In 1660, a woman named Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a collection of plays, poetry, and philosophical treatises under her own name. This was, at the time, borderline scandalous. Women in seventeenth-century England could write privately, as a hobby, as therapy, as correspondence. But to print and sell your work publicly, to compete for attention in the literary marketplace alongside men? That was something else entirely. Samuel Pepys called her “mad, conceited, and ridiculous.” He was hardly alone in that opinion.

Cavendish didn’t care, or if she cared, she didn’t let it stop her. Over her career, she published over a dozen books, including what is often considered the first work of science fiction written by a woman, The Blazing World (1666). She attended meetings of the Royal Society. She argued publicly with the leading philosophers of her age. She was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most productive and ambitious literary figures of the seventeenth century.

And most people have never heard of her.

This erasure is not accidental. It’s the result of three hundred years of publishing history in which women’s contributions were systematically minimized, misattributed, or forgotten. I work in publishing. I should know this history better than I do. The truth is that until I started researching this piece, my knowledge of women’s role in early publishing was embarrassingly thin, limited to a few famous names (Virginia Woolf, the Bronte sisters, Mary Shelley) and a vague sense that things had been “harder for women.” That vagueness, I’ve come to realize, is itself a form of erasure. When you reduce centuries of institutional exclusion to “things were harder,” you flatten the specific, documented, often infuriating ways that women were pushed to the margins of an industry they helped build.

So I want to tell some of those specific stories, not as a comprehensive history (which would require several books, and better ones than I could write) but as a publisher’s reckoning with an industry whose past is more complicated and more unjust than I had understood.

Before we called it publishing

The story of women in publishing goes back further than most people realize. In medieval Europe, the production and circulation of written texts was largely the domain of monasteries. And while monks did most of the copying, nuns were active scribes and illuminators in convents across Europe. Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, wrote theological, scientific, and musical texts that circulated widely during her lifetime. She was not marginal. She was one of the most respected intellectual figures of her century.

But Hildegard was exceptional, and her authority was inseparable from her religious status. As a woman, she had no secular authority. As an abbess believed to have divine visions, she could say things that would have been unprintable coming from a laywoman. This pattern, women’s voices being tolerated when they come from within sanctioned institutions and silenced when they don’t, repeats throughout the history of publishing with depressing regularity.

When Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe in the 1440s, the commercial publishing industry was born. And from the very beginning, women were involved, though rarely in the roles that history remembers. Printers’ wives frequently ran the business side of early print shops: managing apprentices, negotiating with booksellers, keeping accounts. When their husbands died, widows often took over the press entirely. In sixteenth-century Lyon, one of Europe’s major printing centers, at least a dozen women ran print shops as widows or co-owners. Charlotte Guillard managed one of the most prominent presses in Paris for nearly thirty years in the first half of the sixteenth century, producing scholarly editions that were respected across Europe.

These women were publishers in everything but name. They made editorial decisions. They chose which texts to print. They managed distribution and marketing. And yet when histories of early publishing are written, they’re usually mentioned in passing, if at all, as footnotes to their husbands’ or fathers’ stories.

The pseudonym problem

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women were writing and publishing in significant numbers, but often under conditions that required them to hide or disguise their identities. The list of women who published under male pseudonyms is long and well-known: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), the Bronte sisters (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell). Less well-known is the economic reasoning behind the disguise.

It wasn’t just social stigma. Books by women sold fewer copies, received fewer reviews, and were taken less seriously by the critical establishment. This wasn’t speculation; it was measurable market reality. When Charlotte Bronte submitted Jane Eyre as Currer Bell, it was reviewed on its merits. When her identity was revealed, reviewers began describing the novel’s passion as “unwomanly” and its frankness as inappropriate for a female author. The book hadn’t changed. The reviewers’ perception of it had.

This dynamic, where the quality of writing is perceived differently depending on whether the reader believes it was written by a man or a woman, has been documented by researchers as recently as the 2010s. Studies in which the same manuscript is submitted to agents or publishers under male and female names consistently show that the male-named version receives more favorable responses. We are, in some ways, still living with the same bias that drove Mary Ann Evans to call herself George.

What interests me, though, is not just the bias itself but what it cost us culturally. How many women never wrote at all because the barriers seemed impassable? How many wrote but never published? How many published but were forgotten because the critical establishment of their era couldn’t see past their gender? These are questions we can’t answer, and the impossibility of answering them is itself the damage.

The women who built publishing houses

While women writers were navigating pseudonyms and prejudice on the authorial side, other women were building the institutional infrastructure of modern publishing, often without credit.

Blanche Knopf co-founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. with her husband in 1915 and was responsible for bringing many of the firm’s most important international authors to American readers. She traveled extensively in Europe and South America, scouting manuscripts and building relationships with foreign publishers. Her editorial judgment shaped one of the most prestigious catalogs in American publishing. And yet the firm bears only her husband’s name, and most histories of Knopf treat her as a supporting character in his story.

Barney Rosset gets credit for building Grove Press into a counterculture powerhouse, and he deserves much of that credit. But his editor, Judith Schmidt (later Judith Schmidt Douw), was instrumental in identifying and developing the experimental writers who defined the press. Similar stories exist throughout the publishing industry of the mid-twentieth century: women editors doing transformative work under the names of male publishers.

On the British side, the Hogarth Press is usually associated with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, but Virginia was not merely a writer who happened to have a printing press in her basement. She was a publisher with strong editorial opinions, a keen sense of market positioning, and an understanding of physical book design that influenced the press’s entire output. The Hogarth Press published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for instance, in part because Virginia recognized its importance when others didn’t.

These women didn’t just participate in publishing; they shaped it. Their editorial instincts, their international connections, their willingness to take risks on unfamiliar voices, these are the decisions that determined what got published and what didn’t, which writers found audiences and which were lost. To tell the story of twentieth-century publishing without centering these women is to tell an incomplete story. Which is exactly what most publishing histories do.

The agents who changed everything

One area where women have been disproportionately influential, and where their influence is somewhat better recognized, is literary agenting. Women have dominated the ranks of literary agents since the profession’s early days, and some of the most important agent-author relationships in literary history have been between female agents and their (often male) clients.

Audrey Wood represented Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. Candida Donadio represented Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. Lynn Nesbit represented Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. These agents didn’t just negotiate contracts; they shaped careers, guided artistic development, and fought for their clients’ creative freedom in ways that directly affected the books we now consider classics.

The irony is that agenting was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a “suitable” career for women in publishing precisely because it was seen as a service role, a support function, less prestigious than editing or running a house. The men who ran publishing houses viewed agents as intermediaries, necessary but not creative. The agents, meanwhile, were making the creative decisions that determined which manuscripts reached those editors’ desks in the first place.

Today, the agency world remains majority female. According to a 2022 survey, about 74 percent of literary agents in the United States are women. This overrepresentation at the gateway of publishing means that women’s judgment shapes which stories enter the pipeline, even as men still hold disproportionate power at the top of major publishing houses.

What’s changed and what hasn’t

The contemporary publishing industry is, in many respects, more equitable than it’s ever been. Women run major publishing imprints. Women win the biggest literary prizes. Women dominate bestseller lists. The idea that a woman would need to publish under a male name seems, to most people in 2024, like an artifact of a distant past.

But the picture is more complicated than it appears. Women dominate the junior and mid-level ranks of publishing (editorial assistants, publicists, junior editors) while men still hold a disproportionate number of senior leadership positions, particularly in the corporate structures that own the major houses. The pay gap in publishing tracks the broader economy: women earn less than men for comparable work, and this gap widens at higher levels.

On the authorial side, the VIDA Count, an annual survey of gender balance in literary publishing, has documented persistent imbalances in who gets reviewed, who gets reviewed at length, and who gets reviewed in the most prestigious outlets. While the numbers have improved over the past decade, men still receive more and longer reviews in many major publications. This matters because reviews drive sales, and sales drive careers.

And then there’s the question of genre. Women writers are disproportionately represented in fiction (particularly literary fiction and romance) and underrepresented in nonfiction, where advances tend to be higher and media attention more generous. This imbalance is self-reinforcing: publishers acquire fewer nonfiction proposals from women, which means fewer women see nonfiction as a viable career path, which means fewer women submit nonfiction proposals. Breaking this cycle requires deliberate effort from publishers, agents, and media outlets.

What we’re doing about it (and what we could do better)

At ScrollWorks, our catalog skews toward gender parity, which is something I’m conscious of but not willing to turn into a marketing claim. Publishing women isn’t a corporate initiative for us; it’s a natural consequence of reading widely and choosing the best manuscripts we encounter. When I look at our list, which includes Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive, Elena Marsh’s Still Waters, James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, and David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma, I see a balance that reflects the quality of work being submitted to us, not a quota.

But I also recognize that “just choosing the best work” is insufficient as a response to structural inequity. The submissions we receive are already filtered through a system that discourages certain voices and amplifies others. If fewer women submit nonfiction proposals, it’s not because women have less to say about nonfiction subjects; it’s because the industry has historically told them, through its acquisition patterns and marketing priorities, that nonfiction is a male domain. A publisher who simply accepts what comes across the transom is accepting the biases built into the submission pipeline.

So we actively seek out work by women writers, particularly in nonfiction and in genres where women are underrepresented. We attend conferences and workshops where women writers gather. We build relationships with agents who represent diverse lists. We try, imperfectly and with full awareness that we’re a small publisher with limited resources, to be part of the correction rather than part of the problem.

I’m not going to claim we’ve solved anything. Publishing’s gender issues are deep, structural, and will require generations to fully address. But I think small publishers have a particular opportunity here, because we can be intentional in ways that large corporate publishers, driven by market data and shareholder expectations, often can’t. We can take risks on voices that the market hasn’t validated yet. We can invest in writers who don’t fit neatly into existing categories. We can make decisions based on what we believe rather than on what algorithms predict.

That’s a form of power, and I want to use it responsibly. The women who built publishing, from Charlotte Guillard’s print shop in sixteenth-century Paris to Blanche Knopf’s editorial office in midtown Manhattan, didn’t have the institutional power to fully realize their vision. We do. The least we can do is use it in ways that honor what they started.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish the voices that history too often overlooks.

I want to talk about diversity in our catalog, and I want to do it without the corporate preamble that usually accompanies these conversations. No mission statement. No aspirational language about “amplifying underrepresented voices.” Not because those sentiments are wrong, but because I think the gap between what publishers say about diversity and what they actually do has become so wide that the language itself has lost meaning. If I’m going to talk about this, I’d rather be specific and honest, even if that means admitting things that are uncomfortable.

ScrollWorks Media is a small publisher. Our catalog has fewer than thirty titles. The decisions we make about who to publish are not made by committee, not filtered through a corporate diversity initiative, not checked against metrics by a DEI officer. They’re made by a small editorial team, mostly me and two senior editors, based on whether we believe a manuscript is extraordinary and whether we’re the right publisher for it.

This approach has produced a catalog that is, by some measures, diverse. We’ve published writers of different races, nationalities, genders, and class backgrounds. We’ve published books that engage with a range of cultural experiences. We’ve published work that would not have found a home at many larger houses because it didn’t fit neatly into a marketable category.

But I don’t think any of that happened because we had a diversity plan. It happened because we read widely, talked to many writers, and tried to stay open to work that surprised us. That’s the truth, and I share it not as self-congratulation but as an honest accounting of a process that is, by its nature, incomplete.

The problems with “diverse books” as a category

One of the things that bothers me about how the publishing industry talks about diversity is the way it flattens individual books into representative examples of identity categories. A novel by a Black writer becomes “a diverse book.” A memoir by a disabled writer becomes “a diverse perspective.” The book’s specific qualities, its prose, its structure, its argument, its emotional complexity, get subordinated to its demographic utility.

This is bad for writers and bad for readers. It’s bad for writers because it reduces their art to their identity, as if the only interesting thing about a novel by an Indigenous author is the fact that it was written by an Indigenous author. It’s bad for readers because it implies that the primary reason to read these books is obligation rather than pleasure, that you should read them because they’re “important” rather than because they’re good.

The best books we’ve published at ScrollWorks have not been “diverse books.” They’ve been books. David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is not on our list because David is a person of color. It’s on our list because it’s a brilliantly constructed, intellectually ambitious, emotionally resonant novel that happens to be written by a Nigerian-British author whose cultural background informs but does not define the work. If the only reason someone reads that book is to check a diversity box, they’re missing the point. They’re also missing a great novel.

I think we need a different framework for thinking about diversity in publishing, one that starts with the work itself rather than with the identity of the writer. Not because identity doesn’t matter (it does, obviously), but because leading with identity tends to produce shallow engagement rather than genuine literary connection.

What we actually mean when we say we want a diverse catalog

When I think about what I want our catalog to look like, the word that comes to mind isn’t “diverse” in the demographic sense. It’s something closer to “various.” I want books that come from different places in the human experience, that ask different questions, that sound different from one another. I want a catalog where no two books could be mistaken for each other, where each title occupies its own space and does something that none of the others do.

This kind of variety naturally leads to demographic diversity, because different life experiences produce different art. If you’re genuinely open to the full range of human expression, you will end up publishing writers from many backgrounds. But the openness has to be to the expression, not to the background. The moment you start acquiring books primarily because of who wrote them rather than because of what they wrote, you’ve lost the thread.

Compare two hypothetical acquisition scenarios. In the first, a publisher reads a manuscript by a Latina writer and thinks: “We need more Latina voices on our list. Let’s acquire this.” In the second, a publisher reads the same manuscript and thinks: “This book does something I’ve never seen before with language and family and place. I have to publish this.” Both scenarios might result in the same decision, but the reasoning behind them produces very different editorial relationships and very different books.

In the first scenario, the writer is a representative of her demographic. The editorial conversation will inevitably center on “authenticity” and “representation,” which are valid considerations but incomplete ones. In the second scenario, the writer is an artist. The editorial conversation will center on craft, vision, and how to make the book the best possible version of itself. The second conversation is more respectful, more productive, and more likely to result in a book that honors both the writer’s identity and their artistry.

The pipeline problem and what it really looks like

The publishing industry talks a lot about the “pipeline problem,” the idea that the lack of diversity in published books reflects a lack of diversity in submissions. This explanation is partly true and partly a convenient deflection.

It’s true that submissions to literary publishers do not perfectly reflect the demographic composition of the country. Certain communities are underrepresented in the MFA programs that feed the literary pipeline. Access to the time and financial resources needed to write a book-length manuscript is unevenly distributed. Knowledge of how the publishing industry works, including how to find an agent, how to write a query letter, and how to navigate the submission process, is concentrated among people who already have connections to the industry.

But the pipeline problem is also partly a creation of the industry itself. When publishers acquire and market books that center a narrow range of experiences, they signal to writers outside that range that their stories aren’t wanted. When bestseller lists and prize shortlists are dominated by writers from similar backgrounds, aspiring writers from other backgrounds reasonably conclude that the industry doesn’t have room for them. The pipeline isn’t just a neutral channel that brings manuscripts to publishers. It’s shaped by publishers’ past decisions, and those decisions have historically favored certain kinds of writers and certain kinds of stories.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve tried to address this by doing something very simple: reading submissions from everywhere. We accept unsolicited manuscripts, which many literary publishers don’t. We attend writers’ conferences outside the traditional literary fiction circuit. We’ve built relationships with writing programs at community colleges and historically Black colleges, not as a charity project but because good writing comes from everywhere and we’d be fools to limit our sources.

The results have been real. Some of the most exciting manuscripts we’ve received in the past two years have come through channels that didn’t exist for us before we made this effort. Not all of them were right for our list. But the ones that were have made our catalog richer and more interesting than it would have been if we’d relied solely on the traditional agent-to-editor pipeline.

Class, geography, and the diversities nobody talks about

Here’s something I think the publishing industry gets wrong in its diversity conversations: an almost exclusive focus on race and gender at the expense of other axes of difference, particularly class and geography.

The American publishing industry is concentrated in New York City, staffed overwhelmingly by people who attended elite colleges, and operates within a cultural framework that reflects the values and assumptions of the urban professional class. This means that even when publishers succeed in diversifying their catalogs by race and gender, the resulting books often come from writers who share the industry’s class background and geographical perspective.

A Black writer who went to Yale and lives in Brooklyn is diverse in one sense and not diverse in another. Their experience is genuinely different from that of their white colleagues, and that difference matters. But their experience is also quite different from that of a Black writer in rural Mississippi who didn’t go to college and works in a factory. The second writer’s perspective is almost entirely absent from mainstream literary publishing, not because their stories are less worthy but because the industry’s infrastructure, from MFA programs to literary agents to New York publishing offices, is not designed to find them.

I feel strongly that class diversity and geographic diversity are as important as racial and gender diversity in building a catalog that reflects the full range of human experience. James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron is set in a working-class community and takes manual labor seriously as a subject. That book exists in our catalog partly because we value writing about work and working people, which is a form of diversity that doesn’t show up in most publishers’ demographic reports.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters is set in a rural community that most New York publishers would consider “regional” (a word that, in publishing, is almost always a euphemism for “not commercially viable”). We didn’t see it that way. We saw a novel that engaged with a specific place so deeply that it became universal, and we published it because the writing demanded to be published.

What I’ve gotten wrong

Honesty requires me to admit the ways I’ve fallen short. I’ve made acquisitions where, in retrospect, my enthusiasm for the writer’s background influenced my evaluation of the writing itself. I published a book once that I championed partly because the author’s story was compelling and the book’s cultural perspective was underrepresented, even though the manuscript needed more editorial work than I acknowledged at the time. The book didn’t fail, exactly. But it wasn’t as good as it could have been, and I think the author deserved a more rigorous editorial process rather than a more forgiving one.

I’ve also been too cautious at times. I’ve hesitated to give notes on cultural material that I didn’t feel expert in, worrying that my feedback would be insensitive or overstepping. This caution was well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful. An author who submits a manuscript to a publisher wants rigorous editing, not kid-glove treatment. Withholding honest feedback because you’re worried about cultural sensitivity is its own form of condescension.

I’ve learned, slowly, that the best approach is to be honest about what I know and what I don’t, to ask questions when I’m uncertain, and to trust that the authors I work with can handle direct feedback about their craft without interpreting it as a commentary on their identity. Most writers, in my experience, would rather be edited rigorously by someone who takes their work seriously than praised gently by someone who’s afraid of offending them.

Moving forward without a playbook

I don’t have a diversity plan for ScrollWorks, and I don’t intend to create one. This will sound wrong to some people, and I understand why. In an industry where institutional commitments to diversity have been repeatedly made and repeatedly broken, the absence of a formal plan might look like the absence of commitment.

But I think plans, in this context, can become substitutes for genuine engagement. A publisher with a diversity plan can point to the plan and say “we’re working on it” without actually changing anything. The plan becomes the performance. I’d rather skip the performance and focus on the practice: reading widely, staying open, interrogating my own biases, and making decisions that I can stand behind on both literary and ethical grounds.

The catalog is the record. It’s where our actual decisions live. Every book we publish is a statement about what we value, and the sum of those statements, over years and dozens of titles, paints a picture that is more honest than any mission statement could be.

When I look at our catalog, which includes Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive, David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma, Elena Marsh’s Still Waters, and James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, I see books by writers with different backgrounds, different concerns, and different styles, united not by their demographics but by the quality and ambition of their work. That’s the diversity I care about: not a checklist of identities but a genuine range of artistic vision.

Is that enough? Probably not. Probably we could do more, reach further, push harder. But I think “probably not enough” is a more honest position than “we’ve solved it,” and I think ongoing, imperfect effort is more valuable than perfected language about commitments we haven’t tested yet.

We’ll keep reading, keep searching, keep publishing the work that moves us. The catalog will keep growing. And anyone who wants to judge our commitments can look at the books, because the books don’t lie.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. The books tell the story better than any policy ever could.

I finished the first draft of Echoes of Iron in about fourteen months. It was messy, overlong, and I loved it the way you love something you’ve been living inside for more than a year. When the editing was done and the book went out into the world, people started asking the question I should have expected but somehow didn’t: “So, what’s the next one about?”

At the time, I smiled and said something vague about having a few ideas. The truth was more complicated. I had plenty of ideas. What I didn’t have was any confidence that I could do it again.

Nobody tells you that writing a second book is a completely different psychological experience from writing the first. The first time around, you have the luxury of ignorance. You don’t know how hard it’s going to be, how many drafts you’ll go through, how many paragraphs you’ll write and then delete at two in the morning. By the time you sit down to write book number two, you know exactly what’s coming. And that knowledge, paradoxically, makes the whole thing harder.

The Myth of Momentum

There’s a popular idea in publishing circles that your first book builds momentum for your second. The logic goes something like this: you’ve proven you can do it once, so now you have confidence, an audience, and a process. You just do the same thing again, except faster and better.

I want to be diplomatic about this, but I can’t. That idea is wrong. It’s not just slightly wrong or occasionally wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong in a way that misleads new authors and sets them up for a crisis they didn’t see coming.

Here’s what actually happens. Your first book taught you a process, yes. But that process was specific to that book, that story, those characters, that period of your life. When you sit down to write something new, you discover that roughly half of what you learned doesn’t transfer. The outlining technique that worked brilliantly for a thriller falls apart when you’re writing literary fiction. The morning writing routine that produced your debut stops working because your life has changed, you have a kid now, or your commute is different, or you’ve developed an anxiety about writing that didn’t exist before.

I remember sitting at my desk about three months into the second book, staring at a document that was somehow both 40,000 words long and completely shapeless. I had characters I liked. I had scenes that worked in isolation. What I didn’t have was a book. I had a collection of fragments masquerading as a manuscript.

The Comparison Trap

The worst part of writing a second book isn’t the blank page. It’s the comparison. When you’re writing your first book, the only standard you’re measuring yourself against is the vague idea of “a published novel.” That’s a pretty flexible target. You read your own work and think, “Is this good enough to be a book?” And the answer, honestly, can be almost anything because you’ve never done this before and you don’t really know what good enough looks like from the inside.

With the second book, you’re not comparing yourself to some abstract standard. You’re comparing yourself to the finished, edited, polished version of your own first book. You’re reading your rough draft and holding it up against something that went through fourteen months of writing, six months of editing, a professional copyedit, and a proofread. Of course the rough draft looks terrible by comparison. Of course every sentence feels clunky and wrong. You’re comparing a sketch to a painting.

I talked to a friend about this, a writer who had published three novels and was working on her fourth. She laughed when I described the feeling. “Oh, that never goes away,” she said. “You just get better at ignoring it.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting, but it was honest. And honesty, I’ve found, is more useful than comfort when you’re in the middle of a creative project that feels like it’s falling apart.

The Identity Question

Something I didn’t expect at all was the identity crisis. When you publish your first book, you become “the person who wrote that book.” People have opinions about it. Reviewers say things. Readers tell you what they thought it was about, and sometimes their interpretation is wildly different from yours, and you have to smile and nod because who are you to tell someone what your own book means?

All of this becomes part of your identity as a writer, whether you want it to or not. And when you sit down to write the second book, you face a question that’s deceptively simple: am I writing the same kind of thing, or am I trying something different?

Both answers are terrifying. If you write something similar, you’re playing it safe, repeating yourself, trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. If you write something different, you’re abandoning the people who liked your first book, taking a risk, potentially alienating the small audience you’ve built. There’s no winning move. There’s only the move you make and the consequences that follow.

I chose to go in a different direction with my second project, partly because the story I wanted to tell demanded it and partly because I’m constitutionally incapable of doing the same thing twice. That decision cost me some readers and gained me others. I think it was the right call, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed in the same lane.

The Problem With Expectations

First books come out into a world that doesn’t know you exist. This is both awful and wonderful. Awful because getting anyone to pay attention feels impossible. Wonderful because there’s no pressure. Nobody is waiting for your debut novel. Nobody has expectations. You’re a complete unknown, and that anonymity is actually a kind of freedom.

The second time around, there are expectations. Maybe only from a small number of people, but they’re real. Your editor expects something. Your agent (if you have one) expects something. Your readers, however few or many, expect something. And you expect something from yourself, which is often the heaviest expectation of all.

I found myself trying to write the book I thought people wanted me to write, rather than the book I actually wanted to write. It took me about six months to realize what I was doing, and another month to give myself permission to stop. Those were seven wasted months, or at least that’s how they felt at the time. Looking back, I think they were necessary. Sometimes you have to write the wrong thing for a while before you figure out the right thing.

The permission question is important, and I don’t think it gets talked about enough. As a debut author, you give yourself permission to write whatever comes out. As a second-time author, you feel like you need permission from somewhere else, from the market, from your publisher, from the vague entity known as “your readers.” You don’t. You need permission from yourself, and that permission is both free and incredibly difficult to grant.

Practical Things That Helped

I don’t want this whole piece to be about how hard everything is. That’s true, but it’s not useful. So let me share some specific things that helped me get through the second book and arrive at something I was actually proud of.

First, I stopped trying to write the book in order. With my first book, I wrote linearly, from chapter one to chapter thirty-two, straight through. That felt natural at the time. With the second book, it felt like pushing a boulder uphill. So I started writing whatever scene interested me on any given day. Some days that was a climactic confrontation in act three. Other days it was a quiet conversation in act one. The result was a jigsaw puzzle of scenes that I eventually had to assemble into a coherent narrative, which was its own challenge. But at least I was writing. At least the pages were accumulating.

Second, I started keeping what I call a “doubt journal.” Every time I had the urge to delete a chapter or abandon the project entirely, I wrote down what I was feeling and why. Then I kept writing. A week later, I’d go back and read the doubt journal entry, and about seventy percent of the time, the thing I’d been so sure was terrible actually turned out to be fine. Not brilliant, maybe, but workable. The doubt journal taught me that my in-the-moment assessments of my own work were unreliable, which was both humbling and liberating.

Third, I found a writing partner. Not a co-author, just another writer working on their own project who was willing to trade pages and honest feedback on a regular basis. We met every two weeks at a coffee shop and swapped chapters. Her perspective was invaluable because she had no investment in my book succeeding or failing. She just told me what worked and what didn’t, with the kind of bluntness that only a fellow writer can get away with.

The Sophomore Slump Is Real, and That’s Fine

There’s a phrase in the music industry, “the sophomore slump,” that refers to the common phenomenon of a band or artist releasing a disappointing second album. The same thing happens in publishing, and for the same reasons. Your first work benefits from years of accumulated experience and emotion. You’ve been thinking about it, consciously or not, for a long time before you actually write it. Your second work doesn’t have that built-in reservoir of material. You’re starting from scratch, but with higher expectations and less patience from yourself.

I think acknowledging this is important. Not as an excuse for doing bad work, but as a way of being realistic about what you’re up against. The second book is hard for structural reasons, not because you’ve lost your talent or because the first one was a fluke. It’s hard because you’re doing something genuinely different from what you did before, even if it looks the same from the outside.

When I talk to debut authors now who are thinking about their second project, I tell them three things. One: it will be harder than you expect, and that’s normal. Two: your first book’s process probably won’t work this time, so be ready to improvise. Three: the book will feel wrong until suddenly it doesn’t, and there’s no way to predict when that shift will happen. You just have to keep going.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

If I could go back and talk to myself at the beginning of the second book, I’d say this: stop reading reviews of your first book. I know it’s tempting. I know you want to understand what people liked so you can do more of it. But reading reviews while trying to write something new fills your head with other people’s voices, and the only voice you need right now is your own.

I’d also say: give yourself permission to write badly for a while. The first draft of your first book was bad too. You’ve just forgotten how bad it was because the finished product is so different. Every good book passes through a phase where it’s a terrible book. That’s not failure. That’s process.

And I’d say: talk to other writers. Not about craft or technique or market trends. Talk to them about the emotional reality of doing this work. Ask them about the days when they wanted to quit. Ask them about the moments when nothing made sense and the whole project felt hopeless. You’ll discover that your experience is not unique, that virtually every writer goes through exactly what you’re going through, and that knowledge won’t make the work easier but it will make you feel less alone while doing it.

The Part Where It Gets Better

There’s a moment in every second book, at least every second book I’ve heard about, where something clicks. You’ve been struggling and doubting and writing and deleting, and then one day you write a scene and think, “Oh. This is what this book is about.” It might happen at 30,000 words or 60,000 words or 80,000 words. For me, it happened embarrassingly late, around the 70,000-word mark, when I finally understood what my main character actually wanted and why.

That moment doesn’t solve all your problems. You still have to finish the book, which is its own kind of hard. But it changes the quality of the difficulty. Before the click, you’re wandering in the dark. After the click, you’re climbing a mountain. Both are hard, but at least with the mountain you can see where you’re going.

I finished the second book about twenty-two months after I started it, eight months longer than the first. It went through more drafts. It required more revision. The editor’s notes were more extensive. And when it was done, I liked it more than the first one. Not because it was objectively better (I honestly can’t judge that), but because I’d earned it in a way that the first book, with all its naive enthusiasm, hadn’t required.

The first book taught me that I could write a novel. The second book taught me that I was a novelist. Those sound like the same thing, but they’re not. One is an achievement. The other is an identity. And the only way to get from one to the other is to go through the difficulty and come out the other side.

So if you’re working on your second book right now and everything feels wrong, I want you to know: this is what it’s supposed to feel like. Keep going. The book knows what it wants to be, even if you don’t. Your job is to keep writing until you catch up to it.

If you’re curious about the books that came out of this process, you can find Echoes of Iron and our other titles on the ScrollWorks books page.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish books worth reading, one story at a time.

I have a theory that you can judge a civilization by its bookshop cafes. Not its libraries, though those matter too. Not its chain bookstores with their loyalty programs and corporate coffee. I mean the independent bookshops that have a cafe tucked inside, the ones where the espresso machine sits fifteen feet from a shelf of poetry collections and the people working behind the counter actually read the books they sell.

Over the past few years, the ScrollWorks team has visited dozens of these places. Some were planned stops on book tour routes. Others we stumbled into on weekends or vacations. A handful became places we return to regularly, not because we need a book or a coffee but because the combination of the two, in the right environment, produces something that neither one can accomplish alone.

What follows is not a ranked list. I don’t believe in ranking bookshop cafes, partly because the criteria are too personal and partly because the experience depends so much on when you visit, what you’re reading, and what kind of day you’re having. These are simply the places that left the strongest impression on us.

The Spotty Dog Books & Ale, Hudson, New York

I need to be upfront about something: The Spotty Dog is technically a bookshop and bar, not a bookshop and cafe. They serve beer and wine alongside the books. I’m including it anyway because it does what a great bookshop cafe does, which is create a space where browsing and lingering feel like the whole point rather than a prelude to a transaction.

Hudson is a small city in the Hudson Valley that went through a dramatic transformation over the past couple of decades, from a rough post-industrial town to a destination for antique dealers and weekenders from New York City. The Spotty Dog sits on Warren Street, the main commercial strip, in what used to be a fire station. The high ceilings and open floor plan give it a feeling of airiness that most bookshops lack. You can sit at the bar with a local IPA and flip through a used copy of something you’ve been meaning to read, and nobody looks at you like you should buy it or leave.

What I liked most about The Spotty Dog was the curation. The selection felt personal, like someone with strong opinions had chosen every title. There were no dump bins of bestsellers, no “if you liked this, try that” shelf talkers generated by an algorithm. Just books that someone thought were worth reading, organized with a logic that rewarded browsing.

We visited on a Thursday afternoon in October, when the town was quiet and the leaves along the river were turning. I bought a collection of essays by John McPhee and a pint of cider, and I sat reading until the light through the windows turned golden. That kind of afternoon is hard to manufacture. It requires a place that doesn’t rush you.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Yes, I know. Everyone includes Shakespeare and Company on lists like this. I almost left it off for that reason, because recommending it feels about as original as recommending that people visit the Eiffel Tower while they’re in Paris. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t earn its spot.

The cafe is technically separate from the bookshop, occupying the space next door. You order at the counter, find a seat (good luck if it’s a Saturday afternoon), and look out at Notre-Dame through the window. The coffee is fine. It’s not the best coffee I’ve had in Paris, and Paris is not short on excellent coffee. But the experience of drinking it in that particular spot, surrounded by people who came here because they love books, is genuinely special in a way I can’t fully explain.

The bookshop itself is famously cramped and disorganized in the most charming possible way. Narrow staircases lead to tiny rooms stuffed with books. There are beds tucked into corners where the “Tumbleweeds,” the aspiring writers who volunteer at the shop, sleep in exchange for a few hours of work. The whole place feels like it was designed by someone who cared more about literature than fire codes.

I visited three times over two days during a trip in 2022. The first time, I was overwhelmed by tourists and left after twenty minutes. The second time, early on a weekday morning, the shop was nearly empty and I spent two hours moving from room to room, pulling books off shelves and reading first paragraphs. The third time, I sat in the cafe with a croissant and watched the river. Each visit was a different experience, and the early morning one was worth the trip to Paris by itself.

Powell’s City of Books, Portland, Oregon

Powell’s is often called the largest independent bookshop in the world, and while I haven’t verified that claim, I believe it. The store occupies an entire city block in Portland’s Pearl District. It’s divided into color-coded rooms. It has its own map. You can get genuinely lost in it, and I have, more than once.

The cafe inside Powell’s is a partnership with World Cup Coffee, a Portland roaster, and the coffee is noticeably better than what you get at most bookshop cafes. I had an oat milk latte that was excellent, which sounds like a small thing but matters more than you’d think when you’re settling in for two or three hours of browsing.

What sets Powell’s apart from other large bookshops is the mix of new and used books shelved together. You’ll find a brand-new hardcover of the latest novel sitting next to a battered paperback of something published in 1987, and the used copy might cost four dollars. This creates a kind of egalitarianism on the shelves that I really appreciate. Old books and new books compete on their merits, not their marketing budgets.

I spent an entire afternoon in the Gold Room, which is where they keep the science fiction and fantasy. I left with eight books and a coffee cup ring on my notebook from where I’d been scribbling recommendations to myself. If you’re the kind of person who makes lists of books to read later, bring a bigger notebook than you think you’ll need.

McNally Jackson, New York City

McNally Jackson has several locations now, but the original on Prince Street in Nolita is the one I keep going back to. It’s a mid-sized shop with an excellent cafe that serves pastries from local bakeries and espresso drinks that would hold their own in any dedicated coffee shop in the city.

The thing I love about McNally Jackson is the staff recommendations. They’re handwritten on index cards and tucked into the shelves, and they’re consistently good. Not “good” in the sense of recommending obvious bestsellers, but good in the sense of introducing you to books you’ve never heard of that turn out to be exactly what you needed to read. I’ve discovered more books through McNally Jackson staff picks than through any review publication or social media account.

The cafe seating faces the street, so you can people-watch while you read, which in Nolita is practically a contact sport. On a warm afternoon with the door propped open and a stack of new purchases on the table, McNally Jackson is one of the best places to be a reader in New York City. The competitive set is fierce, obviously. New York has a lot of great bookshops. But McNally Jackson wins on the cafe experience specifically because it treats the coffee and food as seriously as it treats the books.

Bart’s Books, Ojai, California

Bart’s is an outdoor bookshop, which means it doesn’t have a cafe in the traditional sense. What it has is a courtyard full of bookshelves open to the sky, shaded by oak trees, with a little area where you can sit and read. There’s a coffee shop across the street. The unofficial practice is to buy your coffee there and bring it to Bart’s, where nobody minds at all.

The honor system at Bart’s is what makes it remarkable. The shelves that face the street are accessible 24 hours a day. If you find a book after the shop is closed, you put your money in a slot in the door. This has been the system since the 1960s, and it still works. I find that incredibly heartening in an era when every other retail experience involves surveillance cameras and anti-theft tags.

Ojai itself is beautiful, a small valley town surrounded by mountains that turn pink at sunset. Visiting Bart’s during the golden hour, with the light filtering through the trees and the smell of old books mixing with the dry California air, is one of those experiences that stays with you. I bought a water-damaged copy of a Raymond Chandler novel for two dollars and read the first three chapters sitting on a bench under an oak tree. It was perfect in the specific way that only imperfect things can be.

Daunt Books, Marylebone, London

Daunt Books is organized by country rather than by genre, which sounds confusing until you experience it and then it seems like the only sensible way to organize a bookshop. Want a novel set in Japan? Go to the Japan section, where you’ll find it shelved alongside travel guides, histories, and essay collections about the country. This organization turns browsing into a kind of armchair travel, and it means you discover connections between books that a conventional genre-based system would hide.

The Marylebone High Street location is the original, housed in a beautiful Edwardian building with long oak galleries, skylights, and a back room that feels like a cathedral dedicated to reading. There isn’t a cafe inside the shop itself, but there’s a wonderful one directly adjacent that shares the entrance, and the line between the two spaces is pleasantly blurred.

I visited on a rainy Tuesday in February, which I think is the optimal condition for a London bookshop. The rain outside made the interior feel warmer and more inviting, and the shop was quiet enough that I could stand in the back gallery and just look at the architecture for a while without being in anyone’s way. I left with a novel set in Turkey and a history of cartography that I never would have found in a conventionally organized store, because I wouldn’t have known to look for it.

Tattered Cover, Denver, Colorado

The Tattered Cover has moved locations several times over the years, and its current home on Colfax Avenue is excellent. It’s a big shop, spread over multiple floors, with comfortable chairs scattered throughout and a cafe that takes up a significant portion of the first floor. The message is clear: sit down, stay a while, we’re not in a hurry and neither should you be.

I appreciate the Tattered Cover because it feels like a community center that happens to sell books. There’s always an event happening or about to happen. Local reading groups meet there. Authors do signings and talks. The bulletin board near the entrance is covered with flyers for writing workshops, poetry readings, and book clubs that meet in people’s living rooms around the city.

The cafe serves solid food along with coffee, which matters when you’re planning to spend several hours in the building. I had a sandwich and a pot of tea and read the first hundred pages of a novel I ended up loving, all without anyone giving me the side-eye for occupying a table too long. That’s the test of a good bookshop cafe, really. Not the quality of the coffee, though that helps. It’s whether the space communicates, through its design and its staff and its general atmosphere, that you’re welcome to stay.

Why These Places Matter

I spend a lot of time thinking about where people encounter books. As a publisher, this is partly professional interest. But it’s also personal. The circumstances in which you discover a book shape your relationship with it. A book recommended by an algorithm feels different from a book you pulled off a shelf because the cover caught your eye while you were drinking an espresso in a warm, well-lit room.

Bookshop cafes create the conditions for what I think of as accidental discovery. You go in with no particular agenda. You browse. You pick things up and put them down. Eventually, something catches your attention, not because it was marketed to you or because it appeared in your social media feed, but because you happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right frame of mind. That kind of discovery is becoming rarer as more of our reading choices are mediated by screens and algorithms, and the places that still enable it are worth protecting.

I’m not naive about the economics. Independent bookshops are struggling. Cafes help, because they give people a reason to walk through the door that isn’t strictly about buying a book. Some people come for the coffee and leave with a novel. Some people come for the novel and stay for the coffee. Either way, the cafe turns the bookshop from a store into a destination, and destinations survive in ways that mere stores often don’t.

If you have a bookshop cafe near you that you love, go there this week. Buy a book and a coffee. Sit for an hour. Tell someone about it. These places persist because people choose to keep them alive, one visit at a time.

For more of our recommendations and reading lists, visit our books page or check out what we’ve been publishing lately on the ScrollWorks blog.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. Opinions are our own, caffeine levels may vary.

About two years ago, we made a decision at ScrollWorks that felt, at the time, slightly heretical. We stopped caring about bestseller lists. Not in the performative way where you say you don’t care while secretly refreshing the rankings every Tuesday morning. We actually stopped. We removed the BookScan tab from our browser bookmarks. We stopped including bestseller list performance in our quarterly reviews. We told our authors that we would not be using list placement as a metric of success.

Some people thought we were being naive. A few thought we were being arrogant. One industry colleague told me, point blank, that we were “leaving money on the table.” Maybe we are. But I think the money we’re supposedly leaving on the table was never really there, at least not for a publisher our size, and chasing it was costing us in ways that didn’t show up on a spreadsheet.

How Bestseller Lists Actually Work

Most readers assume that bestseller lists are straightforward: the books that sell the most copies appear on the list. This is roughly true for some lists and completely false for others. The New York Times bestseller list, which is the one everyone talks about, uses a methodology that is famously opaque. They survey a selection of bookstores and wholesalers, apply editorial judgment, and produce a list that reflects sales but is not a simple ranking of units sold.

What this means in practice is that the list can be gamed. There’s an entire cottage industry built around manipulating bestseller list placement. Bulk purchases through specific retailers. Strategic timing of release dates. Pre-order campaigns designed to concentrate sales into a single reporting week. I’ve seen marketing plans from other publishers that are essentially elaborate schemes to trick the tracking system into registering more sales than actually occurred in organic demand.

This isn’t a secret, by the way. People in publishing talk about it constantly, usually in tones that range from resigned acceptance to bitter amusement. Everyone knows the system is imperfect. Everyone participates anyway, because the alternative, ignoring the lists entirely, feels too risky. Or at least, that’s what we used to think.

The Cost of Chasing

Here’s what happens when a small publisher decides to chase bestseller lists. First, you start timing your releases around the list calendar. Instead of publishing books when they’re ready and when the market conditions make sense, you publish them during weeks when you think the competition will be lighter. This sounds strategic but it’s actually just guessing, because you rarely know what other publishers are planning.

Second, you start spending marketing money on list manipulation rather than on reaching actual readers. You buy ads designed to concentrate sales into a single week. You offer steep pre-order discounts that eat into your margins. You focus on the bookstores and retailers that you believe are tracked by the list, rather than on the ones where your actual readers shop. All of this costs money, and for a publisher our size, that money comes directly from the budget we’d otherwise spend on editing, design, author advances, and the other things that make books good.

Third, and this is the one nobody talks about, you start making acquisition decisions based on list potential rather than book quality. You look at a manuscript and instead of asking “Is this a good book that deserves to exist?” you ask “Can this hit a list?” Those are very different questions, and they lead to very different publishing programs. The first question builds a catalog of books you’re proud of. The second question builds a catalog of books that look like other books that have hit lists, which is how you end up with an industry that publishes the same fifteen types of book over and over.

I watched this happen at a previous job. A small literary publisher, one with a genuinely interesting backlist, started chasing the Times list after one of their books landed on it almost by accident. Over the next three years, their acquisition strategy shifted. They started passing on the weird, wonderful, hard-to-categorize books that had been their identity, in favor of more commercial projects that had “list potential.” Some of those commercial projects hit. Most didn’t. And the publisher ended up in an awkward middle ground: too commercial for their original audience, not commercial enough to compete with the big houses. They’re still around, but they’ve lost something.

What We Measure Instead

Abandoning bestseller lists as a metric didn’t mean abandoning all metrics. We still care about sales. We’re a business, and businesses need revenue. But we shifted our focus from peak-week performance to what I call “long tail health,” the question of whether a book continues to sell over months and years rather than whether it spikes in a single week.

A book that sells 500 copies in its launch week and then tails off to nothing is, by list standards, more successful than a book that sells 200 copies a month for five years. But the second book has sold 12,000 copies total, which is more than enough to be profitable for a publisher our size, and it’s built a readership that will be there when the author’s next book comes out. The first book made a splash and vanished. The second book built something lasting.

We also started paying much more attention to reader engagement. Not in the social media sense of likes and shares, though we track those too. I mean actual engagement: Are people finishing the book? Are they recommending it to friends? Are they coming back to buy the author’s next title? Are they leaving thoughtful reviews that suggest they genuinely connected with the material? These things are harder to measure than list placement, but they’re better indicators of whether a book is doing what books are supposed to do, which is matter to the people who read them.

Our author for Still Waters is a perfect example. The book didn’t come anywhere near a bestseller list. It sold modestly in its first month. But it kept selling, month after month, because readers who found it loved it and told other people about it. Two years later, it’s one of the most profitable books in our catalog, and its author has a dedicated readership that will show up for the next book without any marketing at all. That’s the kind of success that doesn’t make headlines, but it pays the bills and builds a career.

The Author Conversation

The hardest part of this decision was talking to our authors about it. Writers are understandably attached to the idea of being a “bestselling author.” It’s a label that carries weight in the industry, opens doors, and looks good on a book jacket. Telling an author that you’re not going to help them chase that label feels like telling them you don’t believe in their book.

We had to be very clear about what we were actually saying, which was not “we don’t think your book can succeed” but rather “we think success looks different from what the industry has conditioned you to expect.” Some authors got it immediately. Others took convincing. One author left for a bigger publisher, which was her right and I don’t blame her. She wanted the list, and a bigger house had the resources and infrastructure to chase it in a way we couldn’t.

But most of our authors, once they understood the reasoning, were relieved. The pressure to perform in a single launch week is enormous, and it falls disproportionately on the author. You’re expected to do events, interviews, social media campaigns, and newsletter pushes, all timed to concentrate attention into that narrow window. It’s exhausting, and it often doesn’t work, which means the author ends up feeling like they failed when really the system failed them.

Our approach now is to tell authors: your book has years, not weeks. We’re going to support it over time. We’re going to keep it in print, keep marketing it, keep looking for new audiences. The launch is the beginning of the book’s life, not the climax. I’ve watched the relief on authors’ faces when they hear this, and it confirms that we made the right call.

The Industry Reaction

Other publishers have been curious, sometimes skeptical, occasionally dismissive. The skeptics point out that list placement drives discoverability, which drives sales, which funds everything else. And they’re not entirely wrong. A spot on the New York Times list does generate attention and sales. The question is whether that attention and those sales are worth the cost of pursuing them, and for a publisher of our size, I believe the answer is no.

Large publishers can absorb the cost of list manipulation because they spread it across hundreds of titles. If you’re publishing 400 books a year and ten of them hit the list, the revenue from those ten can subsidize the list-chasing efforts for all 400. We publish a handful of books a year. Every dollar we spend on list manipulation is a dollar we’re not spending on making the book better or reaching its natural audience.

I also think the importance of bestseller lists is declining, slowly but steadily. Twenty years ago, the Times list was a primary discovery mechanism. People walked into bookstores and bought whatever was on the list. Today, discovery happens through a much wider range of channels: social media, podcasts, book clubs, TikTok, Substack newsletters, word of mouth amplified by group chats. A book can find a huge audience without ever appearing on a major bestseller list, and an increasing number of them do.

The best books we’ve published are the ones where we focused entirely on making the book as good as it could be and then finding the readers who would love it. The worst experiences we’ve had were the ones where we tried to engineer a launch week spike.

What This Means in Practice

On a practical level, not chasing lists has freed us to make decisions that are better for our books and our authors. We can publish in August, which is traditionally a dead month that serious list-chasers avoid. We can do soft launches for books that need time to find their audience, rather than going all-in on a launch week that may or may not generate the spike we need. We can price our books at a level that makes sense for the content rather than at a level designed to maximize unit sales in a tracking week.

We also spend more time and money on things that improve the reading experience. Better cover design. More rounds of editing. Higher quality paper and binding for our print editions. These are the things that make a reader pick up a book in a store, buy it, love it, and tell their friends about it. None of them show up on a bestseller list, but all of them contribute to the long-term health of a book’s life.

I’ve noticed something interesting since we made this shift. Our backlist sales have gone up. Books that we published two or three years ago are selling more copies now than they did at launch. I think this is because we’re investing in discoverability over time rather than concentrating all our efforts into a single week. A reader who discovers The Last Archive through a friend’s recommendation three years after publication is just as valuable as a reader who buys it during launch week. Maybe more valuable, because that recommendation is organic and carries more trust than any ad campaign.

The Bigger Question

Underneath all of this is a bigger question about what publishing is for. If the goal is to produce as many copies of a thing as possible in the shortest possible time, then bestseller lists are the right metric and chasing them makes sense. But I don’t think that’s what publishing is for, or at least, it’s not what ScrollWorks is for.

We exist to find good books and connect them with readers who will appreciate them. Sometimes those books sell a lot of copies. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, the measure of our success is whether the books we publish are worth reading and whether they find the people who need them. That’s a harder thing to quantify than a list position, and it doesn’t make for a good press release, but it’s an honest description of what we’re trying to do.

I’m not going to pretend that we never think about sales or that we’re some kind of literary nonprofit operating above the grubby concerns of commerce. We need to make money to keep publishing books. But I’d rather make that money by publishing books that matter to their readers than by gaming a tracking system to generate a vanity metric that impresses people at publishing parties.

If that makes us naive or arrogant or guilty of leaving money on the table, I can live with that. The books are better for it. The authors are happier. And the readers, the ones who find us, tend to stick around.

You can see our full catalog at scrollworksmedia.com/books and decide for yourself whether the approach is working.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish books worth reading, regardless of what any list says.

I was at a publishing conference in late 2022 when someone on a panel said, with considerable confidence, that the pandemic’s effect on reading habits had been “temporary” and that things were “returning to normal.” I wrote down the quote because I wanted to remember it, not because I agreed with it. I disagreed then and I disagree now. The pandemic changed how, what, and why people read, and many of those changes are permanent. Publishing will be dealing with the consequences for decades.

I want to be specific about this, because the conversation tends to drift into vague generalities about how “people read more during lockdown.” That’s true, but it’s the least interesting part of the story. The interesting part is what happened next, after the lockdowns ended and people went back to their normal lives, carrying new reading habits with them.

The Audiobook Explosion

Audiobooks were growing before the pandemic, but the growth rate was modest. What happened during 2020 and 2021 was closer to an explosion. People who had never listened to an audiobook before started listening because they wanted to consume books while doing other things: cooking, cleaning, exercising, staring at the wall in existential dread. Many of those new listeners kept listening after the pandemic receded.

The numbers tell part of the story. Audiobook revenue in the US has roughly doubled since 2019. But the numbers don’t capture the qualitative shift, which is that audiobooks went from a niche format used primarily by commuters and frequent travelers to a mainstream format used by a much wider range of people. I know retired teachers who now “read” three books a week by listening while they garden. I know college students who listen to course readings while working out. The identity of the audiobook consumer has changed, and it’s not changing back.

For publishers, this has real implications. Audio rights, once an afterthought in contract negotiations, are now a major revenue line. The quality expectations for audiobook production have gone up dramatically. In 2019, a competent narrator reading in a quiet studio was sufficient. Now listeners expect full performance, distinct character voices, pacing that matches the emotional content of the scene. We’ve had to rethink how we approach audio for every book we publish, and we’ve had to budget accordingly.

There’s also the question of whether audiobooks are “really reading.” I find this debate tiresome and slightly elitist. If someone absorbs the contents of a book through their ears instead of their eyes, they’ve read the book. The delivery mechanism doesn’t change the content. What does change is the relationship between reader and book, and I think publishers who pay attention to those differences will make better audio products. A book that works beautifully in print might need a different kind of narrator, or even a slightly different edit, to work in audio. We haven’t fully figured this out yet as an industry, but we’re getting there.

The Genre Shifts

One of the most visible pandemic-era changes was a massive shift in genre preferences. During the worst of the lockdowns, readers moved away from thrillers, true crime, and anything involving disease or societal collapse. This was understandable. When you’re living through a global health crisis, the last thing you want is a novel about a global health crisis.

What replaced those genres was surprising. Romance and fantasy saw enormous growth, which made sense as escapist choices. But so did literary fiction about small, domestic subjects: family relationships, community life, the ordinary textures of everyday existence. I think people were looking for reminders that normal life existed, that there was a world of small pleasures and manageable problems beyond the overwhelming global situation.

The interesting thing is that these genre shifts have persisted. Romance continues to dominate in a way it didn’t before 2020. Fantasy, especially the subgenre sometimes called “romantasy,” has become one of the biggest categories in publishing. And that market for quiet, domestic literary fiction? It hasn’t gone away. Readers who discovered they liked novels about people having dinner and talking about their feelings have kept reading those novels.

At ScrollWorks, this affected our thinking about what to publish. We’d always leaned toward literary fiction, but the pandemic reinforced our belief that there’s a real, sustainable audience for books that don’t rely on high-concept plots or genre hooks. Still Waters is a good example. It’s a quiet book about ordinary people in an ordinary place, and it’s found readers who connect with it deeply precisely because of that ordinariness. Pre-pandemic, I’m not sure it would have found the same audience.

The Rise of BookTok and Social Discovery

I remember the first time someone mentioned BookTok to me. It was 2021, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about. A year later, BookTok was driving more book sales than any traditional marketing channel, and publishers who had spent decades cultivating relationships with newspaper book reviewers were scrambling to figure out how to get a twenty-two-year-old in Austin to make a sixty-second video about their novel.

The pandemic accelerated the shift from professional gatekeepers to peer recommendation as the primary discovery mechanism for books. People stuck at home turned to social media for book recommendations, and they found that recommendations from regular readers, people who just loved books and wanted to talk about them, were often more useful and more trustworthy than recommendations from professional critics. BookTok was the most visible manifestation of this, but it happened across platforms: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Discord servers, group chats.

This has been genuinely disruptive to the publishing industry’s traditional marketing model. For decades, the path to book discovery ran through a handful of major newspapers and magazines. If the New York Times reviewed your book favorably, you’d see a sales bump. If NPR mentioned it, your book would appear in bookshops across the country. These channels still matter, but they no longer dominate. A single BookTok video can sell more copies than a New York Times review, and the demographics of the audience are completely different.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the democratization of book discovery is genuinely good. Books by diverse authors, books published by small presses, books that the traditional media establishment would have ignored, now have a path to finding readers. That’s wonderful. On the other hand, social media discovery tends to favor books with strong hooks, beautiful covers, and content that translates well to short video. Literary fiction with subtle pleasures that unfold over 300 pages is harder to sell in sixty seconds than a romance with a killer premise.

The Print Resurgence

Here’s something I didn’t expect. Print book sales went up during the pandemic and they’ve stayed up. Not ebooks, which saw a temporary spike during lockdowns and then returned to their pre-pandemic plateau. Physical, hold-in-your-hands print books. This defied every prediction I’d heard from tech-minded industry observers who were certain that the pandemic would accelerate the shift to digital reading.

The explanation, I think, is that people who spent all day staring at screens for work wanted something different when they sat down to read for pleasure. A physical book offers a kind of sensory relief that an e-reader doesn’t. It has texture, weight, a smell. It doesn’t ping you with notifications. You can’t accidentally check your email while reading a physical book. In an era of overwhelming digital stimulation, the analog object became more appealing, not less.

This has practical implications for publishers. We’ve invested more in the physical quality of our books: better paper, more thoughtful cover design, special editions with features that make the physical object worth owning. I think the era of treating the print book as just a delivery mechanism for text is ending. The physical book is also a design object, a piece of craftsmanship, something that you display on a shelf and that signals something about who you are. Publishers who understand this and invest in the physical quality of their products will have an advantage.

The Subscription and Serialization Models

Another pandemic-era development that has reshaped publishing is the growth of subscription-based reading. Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, and similar services were already established, but the pandemic pushed more readers toward subscription models, partly because of convenience and partly because reading more books per month made a flat subscription fee more economical than buying individual titles.

This is a complicated development for publishers. On one hand, subscription models increase readership. On the other hand, they tend to compress the economic value of individual books. When a reader pays $10 a month for unlimited access, the per-book payment to the publisher can be quite low, especially for longer works. This creates incentives that I find worrying: pressure to publish shorter books, to use cliffhangers and serialization to keep readers subscribed, to prioritize volume over quality.

Serialization, in particular, is having a moment. The pandemic created an audience for serial fiction, partly through platforms like Wattpad and Royal Road and partly through Substack and Patreon, where writers publish chapters on a regular schedule. Some of this is excellent. Some of it is obviously rushed, published before it’s ready because the subscription model demands regular content. As a publisher who believes strongly in the editing process, the pressure to publish fast and frequently makes me nervous.

The Mental Health Connection

One of the most significant and least discussed pandemic changes is the explicit connection that readers now make between reading and mental health. Before the pandemic, people read for entertainment, education, and pleasure. Those motivations haven’t gone away, but a new one has been added: people now read as a conscious mental health practice, in the same category as meditation, exercise, and therapy.

I’ve seen this in our reader surveys and in the reviews our books receive. People write things like “this book got me through a difficult time” or “reading this helped with my anxiety.” These aren’t just figures of speech. They’re literal descriptions of how people are using books. The pandemic made everyone more aware of their mental health and more intentional about the activities that support it, and reading is one of those activities.

For publishers, this means that the emotional experience of reading a book matters more than ever. Not in a manipulative, engineered-for-tears way, but in a genuine, does-this-book-make-the-reader-feel-something-real way. The books that succeed in this new environment are the ones that offer authentic emotional experiences, whether that’s the comfort of a well-told romance, the intellectual stimulation of a great piece of nonfiction, or the catharsis of a novel that deals honestly with difficult material.

Where This Leaves Us

The publishing industry has a habit of treating disruptions as temporary. Digital publishing, self-publishing, social media marketing: each time, the initial reaction was “this will blow over,” followed by years of scrambling to catch up when it didn’t. The pandemic reading shifts are no different. They’re here to stay, and the publishers who adapt to them will thrive while the ones who wait for “normal” to return will struggle.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve tried to lean into these changes rather than resist them. We’re investing in audio. We’re building relationships with online book communities. We’re paying more attention to the physical quality of our print books. We’re thinking about the emotional experience our books offer and whether that experience matches what modern readers are looking for.

I don’t think any of this is revolutionary. It’s just paying attention to how the world has changed and adjusting accordingly. But in an industry that can be surprisingly resistant to change, paying attention feels like a competitive advantage.

One final observation. The pandemic didn’t just change individual reading habits; it changed the conversation about reading itself. Before 2020, talking about what you were reading was a niche activity, something you did with fellow book lovers or in the context of a book club. During and after the pandemic, reading became a mainstream topic of conversation in a way it hadn’t been for decades. People posted their reading stacks on Instagram. They discussed novels in group chats. They treated their reading lives as part of their identity in a public, visible way that would have seemed unusual ten years ago. This cultural shift benefits everyone in publishing, from authors to booksellers to publishers like us, because it means reading is no longer a private, slightly eccentric hobby. It’s a shared cultural practice that people are proud to participate in. That’s the pandemic’s most lasting gift to the book world, and I don’t think we’ll ever go back.

You can explore our current catalog and see how we’re putting these ideas into practice at scrollworksmedia.com/books.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We think about this stuff so our authors can focus on writing.

Last week, one of our authors received a box of finished copies of her new book. She posted a photo of herself holding it, beaming. The comments flooded in: congratulations, how exciting, you must be so proud. And she should be proud. But I noticed, as I always notice, that every comment was directed at the author. Not one mentioned the dozens of other people whose work made that book possible.

This is normal. It’s how publishing works, at least from the outside. The author gets the credit and the blame. Their name is on the cover. They do the interviews. They accept the awards. Behind them, invisible to almost everyone, is an army of people whose skills and labor turned a manuscript into a book. I want to talk about those people, because I work with them every day and I think what they do is remarkable and almost never acknowledged.

Copyeditors: The Last Line of Defense

I’ll start with copyeditors because they’re the people I feel most passionately about. A copyeditor’s job is to read the manuscript line by line, checking for errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency, and fact. This sounds mechanical, and some people treat it as if it is. It isn’t. Good copyediting requires a rare combination of precision and sensitivity. You need to catch every misplaced comma and every factual error, but you also need to recognize the difference between a mistake and a stylistic choice. If an author consistently uses sentence fragments for effect, a good copyeditor doesn’t “fix” them. A bad copyeditor does.

The best copyeditor I’ve ever worked with is a woman in her sixties who works from her home in Vermont. She doesn’t use social media. She doesn’t have a website. I’m not going to name her because she’d be mortified. What she does is read manuscripts with an attention to detail that borders on supernatural. She once caught a continuity error where a character’s eye color changed between chapter four and chapter seventeen. The developmental editor missed it. The author missed it. The proofreader, working after the copyeditor, would have missed it. She caught it, noted it in the margin with a gentle query, and moved on to the next page.

Copyeditors are typically paid per word or per page, and the rates have not kept up with inflation. A typical copyediting job for a full-length novel might pay between $1,500 and $3,000, depending on the length and complexity of the text. For work that takes two to three weeks of full-time effort and requires a skill set that takes years to develop, that’s not a lot of money. It bothers me, and I try to pay above market rates when our budget allows, but the economics of small publishing are what they are.

Book Designers: Making the First Impression

People absolutely do judge books by their covers. This isn’t shallow; it’s human nature. A book cover needs to communicate genre, tone, and quality in about two seconds, because that’s how long a potential reader spends looking at it on a shelf or a screen. The people who design those covers are doing one of the hardest jobs in graphic design, and most readers have no idea they exist.

Cover design is a strange discipline because the success criteria are so specific. A cover doesn’t just need to look good. It needs to look good at thumbnail size on a phone screen. It needs to communicate the right genre signals (a literary novel should not look like a thriller, even if the story has thriller elements). It needs to stand out on a shelf next to dozens of competing titles. And it needs to do all of this while satisfying the author, the publisher, the sales team, and the marketing department, all of whom may have different opinions about what the cover should look like.

I’ve sat in cover design meetings that lasted three hours. Three hours of looking at mockups, debating font choices, arguing about whether the color palette says “literary fiction” or “women’s fiction” (a distinction that is itself problematic, but that’s a different article). The designer sits through all of this, takes notes, goes back to their desk, and produces another round of options. And another. And another. The cover of The Cartographer’s Dilemma went through eleven rounds of revision before everyone was happy. The designer handled it with grace and professionalism, which is more than I can say for everyone else in the room.

Interior design is even less visible than cover design, but it matters just as much. The choice of typeface, the size of the margins, the spacing between lines, the way chapter openings are formatted: all of these affect the reading experience in ways that are felt even if they’re not consciously noticed. A well-designed interior makes reading feel effortless. A poorly designed one makes you vaguely uncomfortable without knowing why. The people who do this work are typographers and book designers, and they possess a body of knowledge about text and readability that goes back centuries.

Proofreaders: Catching What Everyone Else Missed

After the manuscript has been edited, copyedited, and laid out in its final design, a proofreader goes through it one more time. Their job is to catch anything that slipped through the previous rounds: typos that were introduced during the layout process, formatting inconsistencies, widows and orphans (those single lines of text stranded at the top or bottom of a page that look wrong even if you don’t know the technical terms for them).

Proofreading is the last quality check before a book goes to the printer, which means the proofreader carries an enormous responsibility. Every error they miss will be immortalized in print, potentially thousands of copies’ worth. I’ve worked with proofreaders who took this responsibility so seriously that they would read the same page three times, once for content errors, once for formatting, and once for visual consistency. It’s painstaking work that requires immense concentration, and it pays even less than copyediting, which is saying something.

One thing that non-publishing people don’t realize is that even with a copyeditor and a proofreader, published books still contain errors. It’s almost impossible to produce a completely error-free book. The human eye, no matter how trained, will occasionally skip over something. When a reader finds a typo in a published book and posts about it on social media, the comments always follow the same pattern: “How did nobody catch this?” The answer is that somebody probably did catch fifty other errors, and this one slipped through. Perfection in publishing is aspirational, not achievable.

Production Managers: The Logistics Wizards

Every physical book you’ve ever held went through a production process that involved dozens of decisions about paper, printing, binding, and distribution. The person who manages that process is the production manager, and their job is a bizarre combination of artistic sensibility and logistical precision.

A production manager has to know things like: What kind of paper should we use for a book with full-color photographs? (Coated stock, probably, but which weight?) How will the paper choice affect the book’s spine width, which affects the cover design, which is already finalized? If we use a matte laminate on the cover instead of a gloss laminate, how will that affect the print cost per unit? Can we afford to use a French flap format (those elegant folded edges on a paperback cover), or will the added cost push us over budget?

These sound like minor details, and individually they are. But collectively, they determine the physical experience of holding and reading the book. A great production manager makes choices that you never consciously notice but that contribute to the feeling that this is a well-made object worth owning. A bad production manager (or more commonly, a production process driven entirely by cost-cutting) produces books that feel cheap and disposable, regardless of the quality of the writing inside.

I once watched our production manager spend twenty minutes holding different paper samples up to a window, checking how the light passed through them. She was looking for show-through, the degree to which text on one side of the page is visible from the other side. She rejected three paper options before settling on one that was slightly more expensive but produced a much cleaner reading experience. Nobody will ever thank her for this. Nobody will ever know it happened. But every person who reads that book benefits from those twenty minutes at the window.

Indexers: Organizing the World

I’m going to talk about indexers even though most fiction publishers don’t use them, because I think they’re one of the most underappreciated specialists in the entire book industry. An indexer reads a completed, laid-out nonfiction book and creates the index at the back, that dense block of terms and page numbers that most readers barely glance at but that researchers, students, and serious readers rely on constantly.

Good indexing is an intellectual act, not a clerical one. The indexer has to read the book, understand its arguments and structure, anticipate what a reader might look for, and organize that information in a way that’s useful. They have to make judgment calls constantly. If a chapter discusses climate change’s effect on agriculture without using the phrase “food security,” should “food security” appear in the index with a see-also reference? A skilled indexer says yes, because that’s what the reader is likely to look up. An algorithm-generated index says no, because the exact phrase doesn’t appear in the text.

This is why computer-generated indexes are still inferior to human-created ones, and probably will be for a while. Indexing requires understanding meaning, not just recognizing words. The best indexers I’ve worked with have a gift for thinking like a reader, anticipating questions before they’re asked and providing answers in the index.

Sales Reps: The Bridge to Bookshops

Between a publisher and a bookshop sits a sales representative, a person whose job is to convince booksellers that a book is worth stocking. For small publishers like us, the sales rep is often the difference between a book being available in independent bookshops and a book being available only online.

Good sales reps actually read the books they’re selling, which might seem obvious but isn’t universal. They visit bookshops in person, talk to the buyers, learn what kinds of books sell in each store, and tailor their pitch accordingly. A book that would fly off the shelves in a college-town bookshop might sit unsold in a tourist-area shop, and vice versa. The sales rep knows these differences and adjusts their approach store by store.

We use a commission sales group that represents several small publishers, and our rep, a man named Dave who has been doing this for over twenty years, knows the independent bookshop ecosystem better than anyone I’ve met. He knows which bookshop owners are passionate about literary fiction, which ones have a customer base that skews toward history and biography, which ones are willing to take a chance on an unknown author if the pitch is good. This knowledge is invaluable, and it exists entirely in Dave’s head and in the heads of reps like him across the country.

Publicists: Getting the Word Out

Book publicity is a grind, and I mean that with genuine respect. A publicist’s job is to get media coverage for a book, which means sending advance copies to reviewers, pitching stories to journalists, arranging author interviews, coordinating events, and following up relentlessly with people who are bombarded with hundreds of pitches a week. The success rate for any individual pitch is low, which means a publicist has to be comfortable with rejection on a daily basis and still show up the next morning with enthusiasm.

The good publicists I’ve worked with have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the media ecosystem. They know which reviewer at which publication is most likely to be interested in a particular kind of book. They know which podcasts are worth pitching and which ones aren’t worth the time. They know the rhythms of the media calendar, when to pitch and when to hold off, which seasons are crowded and which have openings.

I think publicity is one of the hardest jobs in publishing because the results are so uncertain and so visible. When a publicist lands a big review or a major interview, everyone notices and the author is thrilled. When weeks of pitching produce nothing, the publicist absorbs the disappointment while already working on the next campaign. It’s emotionally demanding work, and the people who do it well are tougher than they get credit for.

The Collective Effort

I’ve left out many people: literary agents, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, bookshop staff, librarians, foreign rights managers, translators, audio engineers, narrators. Every one of them plays a role in getting a book from an author’s imagination to a reader’s hands. The process is longer, more complex, and more human-intensive than most people realize.

I wrote this piece because I think the romantic image of the solitary author producing a masterpiece in isolation, while appealing, obscures the reality that books are collaborative products. The author’s contribution is the most important one, sure. Without the writing, there’s nothing. But without the editing, the design, the production, the sales, and the publicity, the writing stays on the author’s hard drive and never reaches anyone.

Next time you finish a book you loved, flip to the acknowledgments page. Most authors thank their editor, their agent, and their family. The really thoughtful ones also thank their copyeditor, their designer, their publicist, and their production team. These are the unsung heroes of book production, the people who do exceptional work that is, by design, invisible. If they’ve done their jobs well, you’ll never notice they were there. That’s the point, and it’s a strange kind of excellence: the better you are at it, the less anyone knows.

To everyone who works behind the scenes on ScrollWorks books, including our titles like The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, and Still Waters: thank you. The books are better because of you.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We know who makes the books, even if most people don’t.

Last week, one of our authors received a box of finished copies of her new book. She posted a photo of herself holding it, beaming. The comments flooded in: congratulations, how exciting, you must be so proud. And she should be proud. But I noticed, as I always notice, that every comment was directed at the author. Not one mentioned the dozens of other people whose work made that book possible.

This is normal. It’s how publishing works, at least from the outside. The author gets the credit and the blame. Their name is on the cover. They do the interviews. They accept the awards. Behind them, invisible to almost everyone, is an army of people whose skills and labor turned a manuscript into a book. I want to talk about those people, because I work with them every day and I think what they do is remarkable and almost never acknowledged.

Copyeditors: The Last Line of Defense

I’ll start with copyeditors because they’re the people I feel most passionately about. A copyeditor’s job is to read the manuscript line by line, checking for errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency, and fact. This sounds mechanical, and some people treat it as if it is. It isn’t. Good copyediting requires a rare combination of precision and sensitivity. You need to catch every misplaced comma and every factual error, but you also need to recognize the difference between a mistake and a stylistic choice. If an author consistently uses sentence fragments for effect, a good copyeditor doesn’t “fix” them. A bad copyeditor does.

The best copyeditor I’ve ever worked with is a woman in her sixties who works from her home in Vermont. She doesn’t use social media. She doesn’t have a website. I’m not going to name her because she’d be mortified. What she does is read manuscripts with an attention to detail that borders on supernatural. She once caught a continuity error where a character’s eye color changed between chapter four and chapter seventeen. The developmental editor missed it. The author missed it. The proofreader, working after the copyeditor, would have missed it. She caught it, noted it in the margin with a gentle query, and moved on to the next page.

Copyeditors are typically paid per word or per page, and the rates have not kept up with inflation. A typical copyediting job for a full-length novel might pay between $1,500 and $3,000, depending on the length and complexity of the text. For work that takes two to three weeks of full-time effort and requires a skill set that takes years to develop, that’s not a lot of money. It bothers me, and I try to pay above market rates when our budget allows, but the economics of small publishing are what they are.

Book Designers: Making the First Impression

People absolutely do judge books by their covers. This isn’t shallow; it’s human nature. A book cover needs to communicate genre, tone, and quality in about two seconds, because that’s how long a potential reader spends looking at it on a shelf or a screen. The people who design those covers are doing one of the hardest jobs in graphic design, and most readers have no idea they exist.

Cover design is a strange discipline because the success criteria are so specific. A cover doesn’t just need to look good. It needs to look good at thumbnail size on a phone screen. It needs to communicate the right genre signals (a literary novel should not look like a thriller, even if the story has thriller elements). It needs to stand out on a shelf next to dozens of competing titles. And it needs to do all of this while satisfying the author, the publisher, the sales team, and the marketing department, all of whom may have different opinions about what the cover should look like.

I’ve sat in cover design meetings that lasted three hours. Three hours of looking at mockups, debating font choices, arguing about whether the color palette says “literary fiction” or “women’s fiction” (a distinction that is itself problematic, but that’s a different article). The designer sits through all of this, takes notes, goes back to their desk, and produces another round of options. And another. And another. The cover of The Cartographer’s Dilemma went through eleven rounds of revision before everyone was happy. The designer handled it with grace and professionalism, which is more than I can say for everyone else in the room.

Interior design is even less visible than cover design, but it matters just as much. The choice of typeface, the size of the margins, the spacing between lines, the way chapter openings are formatted: all of these affect the reading experience in ways that are felt even if they’re not consciously noticed. A well-designed interior makes reading feel effortless. A poorly designed one makes you vaguely uncomfortable without knowing why. The people who do this work are typographers and book designers, and they possess a body of knowledge about text and readability that goes back centuries.

Proofreaders: Catching What Everyone Else Missed

After the manuscript has been edited, copyedited, and laid out in its final design, a proofreader goes through it one more time. Their job is to catch anything that slipped through the previous rounds: typos that were introduced during the layout process, formatting inconsistencies, widows and orphans (those single lines of text stranded at the top or bottom of a page that look wrong even if you don’t know the technical terms for them).

Proofreading is the last quality check before a book goes to the printer, which means the proofreader carries an enormous responsibility. Every error they miss will be immortalized in print, potentially thousands of copies’ worth. I’ve worked with proofreaders who took this responsibility so seriously that they would read the same page three times, once for content errors, once for formatting, and once for visual consistency. It’s painstaking work that requires immense concentration, and it pays even less than copyediting, which is saying something.

One thing that non-publishing people don’t realize is that even with a copyeditor and a proofreader, published books still contain errors. It’s almost impossible to produce a completely error-free book. The human eye, no matter how trained, will occasionally skip over something. When a reader finds a typo in a published book and posts about it on social media, the comments always follow the same pattern: “How did nobody catch this?” The answer is that somebody probably did catch fifty other errors, and this one slipped through. Perfection in publishing is aspirational, not achievable.

Production Managers: The Logistics Wizards

Every physical book you’ve ever held went through a production process that involved dozens of decisions about paper, printing, binding, and distribution. The person who manages that process is the production manager, and their job is a bizarre combination of artistic sensibility and logistical precision.

A production manager has to know things like: What kind of paper should we use for a book with full-color photographs? (Coated stock, probably, but which weight?) How will the paper choice affect the book’s spine width, which affects the cover design, which is already finalized? If we use a matte laminate on the cover instead of a gloss laminate, how will that affect the print cost per unit? Can we afford to use a French flap format (those elegant folded edges on a paperback cover), or will the added cost push us over budget?

These sound like minor details, and individually they are. But collectively, they determine the physical experience of holding and reading the book. A great production manager makes choices that you never consciously notice but that contribute to the feeling that this is a well-made object worth owning. A bad production manager (or more commonly, a production process driven entirely by cost-cutting) produces books that feel cheap and disposable, regardless of the quality of the writing inside.

I once watched our production manager spend twenty minutes holding different paper samples up to a window, checking how the light passed through them. She was looking for show-through, the degree to which text on one side of the page is visible from the other side. She rejected three paper options before settling on one that was slightly more expensive but produced a much cleaner reading experience. Nobody will ever thank her for this. Nobody will ever know it happened. But every person who reads that book benefits from those twenty minutes at the window.

Indexers: Organizing the World

I’m going to talk about indexers even though most fiction publishers don’t use them, because I think they’re one of the most underappreciated specialists in the entire book industry. An indexer reads a completed, laid-out nonfiction book and creates the index at the back, that dense block of terms and page numbers that most readers barely glance at but that researchers, students, and serious readers rely on constantly.

Good indexing is an intellectual act, not a clerical one. The indexer has to read the book, understand its arguments and structure, anticipate what a reader might look for, and organize that information in a way that’s useful. They have to make judgment calls constantly. If a chapter discusses climate change’s effect on agriculture without using the phrase “food security,” should “food security” appear in the index with a see-also reference? A skilled indexer says yes, because that’s what the reader is likely to look up. An algorithm-generated index says no, because the exact phrase doesn’t appear in the text.

This is why computer-generated indexes are still inferior to human-created ones, and probably will be for a while. Indexing requires understanding meaning, not just recognizing words. The best indexers I’ve worked with have a gift for thinking like a reader, anticipating questions before they’re asked and providing answers in the index.

Sales Reps: The Bridge to Bookshops

Between a publisher and a bookshop sits a sales representative, a person whose job is to convince booksellers that a book is worth stocking. For small publishers like us, the sales rep is often the difference between a book being available in independent bookshops and a book being available only online.

Good sales reps actually read the books they’re selling, which might seem obvious but isn’t universal. They visit bookshops in person, talk to the buyers, learn what kinds of books sell in each store, and tailor their pitch accordingly. A book that would fly off the shelves in a college-town bookshop might sit unsold in a tourist-area shop, and vice versa. The sales rep knows these differences and adjusts their approach store by store.

We use a commission sales group that represents several small publishers, and our rep, a man named Dave who has been doing this for over twenty years, knows the independent bookshop ecosystem better than anyone I’ve met. He knows which bookshop owners are passionate about literary fiction, which ones have a customer base that skews toward history and biography, which ones are willing to take a chance on an unknown author if the pitch is good. This knowledge is invaluable, and it exists entirely in Dave’s head and in the heads of reps like him across the country.

Publicists: Getting the Word Out

Book publicity is a grind, and I mean that with genuine respect. A publicist’s job is to get media coverage for a book, which means sending advance copies to reviewers, pitching stories to journalists, arranging author interviews, coordinating events, and following up relentlessly with people who are bombarded with hundreds of pitches a week. The success rate for any individual pitch is low, which means a publicist has to be comfortable with rejection on a daily basis and still show up the next morning with enthusiasm.

The good publicists I’ve worked with have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the media ecosystem. They know which reviewer at which publication is most likely to be interested in a particular kind of book. They know which podcasts are worth pitching and which ones aren’t worth the time. They know the rhythms of the media calendar, when to pitch and when to hold off, which seasons are crowded and which have openings.

I think publicity is one of the hardest jobs in publishing because the results are so uncertain and so visible. When a publicist lands a big review or a major interview, everyone notices and the author is thrilled. When weeks of pitching produce nothing, the publicist absorbs the disappointment while already working on the next campaign. It’s emotionally demanding work, and the people who do it well are tougher than they get credit for.

The Collective Effort

I’ve left out many people: literary agents, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, bookshop staff, librarians, foreign rights managers, translators, audio engineers, narrators. Every one of them plays a role in getting a book from an author’s imagination to a reader’s hands. The process is longer, more complex, and more human-intensive than most people realize.

I wrote this piece because I think the romantic image of the solitary author producing a masterpiece in isolation, while appealing, obscures the reality that books are collaborative products. The author’s contribution is the most important one, sure. Without the writing, there’s nothing. But without the editing, the design, the production, the sales, and the publicity, the writing stays on the author’s hard drive and never reaches anyone.

Next time you finish a book you loved, flip to the acknowledgments page. Most authors thank their editor, their agent, and their family. The really thoughtful ones also thank their copyeditor, their designer, their publicist, and their production team. These are the unsung heroes of book production, the people who do exceptional work that is, by design, invisible. If they’ve done their jobs well, you’ll never notice they were there. That’s the point, and it’s a strange kind of excellence: the better you are at it, the less anyone knows.

To everyone who works behind the scenes on ScrollWorks books, including our titles like The Last Archive, Echoes of Iron, and Still Waters: thank you. The books are better because of you.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We know who makes the books, even if most people don’t.

I read aloud to my partner on a road trip last summer. We were driving through western Pennsylvania, the kind of long, rolling highway that demands either a podcast or a conversation, and we’d run out of both. I pulled up a book on my phone and started reading from the passenger seat. I read for about ninety minutes, and by the time I stopped, something had shifted between us. We’d shared an experience that felt different from watching a movie together or listening to music. It was more intimate and more demanding. We talked about the book for the next hour.

That experience got me thinking about reading aloud as an adult activity. We accept without question that reading aloud to children is valuable. Pediatricians recommend it. Schools encourage it. The entire picture book industry depends on it. But somewhere around age ten or eleven, we stop reading aloud, and most people never start again. I think that’s a loss, and I want to make the case for why.

The Science of Listening

There’s actual research on this, and it’s more interesting than you might expect. Studies have shown that people process language differently when they hear it spoken aloud versus when they read it silently. Listening activates different brain regions and creates different patterns of engagement. When you hear someone read a passage with expression and timing, you process not just the words but the intonation, the pauses, the emphasis. These prosodic features carry meaning that the printed text only implies.

A 2019 study from the University of Waterloo found that words read aloud were remembered significantly better than words read silently. The researchers attributed this to what they called the “production effect,” the idea that the act of producing speech (or hearing someone else produce it) creates an additional memory trace that aids recall. This isn’t just relevant for students studying for exams. It means that reading aloud is a more immersive, more memorable way to experience a text.

I also find it interesting that the silent reading we take for granted is, historically speaking, pretty recent. For most of human history, reading was a spoken activity. Books were read aloud in groups, whether in monastic settings, aristocratic courts, or family parlors. The shift to silent, individual reading only became standard in the last few centuries. We think of silent reading as the default, but it’s actually the innovation. Reading aloud is the original.

What Gets Lost in Silent Reading

I’m an editor by training, and I can tell you with certainty that prose sounds different when you read it aloud. Sentences that look fine on the page reveal their flaws when spoken. A phrase that seemed elegant in print turns out to be a tongue-twister. A paragraph that seemed well-paced on the screen turns out to have no rhythm at all. This is why many editors and writing teachers recommend reading your work aloud as a revision technique. The ear catches things the eye misses.

But this principle works in reverse too. Prose that sounds beautiful when read aloud is doing something that silent reading doesn’t fully capture. When I read a passage from a novel out loud, I hear the music of the language in a way that silent reading only approximates. The rhythms of the sentences, the way consonants and vowels interact, the pacing of clauses within a paragraph: all of this is audible when spoken and invisible (or at least muted) when read silently.

Poetry suffers the most from silent reading. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I’ll say it plainly: I think most poetry is meant to be heard, and reading it silently is like looking at a photograph of a sunset. You get the general idea, but you miss the thing that makes it extraordinary. The sound of language, its rhythms and textures and physical weight in the mouth, is what separates poetry from prose arranged in short lines. When you read a poem silently, you’re experiencing maybe sixty percent of what the poet created.

I started going to poetry readings a few years ago, after a long period of reading poetry only on the page. The difference was revelatory. Poems I’d admired on the page became poems I loved when I heard them spoken. The experience of sitting in a room and listening to a poet read their own work, with all the hesitations and emphases and breaths that the printed text can’t capture, changed my understanding of what poetry is and what it can do.

Reading Aloud as a Social Activity

We live in an era of shared screens but increasingly solitary experiences. Two people can be in the same room, both on their phones, consuming completely different content. This is fine, I’m not going to moralize about screen time, but it does mean that we have fewer shared cultural experiences than we used to. Reading aloud is a way to create one.

When someone reads a book aloud and another person listens, they’re creating a shared experience in real time. They’re in the same story at the same moment. The listener can’t skip ahead. The reader can’t skim. Both are committed to the pace of the spoken word, which is slower and more deliberate than the pace of silent reading. This enforced slowing down is, I think, part of what makes the experience so rewarding. We’re so used to consuming content at maximum speed that the deliberate pace of listening to someone read feels almost countercultural.

I’ve talked to couples who read aloud to each other regularly, and they describe it as one of their favorite shared activities. One couple in their seventies told me they’d been reading a book aloud together every evening for forty years. They alternated chapters. They kept a list of every book they’d read this way, and it was over 500 titles long. The husband said, “It’s the best part of our day,” and his wife nodded, and I believed them completely.

Reading aloud also works in groups. Book clubs that read passages aloud report deeper, more engaged discussions than clubs where everyone reads silently and then talks about it. There’s something about the shared experience of hearing the same words at the same time that creates a foundation for conversation. You’re not just talking about what you remember from your individual reading. You’re talking about what you just heard together.

The Audiobook Question

Someone is going to ask: isn’t this just audiobooks? And the answer is no, not exactly. Audiobooks are wonderful. I listen to them regularly. But listening to a professional narrator perform a book is a different experience from having someone you know read to you in person.

The difference is partly about performance quality (professional narrators are, unsurprisingly, better at narration than most amateurs) and partly about context. An audiobook is a polished, produced product. Reading aloud is a live, imperfect, human activity. The reader stumbles over words. They mispronounce something and correct themselves. They laugh at a joke before they get to the punchline. They get emotional at a sad passage and have to pause. All of these “imperfections” are actually what make the experience meaningful. They’re evidence of a real person engaging with the text in real time, and that engagement is communicated to the listener in ways that a polished recording can’t replicate.

I also think there’s a difference in attention. When I listen to an audiobook, I’m usually doing something else: driving, cooking, exercising. The audiobook is background. When someone reads to me in person, I’m sitting there, doing nothing but listening. The audiobook competes with other stimuli. The live reading commands full attention. Both are valid ways to experience a book, but they’re not the same.

Practical Advice for Starting

If you’re interested in trying this but feel awkward about it (and it does feel awkward at first, I won’t pretend otherwise), here are some suggestions based on my experience.

Start with short pieces. A chapter of a novel is a good length. An essay is even better. A short story is ideal, because you get the satisfaction of completing something in a single session. Don’t begin with War and Peace. Begin with something that takes fifteen or twenty minutes to read.

Choose books with strong prose. Not every book benefits equally from being read aloud. Books that are primarily plot-driven and written in plain, functional language work fine silently but don’t gain much from being spoken. Books with distinctive voice, beautiful language, or strong dialogue come alive when read aloud. I’ve found that literary fiction, memoir, and essay collections tend to work best. Our title Still Waters is the kind of book that rewards reading aloud, because the language is doing so much work that you lose something when you skim.

Don’t try to perform. You’re not an audiobook narrator, and you don’t need to be. Read at a natural pace, in your normal voice. If there’s dialogue, a slight shift in tone is enough to distinguish characters; you don’t need to do accents or voices. The point is to share the experience of the text, not to put on a show.

Read to someone who’s doing something with their hands. I’ve found that reading aloud works beautifully when the listener is knitting, cooking, drawing, or doing some other manual activity. The combination of listening and handwork creates a state of relaxed attention that’s quite pleasant. My partner does crossword puzzles while I read, which struck me as rude at first until she told me she was actually paying more attention that way. Some people focus better when their hands are busy.

Reading Aloud to Yourself

You don’t need a listener to benefit from reading aloud. Reading to yourself, alone in a room, is its own kind of experience. It forces you to slow down, which means you notice more. It engages your body as well as your mind: your diaphragm, your tongue, your jaw. It turns reading from a purely mental activity into a physical one, and I find that the physical engagement deepens my connection to the text.

Writers have known this for centuries. Charles Dickens read his work aloud constantly, both as a revision technique and as performance. Flannery O’Connor reportedly read her stories aloud to her mother. Many contemporary writers read their work aloud as part of their editing process, and the ones I’ve talked to say they can’t imagine skipping this step. If the people who create literature find value in hearing it spoken, maybe the people who consume it should consider doing the same.

I’ve started a practice of reading a few pages aloud to myself every morning, usually poetry or prose that I find particularly beautiful. It takes about ten minutes and it’s become one of my favorite parts of the day. It’s different from meditation, though it has some of the same calming effects. It’s different from studying, though I retain more of what I read this way. It’s its own thing, a kind of daily communion with language that I’ve come to value enormously.

Why This Matters Now

We’re living through a period when attention is fragmented, when most of our reading is done on screens that constantly interrupt us, and when the shared experience of culture is increasingly rare. Reading aloud addresses all three of these problems simultaneously. It demands sustained attention. It works without a screen. And it creates a shared experience between reader and listener.

I’m not suggesting that reading aloud should replace silent reading. Silent reading has its own virtues, primarily speed and privacy. I’m suggesting that reading aloud should supplement it, that it’s a valuable practice that most adults have abandoned without ever making a conscious decision to do so. We just… stopped. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, reading aloud went from something we did every day to something we never did, and most of us never questioned the change.

Try it this week. Read a chapter of whatever you’re currently reading out loud, either to someone else or to yourself. Pay attention to how it feels different from silent reading. Notice what you hear in the prose that you didn’t see on the page. And if you discover that you like it, keep going. The books will reward you for it.

If you’re looking for something to read aloud, browse our catalog for books with prose that rewards slow, careful attention.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We believe books are meant to be heard as well as seen.

Every few months, an article goes viral about reading speed. The headline is usually something like “The Average Person Reads X Words Per Minute: Here’s How You Compare.” The comment sections fill up with people bragging about how fast they read, people confessing they’re slow readers, and people insisting that speed reading is a scam. I’ve read enough of these discussions to have developed a theory, which is that our obsession with reading speed is mostly a waste of time and energy, and that the thing your reading speed actually tells us about you is, with a few exceptions, nothing meaningful at all.

But I want to dig into this properly, because the topic is more interesting than the hot takes suggest. Reading speed touches on questions about cognition, education, culture, and the very nature of what it means to “read” something. So let’s do this.

What the Numbers Say

The commonly cited average reading speed for English-language adults is somewhere between 200 and 300 words per minute. This number comes from various studies conducted over the past century, and it’s reasonably consistent across the research. College-educated adults tend to read a bit faster, around 250 to 300 words per minute. Speed readers claim rates of 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute or more. Some claim rates even higher than that.

Here’s the thing about those speed reading claims: they mostly don’t hold up under scrutiny. A comprehensive review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2016 examined the evidence for speed reading and found that, while people can certainly skim text at very high rates, their comprehension drops significantly when they do. The tradeoff between speed and comprehension is not a training problem that can be solved with technique. It’s a fundamental constraint of how human cognition processes language. Your eyes need time to fixate on words. Your brain needs time to parse syntax and construct meaning. You can push the speed up, but you lose understanding as a consequence.

This doesn’t mean speed reading courses are entirely useless. They can teach useful skimming strategies for situations where you need to extract specific information from a text quickly. But the promise of reading a full novel at 1,500 words per minute with full comprehension is, based on the evidence, not realistic for the vast majority of people.

The Things That Actually Affect How Fast You Read

If average reading speeds don’t vary as dramatically between individuals as the internet would have you believe, what does affect how fast someone reads? Several things, and most of them have nothing to do with innate ability.

The difficulty of the text is the most obvious factor. I read a thriller at maybe 350 words per minute. I read a dense work of philosophy at maybe 100 words per minute. Same reader, same eyes, same brain, wildly different speeds. This is because different texts make different demands. A thriller uses simple, direct prose and familiar narrative structures. Your brain can process it quickly because it’s doing less work per word. A philosophy text introduces complex ideas, unfamiliar terminology, and arguments that require you to hold multiple propositions in mind simultaneously. Your brain slows down because it has more work to do.

Familiarity with the subject matter also plays a huge role. An economist reads an economics paper faster than I do, not because she’s a faster reader in general, but because she already knows the concepts and vocabulary. She doesn’t have to pause to figure out what “marginal utility” means. She doesn’t have to reread a sentence because the logical structure is unfamiliar. Background knowledge acts as a kind of reading lubricant: the more you know about a subject, the faster you can process text about it.

This, incidentally, is one of the strongest arguments for reading widely. People who read across many subjects build up a base of background knowledge that makes all their subsequent reading faster and easier. It’s a compounding effect. The first book you read about, say, evolutionary biology is slow going. The tenth is noticeably easier. By the fiftieth, you’re reading at a pace that would seem impossibly fast to the version of you that struggled through the first one.

Your physical environment matters more than most people acknowledge. Lighting, noise level, comfort, time of day: all of these affect reading speed and comprehension. I read fastest in the morning, in a quiet room, with good natural light. I read slowest in the evening, on a crowded train, with overhead fluorescent lighting. The difference is substantial. If I tested my reading speed under those two conditions, I’d get results that differed by thirty or forty percent, and neither number would be a meaningful measure of my “real” reading speed because there’s no such thing.

The Cultural Baggage of Fast Reading

I think the reason people care so much about reading speed is that our culture equates speed with intelligence. Fast readers are presumed to be smart. Slow readers are presumed to be, if not unintelligent, then at least less capable. This assumption is woven into our educational system. Students who read quickly are tracked into advanced classes. Students who read slowly receive remediation. The implicit message is clear: faster is better.

I think this is largely wrong, and I think it does real harm to people who happen to be slower readers. There are many reasons someone might read slowly that have nothing to do with intelligence. They might be reading in a second language. They might have dyslexia or another reading difference. They might simply be reading more carefully, pausing to think about what they’ve read, making connections to other things they know. A slow reader who deeply engages with a text and remembers it five years later has, by any reasonable standard, “read” that text more successfully than a fast reader who blew through it and forgot it by the following week.

I’ve known people who read extremely fast and retained very little. I’ve known people who read slowly and could recall specific passages from books they’d read decades ago. Speed and comprehension are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable does a disservice to both fast and slow readers.

The Goodreads Problem

I want to talk about Goodreads for a minute, because I think it has done more to warp our relationship with reading speed and reading quantity than any other single platform. Goodreads, for those unfamiliar, is a social network for readers. You log the books you’ve read, rate them, write reviews, and set an annual reading challenge: “I want to read 50 books this year” or whatever number you choose.

The reading challenge feature turns reading into a game with a quantifiable score. And games, as we know from every other domain, encourage optimization. People start choosing shorter books because they count the same as long ones toward the annual total. People start skimming or even abandoning books that don’t hold their interest, not because they’ve made a conscious decision about how to spend their time, but because the unfinished book is holding them back from their number. People feel guilty in December when they’re at 43 out of 50 and the year is running out.

All of this is insane. Reading is not a competitive sport. There is no trophy for reading more books than someone else. A person who reads five books a year and thinks deeply about each one is doing something more valuable (in my opinion) than a person who reads a hundred books a year and forgets them all. But the Goodreads interface, with its progress bars and year-end statistics, creates an implicit hierarchy where more is better, and the easiest way to read more is to read faster.

I deleted my Goodreads account three years ago, and my relationship with reading improved immediately. I stopped counting. I stopped feeling guilty about slow books. I started rereading things I’d already read, which Goodreads discourages because you can’t log the same book twice as a “new” read. Rereading is one of the great pleasures of a reading life, and it’s economically irrational, which is why a platform built on quantification doesn’t support it well.

Fast Reading vs. Slow Reading: A False Dichotomy

The conversation about reading speed tends to split into two camps. On one side: speed reading enthusiasts who believe you can and should read faster, and that doing so will make you more productive, more knowledgeable, and more successful. On the other side: slow reading advocates who believe that the only real reading is deep, careful, contemplative reading, and that speed reading is a bastardization of the whole enterprise.

Both camps are wrong, or more precisely, both are right about some things and wrong about others. The truth is that different texts demand different reading speeds, and a skilled reader adjusts their pace constantly. I skim the news. I read emails at moderate speed. I read poetry slowly. I read contracts very slowly. I read novels at whatever pace the prose demands, which varies chapter by chapter and sometimes sentence by sentence. This isn’t a technique I learned. It’s something every experienced reader does naturally, and it’s what reading speed discussions completely miss when they try to assign a single number to something that’s actually fluid and context-dependent.

The best readers I know aren’t fast readers or slow readers. They’re flexible readers. They can tear through a page-turning thriller at high speed when the situation calls for it, and they can sit with a single paragraph of Proust for ten minutes when the situation calls for that instead. The speed isn’t the point. The responsiveness to the text is the point.

What Your Reading Speed Actually Tells You

So, after all of this, what does your reading speed say about you? I promised in the title that the answer was “probably nothing,” and I’ll stand by that with a few qualifications.

If you read significantly below the average range (well under 150 words per minute) and you find reading effortful and exhausting, that might be worth investigating. It could indicate a vision problem, a reading disability, or some other issue that a specialist could help with. This is not a value judgment. Some of the most brilliant, creative people I’ve known have been slow readers due to dyslexia or other differences, and they’ve found ways to work with their reading speed rather than against it.

If you read within the normal range, which is most people, your speed is telling you nothing useful about your intelligence, your education, or your character. It’s telling you roughly how fast your eyes and brain process written English, which is determined by a mix of practice, familiarity, and cognitive factors that are largely outside your control.

If you read significantly above the average range, congratulations, but this also doesn’t tell you much. You might be a more experienced reader. You might process language slightly faster than average. You might just be a better skimmer who misses more than you realize. Without a comprehension test alongside the speed test, a high reading speed is a number without context.

What I Actually Care About

I work in publishing. I care about reading. And what I care about, specifically, is not how fast people read but whether they read in a way that gives them something. That “something” could be knowledge, pleasure, comfort, excitement, a new perspective, a phrase that sticks in their head for years. None of these outcomes are correlated with speed. A reader who takes three months to finish a novel but thinks about it for the rest of their life has gotten more from that book than a reader who finished it in two days and moved on immediately.

When I acquire a book for ScrollWorks, I never think about reading speed. I think about whether the book rewards attention. I think about whether there are sentences worth rereading, ideas worth sitting with, characters who linger after the last page. The books I’m most proud of publishing, books like The Last Archive and The Cartographer’s Dilemma, are books that get better the more slowly and carefully you read them. They’re not optimized for speed. They’re optimized for depth.

So the next time you see an article about reading speed or someone asks how many books you read last year, feel free to ignore the question entirely. Read at whatever speed you read. Read whatever you want to read. Read it twice if you feel like it. The only metric that matters is whether the reading is doing something for you, and only you can measure that.

Browse our catalog for books that reward reading at any speed.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We read fast sometimes, slow sometimes, and never count.