genuine risks? What are the environmental costs, and how are they changing? How should regulators approach a technology that was designed to resist regulation? And, perhaps most importantly, who actually benefits from the current cryptocurrency ecosystem? Hawthorne’s answers are balanced, evidence-based, and refreshingly free of ideology.

Whether you are cryptocurrency-curious, cryptocurrency-skeptical, or simply tired of nodding along in conversations about Bitcoin without understanding what anyone is talking about, this is the book that will bring you up to speed. I read it in three sittings by the pool, and I am not ashamed to say I enjoyed every page.

Beyond Our Catalog: Five More Essential Summer Reads

Good editors read widely, and our team’s recommendations extend well beyond the ScrollWorks catalog. Here are five more titles we are passing around the office this summer, each one selected because it offers something extraordinary.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this retelling of David Copperfield transposed to the opioid-ravaged hollows of Appalachia is one of the most ambitious and compassionate American novels in recent memory. Kingsolver writes with furious energy and deep empathy, and the voice of her narrator, a foster kid named Demon, is unforgettable. If you have not read it yet, this is your summer.

Educated by Tara Westover

Westover’s memoir of growing up in a survivalist family in Idaho and eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University remains one of the most astonishing personal narratives of the past decade. It is a book about education in the broadest sense: the painful, exhilarating process of learning to see the world clearly and to think for yourself. If our own Elena Marsh’s Still Waters resonates with you, Educated should be next on your list.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize-winning sensibility is on full display in this quiet, devastating novel about an artificial friend observing the human world with innocent precision. It is a book about what it means to love and what it means to be seen, told in Ishiguro’s signature spare prose, where every sentence seems to carry more weight than it should. Read it slowly, preferably outdoors, and let it work on you.

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

The definitive account of the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, Empire of Pain reads like a thriller but hits like a sledgehammer. Keefe’s investigative reporting is meticulous, and his narrative skill transforms a complex story of corporate malfeasance into a compulsively readable page-turner. Pair it with Demon Copperhead for a summer of reckoning with one of America’s most pressing crises.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

If you want to read something genuinely unlike anything else, Piranesi is a small, strange, beautiful novel about a man living in an infinite house filled with classical statues and tidal seas. It is a mystery, a philosophical fable, and an act of world-building so confident and complete that you will forget you are reading fiction. Clarke, author of the much longer Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, proves here that she can be equally powerful in miniature.

What to Read Next: Building Your Summer Stack

If you are wondering where to start, here is how our editors suggest approaching this list. If you tend to read one book at a time, begin with whichever title description made your pulse quicken. Trust your instincts. Your first reaction to a book recommendation is usually the most reliable one.

If you are the kind of reader who likes to alternate between fiction and non-fiction, we suggest pairing titles. Read The Last Archive alongside Empire of Pain for a summer steeped in the politics of truth and institutional power. Alternate between Echoes of Iron and Educated for perspectives on how family and history shape identity. Follow The Cartographer’s Dilemma with Piranesi for a journey from the real spaces we map to the impossible spaces we imagine.

And if you are building a summer reading list for a book club, we particularly recommend Still Waters and Klara and the Sun. Both are books that provoke deep, personal conversations about grief, love, and what it means to pay attention to the world around us. They are the kind of books that make people lean forward in their chairs and say, “But what did you think about the part where…” which is exactly what a book club should do.

For those who want to explore the full ScrollWorks Media catalog, every title mentioned above is available through our Books page, where you will find detailed descriptions, sample chapters, and ordering information. We also encourage you to visit your local independent bookstore and ask a bookseller for their personal recommendations. Some of the best reading discoveries happen in conversation, and there is no algorithm that can replace a passionate bookseller who knows your taste.

A Note on How We Choose

We want to be transparent about something. As a publisher, we have an obvious interest in promoting our own titles, and five of the ten books on this list come from our catalog. We do not apologize for that. We publish books we believe in, and it would be strange if our editors were not enthusiastic about the work they have helped bring into the world.

But we also believe that the best way to earn your trust as readers is to recommend honestly and broadly. That is why half of this list comes from other publishers. More readers is good for everyone, and a reader who discovers a great book, wherever it comes from, is a reader who will keep reading. Our industry thrives when readers are excited about books, full stop.

Every recommendation on this list comes from a specific editor who has read the book, thought about it, and chosen to put their name next to it. These are not algorithmic suggestions or paid placements. They are personal endorsements from people who have spent their careers developing the judgment to know when a book is genuinely worth your time.

We hope this list serves you well this summer. If you pick up any of these titles and want to tell us what you thought, we genuinely want to hear from you. Reach out through our contact page or find us on social media. Reading is best when it is shared, and the conversation does not have to end when you close the back cover.

Happy reading, from all of us at ScrollWorks Media.

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Curated by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team: Elena Torres (Literary Fiction), Marcus Chen (Historical Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction), Priya Nair (Memoir and Personal Essays), James Oduya (Science and Culture), and David Reese (Finance and Technology). Our editors bring a combined forty-plus years of experience in book publishing to every recommendation. For more about our titles, visit our Books page.