I want to tell you about a comma. Specifically, a comma on page 214 of a book we published last year, in the middle of a sentence that read: “She stood in the doorway, watching him leave, and felt nothing at all.” The author’s original version had no comma after “doorway.” The sentence read: “She stood in the doorway watching him leave, and felt nothing at all.” The copy editor added the comma. The author initially objected, arguing that the lack of a pause after “doorway” better conveyed the continuous, almost involuntary nature of the watching. The copy editor explained that without the comma, the participial phrase “watching him leave” could be misread as restrictive, implying that she stood in the doorway specifically for the purpose of watching him leave, rather than happening to watch him leave while standing there. The distinction matters, because the character’s emotional state in that scene is one of accidental witness, not deliberate observation.

That conversation about a single comma took about fifteen minutes. The copy editor was right. The comma went in. And no reader will ever know it happened.

This is the paradox of copy editing: when it’s done well, it’s completely invisible. The reader experiences a clean, clear text and assumes it arrived that way from the author’s desk. They don’t see the hundreds of small decisions, the corrected inconsistencies, the clarified ambiguities, the grammatical tangles that were quietly untangled between the manuscript stage and the printed page. Copy editors work in the negative space. Their success is measured by the absence of problems, which means that the better they are at their job, the less anyone notices they exist.

I think this is a problem. Not the invisibility itself, which is appropriate and by design, but the way it leads to copy editors being undervalued, underpaid, and increasingly cut from production budgets by publishers looking to save money. As someone who has seen, firsthand, the difference between a manuscript that has been properly copy edited and one that hasn’t, I want to make the case for why this role matters more than most people in and out of publishing realize.

First, let’s clarify what copy editing actually is, because it gets confused with several other editorial functions. Copy editing is not the same as developmental editing, which focuses on the big-picture structure of a book: plot, character, pacing, theme. Developmental editors work with the author to shape the manuscript at the level of chapters and scenes and narrative arcs. Copy editing happens later in the process, after the major structural work is done, and it operates at the level of sentences, words, and punctuation. It’s also distinct from proofreading, which is the final check for typos and formatting errors. Copy editing sits between these two stages: more granular than developmental editing, more substantive than proofreading.

A good copy editor does several things simultaneously. They check for grammatical correctness, which sounds simple until you realize how many grammatical rules are genuinely ambiguous or context-dependent. They ensure consistency: if a character’s eyes are described as blue on page 30, they had better still be blue on page 250. They fact-check claims, verify spellings of proper nouns, and flag anachronisms. They smooth transitions, clarify pronoun references, and catch logical gaps. They maintain the author’s voice while cleaning up the author’s prose, which is a needle-threading exercise that requires both technical skill and a fine literary ear.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it’s where copy editing becomes an art rather than a mechanical process. Every writer has a voice, a distinctive way of using language that includes deliberate departures from “correct” grammar. A copy editor who mechanically enforces standard grammar on every sentence will flatten the voice and damage the book. The skill is in distinguishing between errors (which should be fixed) and stylistic choices (which should be respected). This requires reading the entire manuscript with enough attention to internalize the author’s patterns, to understand which irregularities are intentional and which are mistakes. It’s painstaking work, and it demands a kind of ego-free intelligence that is, in my experience, rare.

Let me give you some concrete examples of the kind of problems copy editors catch.

Timeline inconsistencies are among the most common and most dangerous. In a novel that spans months or years, keeping track of when events happen in relation to each other is surprisingly difficult, even for meticulous writers. Our copy editor for The Last Archive caught a scene where a character references an event that, according to the timeline established earlier in the book, hasn’t happened yet. The author had revised the chapter order late in the writing process and missed the chronological ripple effect. Without the copy editor, that error would have been in the published book, and some sharp-eyed reader would have emailed us about it within the first week. (Readers are very good at catching these things, and very enthusiastic about reporting them.)

Character consistency issues are another frequent catch. In a long manuscript written over months or years, authors sometimes forget details about their own characters. A minor character might be left-handed in chapter three and right-handed in chapter twelve. Someone’s hometown might shift from Ohio to Indiana between appearances. These aren’t plot holes in the traditional sense, but they break the illusion of the fictional world, and once a reader notices one, they start looking for others, which pulls them out of the story and into a quality-control mindset that is death to immersion.

Then there are the purely linguistic issues that a copy editor catches by sheer attentiveness to language. Dangling modifiers: “Walking to the store, the rain began.” (The rain was not walking to the store.) Misplaced commas that change meaning: “Let’s eat Grandma” versus “Let’s eat, Grandma.” Homophones that spell-check won’t catch: “he poured over the documents” (he was a liquid?) versus “he pored over the documents.” Subtle word usage errors: “She was nonplussed,” which most people use to mean unimpressed but actually means bewildered. These are the kinds of errors that a spell-checker will miss, that a developmental editor isn’t focused on, and that only a trained copy editor is equipped to catch systematically.

I want to talk about the economics, because this is where the problem gets real. Copy editing a book-length manuscript takes, on average, 40 to 80 hours of concentrated work. For a 300-page novel, a thorough copy editor will spend about two to three weeks reading, marking, querying, and re-checking. The going rate for freelance copy editing ranges from about $30 to $50 per hour, depending on experience and specialization. That puts the cost of copy editing a single book somewhere between $1,200 and $4,000.

For a large publisher with a healthy budget, that’s manageable. For a small press like ScrollWorks, it’s one of our biggest per-title expenses after printing. And for self-published authors, who are often working with very tight budgets, it can be prohibitively expensive. The result is that an increasing number of books are being published with inadequate or no copy editing. I’ve read self-published novels with premise, characters, and narrative voice that were genuinely impressive, undermined by a steady stream of grammatical errors, inconsistencies, and awkward constructions that a copy editor would have caught in the first pass.

Even in traditional publishing, copy editing has been squeezed. As publishers have consolidated and cut costs, editorial departments have shrunk, and copy editing is often one of the first things to get reduced or outsourced. I’ve talked to editors at major houses who admit that their copy editing budgets are a fraction of what they were ten or fifteen years ago. Manuscripts that would once have received two full copy editing passes now get one, or get a “light” copy edit that focuses on catching obvious errors rather than the kind of deep, sentence-level engagement I’ve been describing.

This penny-pinching is, I believe, genuinely damaging to the quality of published books. Readers may not consciously notice the absence of good copy editing, but they feel it. A book with inconsistencies, unclear pronoun references, and grammatical hiccups creates a subtle but cumulative sense of unreliability. The reader can’t quite trust the text, and that lack of trust interferes with the immersion that is the whole point of reading fiction. It’s like watching a movie where the boom mic keeps dipping into the frame. Each individual intrusion is minor, but the cumulative effect is that you never fully lose yourself in the story.

At ScrollWorks, we treat copy editing as a non-negotiable production expense. Every manuscript we publish gets a full, thorough copy edit from a professional editor. We can’t always afford the most experienced editors in the business, but we’ve built relationships with a small group of freelancers whose work we trust, and we give them the time they need to do the job properly. This is one of the things we don’t cut when budgets get tight, because I’ve learned through painful experience that the cost of a bad copy edit, in reader complaints, in reviews that mention errors, in the general sense that a book is less than it should be, far exceeds the cost of a good one.

I also want to give some credit to copy editors as readers. The best copy editors I’ve worked with are not just technicians. They’re deeply perceptive readers who notice things about the manuscript that the author and the developmental editor missed. Our copy editor for Echoes of Iron flagged a passage where the narrator’s tone shifted abruptly in a way that felt unearned. This was technically a developmental note, not a copy editing note, but she mentioned it because she’d been reading so closely that she couldn’t let it pass. The author revised the passage, and the book was better for it. That kind of engagement, that willingness to go beyond the strict boundaries of the role because the text demands it, is what separates a great copy editor from a competent one.

A few words about the relationship between copy editors and authors, which can be fraught. Authors pour years of their lives into manuscripts. Having someone mark up that manuscript with corrections and queries can feel intensely personal, even when the copy editor is being diplomatic and constructive. I’ve seen authors react to copy editing with defensiveness, anger, and occasionally outright hostility. “I wrote it that way on purpose” is a sentence I’ve heard many times, and sometimes it’s true, in which case the copy editor’s query should be overridden, and sometimes it’s a reflexive defense of an error the author didn’t realize they’d made.

The most productive author-copy editor relationships are built on mutual respect. The author respects the copy editor’s expertise and engages with their queries seriously rather than dismissing them reflexively. The copy editor respects the author’s voice and intentions and frames their suggestions as questions rather than directives. When this dynamic works, the result is a text that is both more technically sound and more fully realized as a work of art. When it doesn’t work, the result is a mess of stet marks and resentment that nobody enjoys.

I want to close with something I tell every author we work with at the beginning of the editing process. The copy editor is not your adversary. They’re your last line of defense before your words meet the public. They are the person who will save you from the embarrassment of having a character with two different birthdays, or a semicolon where there should be a colon, or a scene set in the morning that somehow becomes afternoon without anyone noticing. They’re the person who cares about your prose at a level of granularity that even you, the author, may not match, because they’re reading with the specific purpose of making sure every sentence does exactly what you wanted it to do.

Every book you’ve ever loved was copy edited by someone whose name you probably don’t know. That anonymity is, in a strange way, the highest form of professional accomplishment. It means the copy editor did their job so well that you never had reason to notice. But I notice. I notice every time I read a clean, clear, consistent text that lets me lose myself in the story without stumbling over errors. And I’m grateful, every time, for the invisible hands that made it so.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is held every October in a convention center the size of a small city. You enter through hall after hall of publishers from 80-something countries, navigating crowds that peak at over 300,000 visitors across five days, and somewhere around hour three of your first day, you realize something: the international book trade is alive, enormous, and conducted largely through handshake agreements made over terrible coffee in glass-walled meeting rooms. If you want to understand how the publishing industry actually works, not how it’s depicted in New York media profiles of literary agents, but how the global machinery of rights, distribution, and production actually functions, you need to spend time at a book fair.

I’ve attended Frankfurt three times and the London Book Fair twice. I’ve also been to BookExpo America (before it folded), the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and several smaller regional fairs. Each has its own character, but they all serve the same basic function: they’re marketplaces where the business of publishing happens in person, face to face, at a speed and efficiency that email and Zoom calls simply cannot match.

Most readers have no idea that book fairs exist, or if they do, they assume they’re basically oversized versions of the literary festivals I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. They’re not. Literary festivals are for readers. Book fairs are for the industry. The distinction matters. At a festival, you browse tables and attend panels. At a book fair, you sit in pre-scheduled thirty-minute meetings with rights managers, foreign publishers, literary agents, and distributors, and you negotiate the deals that determine which books get published where, in what languages, and at what prices.

Let me explain how this works in practice, because the mechanics are fascinating and almost entirely opaque to anyone outside the industry.

Say we publish a novel at ScrollWorks that does well in the U.S. market. A publisher in Germany might be interested in acquiring the German-language rights to publish a translated edition. Historically, and still predominantly, this deal gets done at a book fair. Our rights person (at our scale, that’s me wearing a different hat) meets with the German publisher’s acquisitions editor in a meeting room at Frankfurt. I bring a one-page sell sheet with the book’s description, sales figures, review quotes, and a sample chapter. They’ve usually already read the manuscript or a partial, because I sent it ahead of the fair. We discuss terms: advance, royalty rates, territory, publication timeline. If there’s interest from multiple foreign publishers, there might be a mini-auction, conducted over the course of the fair, with offers going back and forth between meetings.

The whole thing sounds archaic in an era of instant digital communication. Why fly to Germany to sit in a meeting room when you could have the same conversation over email? This is the question that tech-minded people always ask, and it reveals a misunderstanding of how negotiation works in publishing.

Publishing deals, especially international ones, are built on relationships. A German publisher deciding whether to take a chance on a small American press’s debut novel is making a bet that involves significant money, time, and reputation. They’re not just buying a manuscript. They’re entering a partnership with a publisher they need to trust. Trust, in my experience, is built in person far more efficiently than over email. At a book fair, you can read the other person’s enthusiasm (or lack thereof), you can have the sidebar conversations that email doesn’t allow for, and you can build the personal rapport that makes future deals easier. The handshake at the end of a meeting isn’t ceremonial. It represents a level of mutual commitment that a signed email doesn’t quite capture.

The London Book Fair, held every April at Olympia London, has a different character than Frankfurt. It’s smaller, more focused on the English-language market, and somewhat less intimidating for newcomers. I attended my first London fair in 2019, and I remember being struck by how much less formal it felt than Frankfurt. Frankfurt has the weight of history and scale. London has the energy of a working trade show where people are there to get things done without the ceremonial aspects.

What I appreciate about London specifically is the seminars and programming aimed at smaller publishers. Frankfurt can feel overwhelming for an independent press. The major publishers have massive stands, sometimes two stories tall, with meeting rooms, bars, and dedicated staff. A small publisher might have a shared table in one of the collective exhibits, with a banner and a stack of catalogs. The disparity can be demoralizing if you let it get to you. London does a better job of creating programming and networking opportunities scaled to independent publishers, and the International Rights Centre at London is specifically designed to facilitate the kind of meetings that smaller presses need.

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is the most visually striking fair I’ve attended. Held in Bologna, Italy, every spring, it’s dedicated to children’s and young adult publishing, and the exhibits are full of color, illustration, and a kind of creative exuberance that you don’t see at Frankfurt or London. We don’t publish children’s books at ScrollWorks, so Bologna isn’t directly relevant to our business, but I attended once as an observer and found it enormously educational. The global market for children’s books is structured differently than the adult market, with illustration playing a more central role in rights negotiations and with certain markets (Japan, Korea, Scandinavia) having outsized influence. I came away with a better understanding of the publishing industry as a whole, even though the specific segment wasn’t our lane.

Now, I should address the elephant in the room: do book fairs still matter in the age of digital communication? This question has been asked with increasing urgency since the pandemic, which forced Frankfurt and London to go virtual in 2020 and 2021. The virtual editions were, by most accounts, adequate but uninspiring. You could schedule video meetings and browse digital catalogs, but the accidental encounters, the energy of the physical fair, and the deal-making momentum that comes from being in the same room with hundreds of potential partners were absent.

The answer, based on what I’ve seen since the fairs returned to in-person format, is yes. They still matter. Attendance at Frankfurt in 2022 bounced back to near pre-pandemic levels, and the deal volume was reportedly higher than expected. Publishers who had spent two years doing everything remotely came back to Frankfurt with a backlog of negotiations and a renewed appreciation for in-person deal-making. The fair’s role as a gathering point, a fixed moment in the calendar when the entire industry converges, turns out to be more resilient than the pandemic skeptics predicted.

That said, the pandemic did accelerate some changes that were already underway. More preliminary work is now done before the fair, with manuscripts exchanged and initial interest confirmed via email, so that the fair meetings themselves are more focused and efficient. Video calls have become a standard supplement to fair meetings, used for follow-up negotiations and for connecting with publishers who didn’t attend in person. The fair hasn’t been replaced by digital tools, but it has been augmented by them, and the result is a more efficient system overall.

For small publishers like us, book fairs present a particular cost-benefit challenge. Attending Frankfurt means flights, hotels, registration fees, and at least three days away from the office during one of the busiest periods of the fall season. The total cost for a two-person trip is easily $5,000 to $8,000. For that investment to make sense, we need to come home with enough promising leads and potential deals to justify the expense. Some years, we do. Some years, the leads are thinner, and I spend the flight home wondering if the money would have been better spent on marketing.

What tips the balance, in my calculation, is the cumulative effect. Any single fair might or might not produce immediate results. But attending consistently, year after year, builds a network of international contacts that compounds over time. The German publisher I met at Frankfurt in 2019 didn’t buy anything from us that year. But we stayed in touch, and in 2022, they acquired translation rights to one of our titles. That deal might never have happened without the initial face-to-face meeting. The fair planted a seed that took three years to grow.

I want to talk about a specific aspect of book fairs that I think is underappreciated: the role they play in surfacing international literature. The flow of translated literature into the English-language market has always been famously lopsided. According to various estimates, only about 3 to 5 percent of books published in English are translations, compared to 20 to 40 percent in many European markets. Book fairs are one of the primary mechanisms by which non-English-language books get noticed by English-language publishers. Scouts, who are specialized agents that attend fairs on behalf of publishers to identify promising foreign titles, play a significant role in this process. Without the concentration of international publishers that book fairs provide, the translation pipeline would be even thinner than it already is.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve occasionally acquired English-language rights to translated works, and in both cases, the initial contact happened at a book fair. The process of acquiring a translation is complex, involving not just the original publisher and the translator but also considerations of cultural context, market fit, and the significant additional cost of translation itself (a good literary translator working on a 300-page novel might charge $10,000 to $15,000). But the results, when it works, are among the most rewarding things we do. Bringing a book that was written in another language into English, making it available to readers who would otherwise never encounter it, feels like participating in a genuinely global literary conversation.

The other thing fairs do, which is harder to quantify but very real, is provide a sense of perspective. When you spend your days focused on the American book market, it’s easy to develop a tunnel vision about what publishing looks like. Attending an international fair reminds you that the American market, large as it is, represents only a fraction of global publishing activity. You meet publishers from countries whose literary traditions you know nothing about. You discover that a novel that sold modestly in the U.S. was a massive bestseller in France, or that a debut author you passed on has won a major prize in South Korea. This global perspective is humbling, and it makes you a better publisher.

For anyone considering attending a book fair for the first time, whether as a publisher, an agent, an author, or simply a curious observer, my advice is this: prepare intensively, schedule your meetings in advance, bring more business cards than you think you’ll need, wear comfortable shoes, and stay near the convention center so you don’t lose precious time commuting. Also, if you’re going to Frankfurt, learn to say “hello” and “thank you” in at least five languages. It won’t help your negotiations, but it will make people smile, and in an industry built on personal relationships, that counts for more than you’d think.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is how book fairs function as an early warning system for industry trends. The panels, keynotes, and hallway conversations at Frankfurt and London are where you first hear about shifts in reading habits, new technologies, emerging markets, and changing business models. It was at Frankfurt in 2018 that I first heard serious discussion about the audiobook boom that would reshape the industry over the following years. It was at London in 2019 that I first encountered publishers experimenting with subscription models. You can read about these trends in trade publications weeks or months later, but being at the fair lets you hear the conversations in real time, ask questions, and gauge how seriously the industry’s decision-makers are taking them.

The book fair is, in the end, an act of faith. It’s a gathering of people who believe that books are worth making, selling, translating, and carrying across borders. In a media environment that increasingly treats text as content and content as a commodity, that faith feels countercultural. I find it reassuring to stand in a room with 300,000 other people who share it.

People sometimes ask me, usually after a drink or two at industry events, what we actually say when we reject a manuscript. They’re expecting something dramatic, or at least something revealing. They imagine that rejection letters contain coded messages, hidden cruelties, or secret formulas that, if deciphered, would unlock the mystery of what publishers want. The reality is both simpler and more complicated than that. Our rejection letters are, in fact, carefully written documents that say a great deal, just not always in the ways that the recipient expects.

Let me start with the numbers, because they provide necessary context. ScrollWorks receives roughly 1,200 to 1,500 unsolicited submissions per year. We accept between four and six manuscripts for publication. That means we reject approximately 99.6 percent of what we receive. I’ll sit with that number for a moment because I think it’s important. If you’ve submitted to us and been rejected, you are in the vast, vast majority. The rejection says almost nothing about you or your writing. It says that we had very few slots and an enormous number of submissions, and the math didn’t work out in your favor.

This is, I realize, cold comfort when you’re sitting with a rejection email in your inbox. I know this because I was a writer before I was a publisher, and I received enough rejections to wallpaper a small bathroom. The experience of being rejected is always personal, even when the rejection itself isn’t. So I want to take you behind the curtain and explain exactly what our rejection letters mean, what the different versions signal, and how to read them as usefully as possible.

We have, roughly, four tiers of rejection. I’m going to describe each one honestly, because I think writers deserve transparency about this process even when the transparency is uncomfortable.

The first tier is the form rejection. This is a brief, polite email that thanks the writer for their submission, states that we won’t be pursuing the project, and wishes them well in finding the right publisher. It’s standardized, which means every writer who receives it gets essentially the same language. We send this response to about 80 percent of our submissions. It goes out within four to six weeks of receiving the manuscript.

I know that form rejections feel impersonal, and they are impersonal. But here’s what I want writers to understand about why we use them. At 1,200 submissions a year, if I wrote a personalized response to every one, I would spend my entire working life writing rejection letters and never actually publish any books. The form rejection is a necessary concession to volume. It is not a statement about the quality of the writing. Many submissions that receive form rejections are perfectly competent manuscripts that simply aren’t right for our list. Some are quite good. A few are excellent but duplicate something we’ve already acquired or are planning to acquire. The form rejection carries no information about quality. It carries only the information that we’re not going to publish this particular book.

The second tier is what I privately call the “warm form.” It’s still a standard template, but it includes one or two sentences of genuine, specific feedback. Something like: “We were impressed by the strength of your prose and the originality of your premise, but ultimately felt the manuscript wasn’t quite the right fit for our current list.” This goes to about 10 to 12 percent of our submissions. If you receive a warm form from us, it means your manuscript made it past the initial screening, was read with attention, and was discussed internally before being declined. It means we think you can write. It means that with a different manuscript, or with this manuscript after further revision, you might well be someone we’d want to work with.

I want to linger on this tier because I think it’s the one that frustrates writers the most. You get a letter that says something nice but still rejects you. The niceness can feel like a consolation prize, or worse, like a cruel tease. But from our side of the table, the warm form represents genuine respect for the writer’s work. We are explicitly choosing to acknowledge something good in the manuscript rather than sending the standard form. When we say “we were impressed,” we mean it. Publishing is too exhausting and too poorly compensated for anyone in it to waste time being dishonest in rejection letters.

The third tier is the personalized rejection. This is a letter written specifically for this manuscript by the editor who read it, offering detailed feedback about what worked, what didn’t, and sometimes suggestions for revision. These go to about 5 to 8 percent of our submissions. If you receive a personalized rejection from us, pay very close attention to it. It means your manuscript was seriously considered for acquisition. It means at least two people on our team read the full manuscript and discussed it in an editorial meeting. It means we see real potential in the work and are investing our time in explaining why, despite that potential, we’re passing.

Personalized rejections are, frankly, the hardest letters I write. They require honesty about the manuscript’s weaknesses, which feels uncomfortable when you know how much effort the writer put into the work. But they also require genuine engagement with the manuscript’s strengths, because a personalized rejection that’s all criticism is just a mean letter. The balance I’m aiming for is: “Here’s what you did well. Here’s what prevented us from moving forward. Here’s what we think would make this manuscript stronger.” Whether the writer acts on that feedback is up to them, but the feedback itself is given in good faith and based on careful reading.

I want to share some of the most common reasons manuscripts receive personalized rejections at our press, because I think these patterns are useful for writers to know about.

The single most common reason is voice. The manuscript is competent, sometimes very competent, but the prose doesn’t have a distinctive enough voice to carry a full book. The writing is correct without being compelling. The sentences are well-constructed but could have been written by any of a hundred different writers. At ScrollWorks, where we publish literary fiction, voice is the thing we care about most, and its absence is the most frequent reason we pass on otherwise strong manuscripts. I’ve written dozens of rejection letters that essentially say: “The craft here is solid, but we’re looking for something more idiosyncratic, more personal, more surprising in the prose.”

The second most common reason is pacing. Many manuscripts we receive have strong beginnings and strong endings but sag in the middle. The writer had a clear sense of how to start the story and where they wanted it to end, but the 200 pages in between feel padded, repetitive, or insufficiently structured. This is a solvable problem, and when I flag it in a personalized rejection, I’m genuinely hoping the writer will revise and resubmit. Some of our published books, including The Cartographer’s Dilemma, went through exactly this arc: initial submission, personalized rejection with specific pacing feedback, revision, resubmission, and acceptance.

The third common reason is what I think of as “familiarity.” The manuscript is well-executed but tells a story I’ve read too many times before. The troubled marriage. The family secrets revealed at a funeral. The coming-of-age in a small town. These are not bad premises, and I’ve published books with all of these setups. But the execution needs to bring something genuinely new, some angle or insight or structural innovation that makes the familiar feel fresh. When a manuscript competently treads well-worn ground without surprising me, I find it very hard to champion it through the publication process, which requires sustained enthusiasm over a period of one to two years.

The fourth tier of rejection, the rarest, is the revise-and-resubmit invitation, commonly called an R&R. This is not technically a rejection at all. It’s a letter that says: “We are very interested in this manuscript but don’t feel it’s ready for publication in its current form. Here are the specific changes we’d like to see. If you’re willing to revise along these lines and resubmit, we will read the revised version with serious intent to acquire.” We issue maybe two or three of these per year. They represent our highest level of engagement short of an offer.

An R&R is, in a sense, a vote of confidence. We’re telling the writer that their book is good enough for us to invest editorial time in before we’ve even decided to publish it. But I want to be honest: an R&R is not a guarantee of publication. We’ve issued R&Rs that didn’t result in offers, either because the revision didn’t address our concerns sufficiently or because our editorial priorities shifted between the initial letter and the resubmission. Writers who receive an R&R should treat it seriously and work hard on the revision, but they should also maintain realistic expectations about the outcome.

Now, let me address some of the things that writers read into rejection letters that aren’t actually there.

“Not right for our list” does not mean “your writing is bad.” It means what it says: the manuscript doesn’t fit with the other books we’re publishing. Fit is a real consideration. A press that publishes literary fiction about the American South is probably not going to acquire your speculative novel set in space, no matter how good it is. When we say a manuscript isn’t right for our list, we’re often genuinely recommending that the writer look at publishers whose catalogs more closely match their work.

“We didn’t connect with the material” is another phrase that gets over-interpreted. It doesn’t mean we hated the book. It means that the subjective, personal element of editorial enthusiasm, the feeling that you absolutely must publish this book, wasn’t there. This is the most honest thing I can tell you about how acquisitions work: we don’t publish books we merely think are good. We publish books we’re passionate about. Books that keep us up at night, that we can’t stop talking about, that we can imagine championing for years. The gap between “this is good” and “I have to publish this” is the space where most rejections happen.

“We encourage you to submit future work” is not a throwaway line. If we say this, we mean it. Our form rejections don’t include this phrase. We add it deliberately to signal that we want to hear from this writer again. If you received a rejection from us that ends with an invitation to submit future work, please actually do that. We’re keeping an eye out for your next manuscript.

One more piece of advice for interpreting our rejections, and rejections from any publisher: the speed of the response is informative. If you hear back from us within two weeks, your manuscript was likely filtered at the initial screening stage. If it takes six to eight weeks, it was probably read more carefully. If it takes three months or more, your manuscript almost certainly went through multiple reads and internal discussion. A slow rejection is, paradoxically, a better signal than a fast one. It means people spent time with your work, and time is the scarcest resource in any editorial department.

I want to end with something that I hope is genuinely comforting, or at least genuinely useful. The publishing industry’s rejection rate is staggering. Even the most successful authors alive today have boxes full of rejection letters. The rejection rate at any reputable press, including ours, reflects the simple mathematics of limited capacity and unlimited submissions. It does not reflect a judgment about the value of your work, the seriousness of your commitment, or the viability of your future career.

What I hope our rejection letters actually communicate, beneath the polite language and the standard phrasing, is this: we read your work, we took it seriously, and we’re grateful that you trusted us with it. The submission itself is an act of courage that I respect enormously. Not everyone who writes a book is willing to send it out into the world and risk being told no. You did that. Whatever our letter says, that matters.

Keep writing. Keep submitting. And if the letter from us includes a personalized note, read it twice. We meant every word.

I ghostwrote my first book when I was twenty-six. The author, a retired surgeon with a fascinating life and no patience for sitting at a keyboard, paid me a flat fee that seemed enormous at the time. I spent four months interviewing him, organizing his stories, and turning his rambling anecdotes into something that read like a coherent memoir. When the book came out, his name was on the cover. Mine appeared nowhere. And honestly? I was fine with that. I had rent money and a finished manuscript under my belt, even if nobody knew it was mine.

That was my introduction to ghostwriting, and in the years since, I’ve watched the practice become both more common and more misunderstood. People have strong feelings about it. Some think it’s dishonest. Others consider it a perfectly normal part of the publishing ecosystem. I’ve sat on both sides of the table now, as a ghostwriter and as someone who hires them, and I think the truth is more interesting than either camp admits.

Let me start with the obvious question: is ghostwriting deceptive? The knee-jerk answer from many readers is yes, absolutely. You bought a book with someone’s name on it, you expect that person wrote it. Fair enough. But publishing has never worked that cleanly. Presidents don’t write their own memoirs. CEOs don’t write their own business books. Celebrities don’t write their own autobiographies. This isn’t a secret, exactly, but it’s one of those things people know without really thinking about. The acknowledgments page might thank “my collaborator” or “my writing partner,” and everyone moves on.

The more honest framing, I think, is that ghostwriting is a service. The ghostwriter provides craft. The named author provides content, expertise, or fame. When a Nobel Prize-winning economist hires someone to turn their research into a readable book, the ideas are still the economist’s. The ghostwriter’s job is translation: taking knowledge that exists in one form (lectures, papers, conversations) and reshaping it for a general audience. I don’t think that’s dishonest. I think it’s practical.

Where it gets murkier is fiction. Ghostwritten nonfiction makes intuitive sense to most people once they think about it. But ghostwritten novels? That feels different. When you read a thriller by a famous author and discover it was actually written by someone else working from a rough outline, the betrayal stings more. Fiction feels personal in a way that a business book doesn’t. You’re buying into a voice, a sensibility, a way of seeing the world. Learning that voice belongs to someone else entirely can feel like discovering an actor was lip-syncing.

I’ve ghostwritten fiction exactly once, a novella for a well-known author who was behind on a deadline and needed help. I won’t name names. The experience was strange. I had to suppress every instinct I had as a writer and imitate someone else’s style. It was technically challenging and creatively unsatisfying. The author’s fans loved it. They had no idea. And I walked away feeling like I’d pulled off a magic trick that nobody was supposed to see.

The economics of ghostwriting are worth understanding because they explain why it’s so common. A typical ghostwriting fee for a full-length nonfiction book ranges from $20,000 to $100,000 or more, depending on the complexity and the ghostwriter’s reputation. For the named author, this is an investment. If they’re a speaker or consultant, a published book can generate far more than that in speaking fees, consulting gigs, and credibility. The book itself might not even need to sell well. It just needs to exist.

For the ghostwriter, the math is simpler. You get paid upfront (or in installments), you don’t have to build a platform, you don’t have to do marketing, and you don’t have to worry about sales. The tradeoff is anonymity. Some ghostwriters are fine with that forever. Others use it as a stepping stone, building skills and savings while working on their own projects in the evenings. I know ghostwriters pulling in $200,000 a year who have no public profile whatsoever. They’re happy. They like the work. They don’t want the spotlight.

The process itself varies wildly depending on the project. Some authors hand over a detailed outline, recorded interviews, and boxes of research materials. Others show up to your first meeting with nothing but a vague idea and the expectation that you’ll figure it out. I’ve had both experiences, and I can tell you that the former is a dream and the latter is a nightmare. The best ghostwriting relationships are genuine collaborations. The worst are situations where the named author treats you like a secretary who happens to know grammar.

One thing that surprised me early on was how much psychology goes into ghostwriting. You’re not just writing in someone else’s voice; you’re managing their ego, their insecurities, and their expectations. Many authors who hire ghostwriters feel guilty about it. They want to believe they could have written the book themselves if they just had more time. Part of your job is to validate that feeling while also, quietly, doing the thing they can’t do. It’s a weird dynamic. You have to be good enough to write the book but humble enough to pretend you barely helped.

The rise of self-publishing has changed the ghostwriting market in interesting ways. There’s now a massive demand for ghostwritten genre fiction, particularly romance, thriller, and science fiction. Authors (or more accurately, publishers operating under pen names) hire ghostwriters to produce books on a schedule, sometimes one every month or two. The pay for these gigs is often low, $2,000 to $5,000 per book, and the quality expectations match the price. It’s volume work. Some ghostwriters churn out 10 or 12 books a year this way. I don’t judge them for it. Bills are real.

But this assembly-line approach has also created a perception problem. When people hear “ghostwriting” now, they sometimes picture a content mill churning out forgettable Kindle books. That’s one version of it, sure. But it’s not the whole picture. At the higher end, ghostwriting is meticulous, slow, and deeply collaborative work. I spent eight months on one project, a memoir for a woman who’d survived a genocide. Every sentence mattered. Every word choice carried weight. Reducing that work to “she didn’t really write it” misses the point entirely.

The legal side is straightforward in most cases. Ghostwriting agreements typically transfer all rights to the named author. The ghostwriter signs a non-disclosure agreement. Copyright belongs to the person whose name goes on the cover. In some arrangements, the ghostwriter gets a percentage of royalties on top of their fee, which is nice when it happens but rare. The NDA is the part that trips people up emotionally. You can’t talk about your best work. You can’t put it in your portfolio. You can’t point to it when someone asks what you’ve written. That silence gets heavy over time.

I’ve talked to ghostwriters who’ve worked on bestsellers, books that spent months on the New York Times list, and they can’t tell anyone. Imagine writing a book that millions of people read and loved, and your contribution is invisible. Some people can handle that. Others eventually can’t, which is why some ghostwriters transition to writing under their own names once they’ve built enough financial stability. The irony is that their ghostwritten work is often better than their solo work, at least commercially. When you’re writing for someone else, you focus purely on craft and audience. When you’re writing for yourself, ego creeps in.

There’s a spectrum between full ghostwriting and acknowledged collaboration that I think more people should know about. “As told to” credits are one step up from full ghostwriting. You’ll see this on memoirs where the celebrity’s name is followed by “as told to [writer’s name]” in smaller type. This gives the writer some recognition while making it clear whose story it is. Then there’s co-authoring, where both names appear on the cover. And finally, there’s what I’d call editorial shaping, where an author writes the draft but a skilled editor essentially rewrites large portions of it. That last one happens more than anyone in publishing wants to admit.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve worked with ghostwriters on certain projects, and we’ve also worked with authors who are adamant about writing every word themselves. Both approaches can produce excellent books. The key variable isn’t who holds the pen. It’s whether the person with the ideas and the person with the craft can communicate effectively. I’ve seen brilliantly ghostwritten books and terribly ghostwritten books. I’ve seen self-written books that needed a ghostwriter desperately and self-written books that sang from the first page. The method matters less than the result.

If you’re considering hiring a ghostwriter, here’s what I’d tell you based on my experience on both sides. First, be honest with yourself about why you want a book. If it’s for business credibility, ghostwriting makes perfect sense. If it’s because you’ve always dreamed of being a writer, hiring someone else to do the writing won’t scratch that itch. You’ll hold the finished book and feel empty. I’ve seen it happen. Second, budget realistically. Good ghostwriting isn’t cheap, and cheap ghostwriting isn’t good. The $500 ghostwriter you found on Fiverr will give you $500 worth of work. Third, expect the process to take longer than you think. Even with a professional ghostwriter, you’ll need to invest significant time in interviews, review, and revision. This is still your book. You can’t fully outsource it.

If you’re considering becoming a ghostwriter, my advice is different. Start by getting really good at mimicking other people’s voices. Read a chapter of someone’s writing and try to write the next chapter in their style. It’s harder than it sounds. Most writers have such strong personal voices that suppressing them requires conscious effort. You also need to be comfortable with ambiguity. Ghostwriting projects often change direction midway through. The author decides they want to restructure the entire book, or they realize the story they thought they wanted to tell isn’t the story that matters. Flexibility isn’t optional in this line of work.

The ethical questions around ghostwriting aren’t going away, and I don’t think they should. It’s worth interrogating who gets to be called an author and what that label means. But I also think the outrage is often misplaced. We don’t expect actors to write their own scripts. We don’t expect singers to compose all their own music (though we respect it more when they do). Why do we hold authors to a different standard? Partly because writing feels more intimate than other art forms. A book is supposedly a direct pipeline from one mind to another. Discovering there’s an intermediary in that pipeline feels like a violation of the implied contract.

I understand that feeling. I just don’t think it holds up under scrutiny. The “implied contract” of authorship has always been flexible. Authors have always had editors who reshape their work, sometimes dramatically. They’ve had writing groups that contribute ideas, researchers who do the legwork, and spouses who suggest the ending. The line between “help” and “ghostwriting” is blurrier than anyone wants to admit. At what point does editing become rewriting? At what point does rewriting become ghostwriting? There’s no clean answer.

What I do think is unethical is misrepresenting ghostwritten work in contexts where authorship matters beyond commerce. Academic ghostwriting, for instance, is a real problem. Paying someone to write your dissertation isn’t the same as paying someone to write your business book. In academia, the writing is supposed to demonstrate your own knowledge and thinking. In publishing, the writing is a product. Those are different contexts with different rules, and conflating them muddies the conversation.

I’ll close with a story. A few years ago, I was at a literary event and overheard two people arguing about a memoir that had been revealed as ghostwritten. One person was furious, calling it a lie. The other shrugged and said the book had moved her to tears regardless of who typed the words. They were both right, in a way. The first person cared about authenticity. The second cared about impact. Those are different values, and ghostwriting sits right at the intersection where they collide.

The truth about ghostwriting, if I had to boil it down, is this: it’s neither the fraud that critics claim nor the harmless convention that the industry pretends. It’s a complicated, financially driven practice that produces some wonderful books and some terrible ones, that gives opportunities to talented writers who might otherwise struggle, and that allows people with important stories and no writing ability to get those stories onto the page. Like most things in publishing, the reality is messier than the narrative. And I think that’s fine. Publishing has always been messy. The books that survive are the ones worth reading, regardless of whose hands actually built them.

I ghostwrote my first book when I was twenty-six. The author, a retired surgeon with a fascinating life and no patience for sitting at a keyboard, paid me a flat fee that seemed enormous at the time. I spent four months interviewing him, organizing his stories, and turning his rambling anecdotes into something that read like a coherent memoir. When the book came out, his name was on the cover. Mine appeared nowhere. And honestly? I was fine with that. I had rent money and a finished manuscript under my belt, even if nobody knew it was mine.

That was my introduction to ghostwriting, and in the years since, I’ve watched the practice become both more common and more misunderstood. People have strong feelings about it. Some think it’s dishonest. Others consider it a perfectly normal part of the publishing ecosystem. I’ve sat on both sides of the table now, as a ghostwriter and as someone who hires them, and I think the truth is more interesting than either camp admits.

Let me start with the obvious question: is ghostwriting deceptive? The knee-jerk answer from many readers is yes, absolutely. You bought a book with someone’s name on it, you expect that person wrote it. Fair enough. But publishing has never worked that cleanly. Presidents don’t write their own memoirs. CEOs don’t write their own business books. Celebrities don’t write their own autobiographies. This isn’t a secret, exactly, but it’s one of those things people know without really thinking about. The acknowledgments page might thank “my collaborator” or “my writing partner,” and everyone moves on.

The more honest framing, I think, is that ghostwriting is a service. The ghostwriter provides craft. The named author provides content, expertise, or fame. When a Nobel Prize-winning economist hires someone to turn their research into a readable book, the ideas are still the economist’s. The ghostwriter’s job is translation: taking knowledge that exists in one form (lectures, papers, conversations) and reshaping it for a general audience. I don’t think that’s dishonest. I think it’s practical.

Where it gets murkier is fiction. Ghostwritten nonfiction makes intuitive sense to most people once they think about it. But ghostwritten novels? That feels different. When you read a thriller by a famous author and discover it was actually written by someone else working from a rough outline, the betrayal stings more. Fiction feels personal in a way that a business book doesn’t. You’re buying into a voice, a sensibility, a way of seeing the world. Learning that voice belongs to someone else entirely can feel like discovering an actor was lip-syncing.

I’ve ghostwritten fiction exactly once, a novella for a well-known author who was behind on a deadline and needed help. I won’t name names. The experience was strange. I had to suppress every instinct I had as a writer and imitate someone else’s style. It was technically challenging and creatively unsatisfying. The author’s fans loved it. They had no idea. And I walked away feeling like I’d pulled off a magic trick that nobody was supposed to see.

The economics of ghostwriting are worth understanding because they explain why it’s so common. A typical ghostwriting fee for a full-length nonfiction book ranges from $20,000 to $100,000 or more, depending on the complexity and the ghostwriter’s reputation. For the named author, this is an investment. If they’re a speaker or consultant, a published book can generate far more than that in speaking fees, consulting gigs, and credibility. The book itself might not even need to sell well. It just needs to exist.

For the ghostwriter, the math is simpler. You get paid upfront (or in installments), you don’t have to build a platform, you don’t have to do marketing, and you don’t have to worry about sales. The tradeoff is anonymity. Some ghostwriters are fine with that forever. Others use it as a stepping stone, building skills and savings while working on their own projects in the evenings. I know ghostwriters pulling in $200,000 a year who have no public profile whatsoever. They’re happy. They like the work. They don’t want the spotlight.

The process itself varies wildly depending on the project. Some authors hand over a detailed outline, recorded interviews, and boxes of research materials. Others show up to your first meeting with nothing but a vague idea and the expectation that you’ll figure it out. I’ve had both experiences, and I can tell you that the former is a dream and the latter is a nightmare. The best ghostwriting relationships are genuine collaborations. The worst are situations where the named author treats you like a secretary who happens to know grammar.

One thing that surprised me early on was how much psychology goes into ghostwriting. You’re not just writing in someone else’s voice; you’re managing their ego, their insecurities, and their expectations. Many authors who hire ghostwriters feel guilty about it. They want to believe they could have written the book themselves if they just had more time. Part of your job is to validate that feeling while also, quietly, doing the thing they can’t do. It’s a weird dynamic. You have to be good enough to write the book but humble enough to pretend you barely helped.

The rise of self-publishing has changed the ghostwriting market in interesting ways. There’s now a massive demand for ghostwritten genre fiction, particularly romance, thriller, and science fiction. Authors (or more accurately, publishers operating under pen names) hire ghostwriters to produce books on a schedule, sometimes one every month or two. The pay for these gigs is often low, $2,000 to $5,000 per book, and the quality expectations match the price. It’s volume work. Some ghostwriters churn out 10 or 12 books a year this way. I don’t judge them for it. Bills are real.

But this assembly-line approach has also created a perception problem. When people hear “ghostwriting” now, they sometimes picture a content mill churning out forgettable Kindle books. That’s one version of it, sure. But it’s not the whole picture. At the higher end, ghostwriting is meticulous, slow, and deeply collaborative work. I spent eight months on one project, a memoir for a woman who’d survived a genocide. Every sentence mattered. Every word choice carried weight. Reducing that work to “she didn’t really write it” misses the point entirely.

The legal side is straightforward in most cases. Ghostwriting agreements typically transfer all rights to the named author. The ghostwriter signs a non-disclosure agreement. Copyright belongs to the person whose name goes on the cover. In some arrangements, the ghostwriter gets a percentage of royalties on top of their fee, which is nice when it happens but rare. The NDA is the part that trips people up emotionally. You can’t talk about your best work. You can’t put it in your portfolio. You can’t point to it when someone asks what you’ve written. That silence gets heavy over time.

I’ve talked to ghostwriters who’ve worked on bestsellers, books that spent months on the New York Times list, and they can’t tell anyone. Imagine writing a book that millions of people read and loved, and your contribution is invisible. Some people can handle that. Others eventually can’t, which is why some ghostwriters transition to writing under their own names once they’ve built enough financial stability. The irony is that their ghostwritten work is often better than their solo work, at least commercially. When you’re writing for someone else, you focus purely on craft and audience. When you’re writing for yourself, ego creeps in.

There’s a spectrum between full ghostwriting and acknowledged collaboration that I think more people should know about. “As told to” credits are one step up from full ghostwriting. You’ll see this on memoirs where the celebrity’s name is followed by “as told to [writer’s name]” in smaller type. This gives the writer some recognition while making it clear whose story it is. Then there’s co-authoring, where both names appear on the cover. And finally, there’s what I’d call editorial shaping, where an author writes the draft but a skilled editor essentially rewrites large portions of it. That last one happens more than anyone in publishing wants to admit.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve worked with ghostwriters on certain projects, and we’ve also worked with authors who are adamant about writing every word themselves. Both approaches can produce excellent books. The key variable isn’t who holds the pen. It’s whether the person with the ideas and the person with the craft can communicate effectively. I’ve seen brilliantly ghostwritten books and terribly ghostwritten books. I’ve seen self-written books that needed a ghostwriter desperately and self-written books that sang from the first page. The method matters less than the result.

If you’re considering hiring a ghostwriter, here’s what I’d tell you based on my experience on both sides. First, be honest with yourself about why you want a book. If it’s for business credibility, ghostwriting makes perfect sense. If it’s because you’ve always dreamed of being a writer, hiring someone else to do the writing won’t scratch that itch. You’ll hold the finished book and feel empty. I’ve seen it happen. Second, budget realistically. Good ghostwriting isn’t cheap, and cheap ghostwriting isn’t good. The $500 ghostwriter you found on Fiverr will give you $500 worth of work. Third, expect the process to take longer than you think. Even with a professional ghostwriter, you’ll need to invest significant time in interviews, review, and revision. This is still your book. You can’t fully outsource it.

If you’re considering becoming a ghostwriter, my advice is different. Start by getting really good at mimicking other people’s voices. Read a chapter of someone’s writing and try to write the next chapter in their style. It’s harder than it sounds. Most writers have such strong personal voices that suppressing them requires conscious effort. You also need to be comfortable with ambiguity. Ghostwriting projects often change direction midway through. The author decides they want to restructure the entire book, or they realize the story they thought they wanted to tell isn’t the story that matters. Flexibility isn’t optional in this line of work.

The ethical questions around ghostwriting aren’t going away, and I don’t think they should. It’s worth interrogating who gets to be called an author and what that label means. But I also think the outrage is often misplaced. We don’t expect actors to write their own scripts. We don’t expect singers to compose all their own music (though we respect it more when they do). Why do we hold authors to a different standard? Partly because writing feels more intimate than other art forms. A book is supposedly a direct pipeline from one mind to another. Discovering there’s an intermediary in that pipeline feels like a violation of the implied contract.

I understand that feeling. I just don’t think it holds up under scrutiny. The “implied contract” of authorship has always been flexible. Authors have always had editors who reshape their work, sometimes dramatically. They’ve had writing groups that contribute ideas, researchers who do the legwork, and spouses who suggest the ending. The line between “help” and “ghostwriting” is blurrier than anyone wants to admit. At what point does editing become rewriting? At what point does rewriting become ghostwriting? There’s no clean answer.

What I do think is unethical is misrepresenting ghostwritten work in contexts where authorship matters beyond commerce. Academic ghostwriting, for instance, is a real problem. Paying someone to write your dissertation isn’t the same as paying someone to write your business book. In academia, the writing is supposed to demonstrate your own knowledge and thinking. In publishing, the writing is a product. Those are different contexts with different rules, and conflating them muddies the conversation.

I’ll close with a story. A few years ago, I was at a literary event and overheard two people arguing about a memoir that had been revealed as ghostwritten. One person was furious, calling it a lie. The other shrugged and said the book had moved her to tears regardless of who typed the words. They were both right, in a way. The first person cared about authenticity. The second cared about impact. Those are different values, and ghostwriting sits right at the intersection where they collide.

The truth about ghostwriting, if I had to boil it down, is this: it’s neither the fraud that critics claim nor the harmless convention that the industry pretends. It’s a complicated, financially driven practice that produces some wonderful books and some terrible ones, that gives opportunities to talented writers who might otherwise struggle, and that allows people with important stories and no writing ability to get those stories onto the page. Like most things in publishing, the reality is messier than the narrative. And I think that’s fine. Publishing has always been messy. The books that survive are the ones worth reading, regardless of whose hands actually built them.

I read my first novella when I was fifteen. It was Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” assigned in English class, and I finished it in a single afternoon on my bedroom floor. I remember the specific feeling of closing the book and thinking: that’s it? Not because I was disappointed. Because I was stunned that something so short could leave me feeling so completely rearranged. I’d been reading 400-page fantasy novels up to that point, books where you needed a map in the front cover and a glossary in the back. Kafka did more in 50 pages than most of those books managed in 500.

That experience set something in motion. Over the next few years, I started seeking out shorter works on purpose. Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” Camus’s “The Stranger.” Each one hit differently than a full-length novel. There was a compression to them, a refusal to waste your time that I found addictive. Novels gave you room to wander. Novellas grabbed you by the collar and didn’t let go until they were done.

And yet, for all their power, novellas remain the awkward middle child of literary forms. Too long to be short stories. Too short to be novels. Bookstores don’t know where to shelve them. Publishers don’t know how to price them. Readers often skip them entirely, assuming they’re not getting enough book for their money. This has always baffled me, because some of the greatest works in the English language are novellas, and the form’s constraints are exactly what make them so effective.

Let me be specific about what I mean by “novella.” The word gets thrown around loosely, but in publishing, it generally refers to a work of fiction between 17,500 and 40,000 words. That’s roughly 60 to 150 pages, depending on formatting. A short story tops out around 7,500 words. A novel starts around 50,000. The novella occupies the territory in between, and it’s a territory with its own rules and its own strengths.

The primary strength is focus. A novel can afford subplots, digressions, and ensemble casts. A novella can’t. There isn’t room. You get one story, maybe two characters worth investing in, and every scene needs to earn its place. This constraint forces writers to make choices that longer forms allow them to avoid. Should this scene be here? Does this character need a backstory? Is this metaphor doing enough work? In a novel, you can carry passengers. In a novella, everyone has to row.

I think this is why so many novellas feel intense in a way that novels don’t. Consider “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. That book is barely 100 pages, but its density per page is extraordinary. Every sentence is loaded. Every image connects to a larger theme. You can’t skim it. You can’t put it down and pick it up a week later without losing the thread. It demands your full attention for a few hours, and then it’s done. That kind of sustained intensity is almost impossible to maintain over 300 or 400 pages. Even the best novels have valleys. Novellas are all peak.

From a craft perspective, I think writing a good novella is harder than writing a good novel. That might sound counterintuitive, since novellas are shorter. But length is deceptive. More pages give you more room to fix problems, to develop character through accumulation, to let the plot breathe. Fewer pages mean every decision is magnified. A weak scene in a novel is a minor blemish. A weak scene in a novella is a structural failure. I’ve talked to writers who’ve published both forms, and most of them say the novella was harder. Getting the length right alone is its own challenge. You’re constantly fighting the impulse to expand into novel territory or contract into short story territory.

The publishing industry has historically been unkind to novellas for entirely practical reasons. A novella is hard to sell as a standalone book. It feels thin on the shelf. Readers look at the page count and think they’re being shortchanged. Pricing is awkward: you can’t charge novel prices for novella length, but charging less makes the book seem less serious. For decades, the main venue for novellas was literary magazines and anthologies, where they could appear alongside other works and the length issue disappeared.

E-books and self-publishing have changed this equation significantly. When there’s no physical shelf and no spine to judge, length matters less. A 30,000-word e-book at $4.99 feels like a reasonable proposition in a way that a 90-page paperback at $14.99 does not. The digital marketplace has created space for novellas to exist as standalone commercial products, and some writers have built entire careers on them. The romance genre, in particular, has embraced the novella format. Readers want quick, complete stories they can finish in a sitting. Novellas deliver exactly that.

At ScrollWorks, we’re vocal advocates for the novella form. Our title Still Waters sits right in that sweet spot, and it’s one of our most affecting pieces of fiction. The compression of the form allowed us to create something that hits with a concentration you just don’t get in longer works. Every chapter counts. Every scene does double duty. There’s no filler, because there’s no room for filler. As both publishers and readers, we think more people should give novellas a serious chance.

The reading experience of a novella is different from a novel in ways that go beyond just time commitment. When I read a novel, I build a relationship with it over days or weeks. I put it down, think about it, come back. The characters become familiar gradually. With a novella, the relationship is compressed into hours. It’s less like dating and more like a long, honest conversation with a stranger on a train. You learn everything you’re going to learn in one sitting, and the emotional impact is concentrated rather than spread out. Some readers prefer the slow build. I get that. But there’s something to be said for the gut punch.

Let me list some novellas that I think prove the form’s power, because abstract arguments only go so far. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Tolstoy is maybe the greatest piece of fiction ever written about dying, and it’s under 100 pages. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote, the actual book and not the movie, is a razor-sharp portrait of loneliness and self-invention that loses nothing for its brevity. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James managed to be one of the most debated works in English literature despite being barely novella length. “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King, before it was a movie, was a novella in a collection. These aren’t minor works by major writers. They’re among those writers’ best output.

More recently, novellas have been having a genuine renaissance. “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang, which won the International Booker Prize, is structured as three connected novellas. Samantha Schweblin’s “Fever Dream” is a novella that reads like a hallucination, barely 180 pages and utterly unforgettable. Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” pushes the boundaries of what the form can contain. The literary world is producing more excellent novellas now than at any point I can remember, and readers are starting to notice.

For writers, the novella offers something that both the short story and the novel struggle to provide: room to develop a single idea fully without the obligation to sustain a world. A short story gives you a moment, a glimpse. A novel gives you a whole life, sometimes several. A novella gives you an arc, complete and satisfying, with enough space to breathe but not enough to get lost. If you’ve ever finished a short story and thought “I wish there was more” or put down a novel and thought “this could have been shorter,” the novella is the form you’re looking for.

I want to push back on the idea that novellas are somehow less ambitious than novels. Ambition isn’t measured in page count. “Animal Farm” is a novella. “A Christmas Carol” is a novella. “The Pearl” is a novella. These are works that changed how people think. They entered the culture and never left. Meanwhile, there are 800-page novels published every year that no one remembers twelve months later. Length is not ambition. Length is just length. A writer who can say everything they need to say in 30,000 words and then stop is showing more discipline, and arguably more ambition, than one who writes 100,000 words because they couldn’t figure out what to cut.

The commercial argument against novellas is weakening, too. Subscription services like Kindle Unlimited have made length less relevant to purchasing decisions. Audiobook listeners, who are a rapidly growing segment of the reading public, often appreciate shorter works they can finish during a road trip or a weekend of chores. Serialized fiction, which is booming in online spaces, is essentially a string of novella-length installments. The market is catching up to what readers have always known: good stories come in many sizes.

I have a theory about why novellas fell out of favor in the twentieth century, and it’s mostly about economics rather than art. As publishing consolidated and bookstores became the primary sales channel, the physical object mattered more. A novella looks thin on a shelf. It’s hard to read the spine. It gets lost between the fat thrillers and the chunky literary fiction. Publishers responded by padding novellas into novels (adding unnecessary subplots, stretching scenes, inserting characters who don’t need to be there) or rejecting them outright. How many great novellas never got published because an editor said “this needs to be 80,000 words”? I suspect the answer is a lot.

The digital era is correcting this distortion, slowly. But old habits die hard. I still meet readers who feel cheated by a book under 200 pages, as if they’re paying by the word. I want to gently suggest that this mindset is backwards. You’re not paying for paper. You’re paying for the experience. A two-hour movie and a three-hour movie cost the same ticket price. Nobody complains that the shorter movie was a ripoff if it was better. Books should work the same way. If a 120-page novella keeps you up until 3 AM and changes how you think about something, it’s worth more than a 500-page novel you abandoned on page 200.

For readers who want to get into novellas but aren’t sure where to start, I’d suggest beginning with what you already like. If you read thrillers, try Stephen King’s novella collections (“Different Seasons” is a masterpiece, containing both “Shawshank” and “The Body,” which became “Stand By Me”). If you read literary fiction, pick up “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro, which, while sometimes classified as a short novel, has all the hallmarks of novella construction. If you read science fiction, Ted Chiang’s novellas (several are collected in “Stories of Your Life and Others”) are among the best the genre has produced.

The novella isn’t a lesser form. It isn’t a novel that didn’t try hard enough or a short story that went on too long. It’s its own thing, with its own aesthetics and its own pleasures. It rewards different reading habits. It demands different writing skills. It offers something that no other form can provide: a complete literary experience in a single, unbroken sitting. In a world where our attention is fragmented, where most people struggle to finish the books they start, maybe the novella isn’t just worthy of respect. Maybe it’s exactly what we need.

I think about that afternoon on my bedroom floor with Kafka more often than you’d expect. Not because it was a formative literary experience, although it was. But because it taught me that stories don’t need to be long to be important. They need to be right. Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” at exactly the length it needed to be, not a page more or less. That’s the novella’s promise and its challenge. Not to be shorter than a novel, but to be exactly as long as the story demands. When it works, there’s nothing else like it.

Last year, I read 67 books. The year before that, 41. The year before that, maybe 15. I didn’t get faster at reading. I didn’t take a speed-reading course or install some app that flashes words at me one at a time. What changed was simpler than that, and I think it’s something most people could replicate if they stopped obsessing over speed and started paying attention to habit.

The speed-reading industry has been selling people a fantasy for decades. The pitch is seductive: learn to read 1,000 words per minute and you’ll tear through books like paper. There are courses, seminars, YouTube channels, and entire businesses built on this promise. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Or rather, it works in the sense that you can technically move your eyes across pages faster, but comprehension drops off a cliff. Research from cognitive scientists has been pretty clear on this: above about 400 words per minute, most people start losing the thread. Speed reading is really just speed skimming, which is a useful skill for certain kinds of material but a terrible way to read a novel.

I know this because I tried it. In my early twenties, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with productivity optimization. I read Tim Ferriss, I tried the Pomodoro technique, I experimented with polyphasic sleep (terrible idea, by the way). Naturally, I also tried speed reading. I bought a course, practiced the techniques, and managed to get my reading speed up to something like 600 words per minute. I felt very accomplished. I also couldn’t remember anything I read. I’d finish a book and have only a vague sense of what it was about. The words had passed through me like water through a sieve.

So I gave up on reading faster and started thinking about reading more. Those sound like the same thing, but they’re not. Reading faster means cramming more words into each hour. Reading more means creating more hours in which reading happens. The first is a compression problem. The second is a scheduling problem. And scheduling problems, it turns out, are much easier to solve.

The single biggest change I made was identifying dead time. Not free time, dead time. The difference matters. Free time is a block on your calendar where nothing is scheduled. Dead time is the minutes scattered throughout your day that you currently fill with nothing useful: waiting in line, sitting in a waiting room, riding the bus, standing on the subway platform, lying in bed before sleep takes you. Most people have 30 to 90 minutes of dead time per day. They spend it scrolling their phones, which is fine as a choice, but it’s a choice, not an inevitability.

I started filling dead time with reading. I put a book in my bag every morning. I kept one on my nightstand. I loaded my phone’s Kindle app with whatever I was reading so I always had it available. I didn’t set goals or track minutes. I just made the book the default option for any moment where I had nothing else to do. Waiting for a friend at a restaurant? Book. Doctor’s office? Book. Can’t sleep? Book (though this one can backfire if the book is too good).

The math is surprisingly generous. If you read at an average pace of 250 words per minute and you find 30 minutes of dead time per day, that’s 7,500 words per day. A typical novel is around 80,000 words. That means you’d finish a book roughly every 11 days, or about 33 books per year, just from dead time. You haven’t given up a single evening. You haven’t canceled any plans. You’ve just redirected time you were already spending on nothing into something you (presumably) enjoy.

The second change was quitting books I wasn’t enjoying. This one was harder for me than you might think, because I was raised in a household where abandoning a book was considered a moral failing. My mother would finish every book she started, even if she hated it, because “you might miss something good at the end.” I operated under this principle for years, grinding through mediocre novels out of a sense of obligation, and it was killing my reading habit. Nothing makes you dread picking up a book like knowing you’re going to be bored.

I now follow what I call the 50-page rule, though it’s more of a guideline. If a book hasn’t grabbed me by page 50, I stop. Life is short. There are more great books than I could ever read. Spending eight hours finishing something I’m not enjoying is eight hours I could have spent on something I love. Some people set the threshold at 100 pages. Others go by percentage. The specific number doesn’t matter. What matters is giving yourself permission to stop. Once I started doing this, my reading speed effectively doubled, because I was no longer slogging through books that didn’t engage me.

The third change was mixing formats. I used to be a purist about physical books. There’s something about the weight of a hardcover, the smell of the pages, the satisfaction of watching your bookmark migrate from front to back. I still love that experience. But insisting on it exclusively was limiting how much I could read. Physical books are heavy, fragile, and hard to read in low light. They require two hands. They don’t fit in a pants pocket.

E-readers solved most of these problems. My Kindle goes everywhere. It’s backlit, so I can read in bed without disturbing anyone. It weighs nothing. I can hold it with one hand while standing on a train. I can adjust the font size when my eyes are tired. I resisted e-readers for years because they felt like a betrayal of “real” books. Getting over that snobbery was one of the best decisions I’ve made as a reader.

Audiobooks were the bigger revelation, though. I was skeptical of audiobooks for a long time. It didn’t feel like “real” reading. I worried I wouldn’t retain as much. But I started listening during my commute, while cooking, while doing laundry, while walking the dog. Suddenly, activities that had been dead time became reading time. A 40-minute commute each way is an hour and 20 minutes of reading per day. That alone gets you through a standard audiobook in about a week. Over the course of a year, my commute alone accounts for roughly 15 to 20 books.

The retention concern, by the way, turned out to be mostly unfounded. Research on audiobook comprehension is mixed, but my personal experience is that I remember audiobooks about as well as physical books, provided I’m paying attention. The key caveat is “paying attention.” I can’t listen to an audiobook while doing something cognitively demanding. Writing, coding, having a conversation: these activities are incompatible with audiobook listening. But passive physical tasks, cooking, cleaning, walking, driving on a familiar route, pair beautifully with listening.

I’ve also found that certain books work better in certain formats. Dense nonfiction with lots of data and arguments? Physical book or e-reader, so I can go back and re-read passages. Memoirs and narrative nonfiction? Audiobook, especially if the author narrates (hearing someone tell their own story in their own voice is a qualitatively different experience). Genre fiction? E-reader, because I tend to read these quickly and don’t need to linger over sentences. Literary fiction? Physical book, because the prose itself is part of the pleasure and I want to control the pace.

The fourth change was building a reading environment. By this I mean both a physical environment and a psychological one. Physically, I created a spot in my home that’s designated for reading. It’s an armchair next to a window with a good lamp. There’s no TV visible from that chair. My phone charger is in another room. When I sit in that chair, my brain knows what’s about to happen. It’s Pavlovian, honestly. The chair means reading time. After a few weeks of consistency, I found I could focus more easily there than anywhere else.

The psychological environment matters just as much. I stopped treating reading as something I do when there’s nothing better to do. I started treating it as an activity I schedule, the same way I schedule exercise or dinner with friends. “I’m going to read from 9 to 10 PM” became a normal sentence in my household. My partner knows not to interrupt during that hour. It sounds rigid, but the structure actually freed me. I stopped feeling guilty about reading when I “should” be doing something else, because reading had its own designated time.

The fifth change was managing my reading list intentionally. For years, my to-read list was a chaotic pile of recommendations, impulse purchases, and half-remembered titles from articles. I’d stand in front of my bookshelf feeling overwhelmed by options and often default to re-reading something comfortable instead. The paradox of choice is real, and it applies to reading as much as anything.

Now I keep a simple list with three categories: currently reading (never more than three at a time), next up (five books I’ve committed to reading next), and someday (everything else). When I finish a book, I pick the next one from my “next up” list without deliberation. No browsing, no agonizing. The decision was made in advance. This eliminates the friction between books, which is where a lot of reading momentum dies. People finish a book, don’t know what to read next, and end up not reading for days or weeks while they decide.

Speaking of momentum: reading begets reading. This is something nobody talks about enough. When you’re in the middle of a book you love, you find time to read. You stay up late. You read at breakfast. You sneak a chapter during lunch. But when you’re between books or stuck in something dull, reading drops off your priority list entirely. The goal isn’t to read faster. The goal is to stay in that state of engagement as much as possible. Every trick I’ve described, filling dead time, quitting bad books, mixing formats, scheduling reading time, managing your list, is really about maintaining momentum.

I want to address the guilt factor, because I think it stops more people from reading than any practical obstacle. Many of the people who tell me “I don’t have time to read” actually do have time. They just feel like they should spend it on something more “productive.” Reading a novel feels indulgent when the dishes are dirty, the inbox is full, and there’s a to-do list as long as your arm. I understand this feeling. I battle it myself. But I’ve come to believe that reading is productive in ways that don’t show up on a to-do list. It makes you a better thinker, a more empathetic person, and a more interesting conversationalist. It reduces stress. It improves focus. It’s one of the few activities that makes you simultaneously more relaxed and more alert.

There’s also the question of what counts as reading. Some people feel that only literary fiction “counts,” that reading thrillers or romance or science fiction is somehow less valuable. This attitude is both snobbish and counterproductive. Read whatever you enjoy. A person who reads 30 romance novels a year is a better reader than a person who reads zero literary novels because they’re too intimidated to start. Genre fiction develops the same reading muscles as literary fiction. It improves vocabulary, comprehension, and cognitive empathy. If you enjoy it, it counts. Period.

I should mention that these strategies work for nonfiction too, with some modifications. Nonfiction is generally easier to read in short bursts, since chapters tend to be more self-contained. It’s also more amenable to skimming. Not all nonfiction deserves a cover-to-cover read. Some books have one or two great chapters padded with filler. With nonfiction, I give myself permission to skip around, read the chapters that interest me, and put the book down once I’ve gotten the main ideas. This isn’t cheating. It’s efficiency. Most nonfiction authors would tell you the same thing. They know their books have varying chapter quality. They wrote the whole thing because publishers want 60,000 words, not because every chapter is equally important.

A few specific practical tips that have helped me. Keep your phone in another room during designated reading time. If that’s not possible, turn off notifications. The gravitational pull of a notification badge is almost impossible to resist, and once you pick up your phone “just to check,” you’ve lost 20 minutes. Buy books slightly faster than you read them, so you always have a queue. Return library books before the due date so you have motivation to finish them. Join a book club if external accountability helps you (it helps some people enormously and annoys others, so your mileage may vary). And read before bed instead of watching a screen. The blue light from screens disrupts sleep; the gentle focus of reading promotes it. I fall asleep faster on nights I read than nights I watch TV, and it’s not close.

The payoff for all of this isn’t just a higher book count, though the number is satisfying in an abstract way. The real payoff is that reading becomes a natural part of your life rather than an occasional hobby you feel guilty about neglecting. When reading is woven into your daily routine, you stop thinking about “finding time to read” the same way you don’t think about “finding time to eat.” It just happens. It’s what you do with certain parts of your day. Getting to that point doesn’t require reading faster. It requires removing the friction, guilt, and decision fatigue that keep you from reading at all. The speed you read at is fine. It’s always been fine. What needs to change is everything around it.

Every publishing house has a personality, whether they admit it or not. You can feel it in the books they choose, the covers they design, the way their prose moves on the page. Some houses feel cool and minimal. Others feel warm and slightly chaotic. Ours, I hope, feels like a conversation between smart people who aren’t trying to impress each other. And the books that shaped that sensibility are worth talking about, because house style doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s built, book by book, influence by influence.

When I started ScrollWorks Media, I didn’t sit down and write a style guide. I probably should have, but what happened instead was more organic. I kept a shelf of books that I’d pull down when I needed to remember what good writing felt like. Books I’d re-read when I was editing a manuscript and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. Books that reminded me of the effect I wanted our work to produce in a reader. Over time, that shelf became our unofficial style guide, and the books on it influenced everything from our sentence-level editing to our approach to narrative structure.

The first book I’d put on the list is “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. If our house has a guiding principle, it’s the one Ishiguro demonstrates here: restraint is a form of power. Stevens, the butler, never says what he means. The reader has to infer everything, the regret, the love, the wasted life, from the gap between what he says and what he feels. This technique of withholding, of trusting the reader to understand what’s happening beneath the surface, is something I push for in almost every book we work on. I don’t want our authors to tell readers how to feel. I want them to create conditions where the feeling is inescapable.

Ishiguro’s prose is also worth studying for its deceptive simplicity. He doesn’t use flashy vocabulary or complicated syntax. His sentences are clear and measured. But the cumulative effect is devastating. By the end of the book, you’re emotionally wrecked by sentences that, individually, read like polite small talk. That’s a level of craft that I find inspiring, and it’s the benchmark I hold up when an author tells me their manuscript needs more “lyrical” language. Usually, what it needs is more precision.

The second book is “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. I know it’s controversial to admire Capote at this point, given the questions about his accuracy and his exploitation of the people involved. I’m not holding him up as a moral example. But as a piece of writing, “In Cold Blood” taught me more about narrative structure than any craft book ever has. Capote took a newspaper story, a family murdered in rural Kansas, and built it into something that reads like a novel while remaining (mostly) factual. The pacing is extraordinary. The way he intercuts between the victims’ lives and the killers’ journey across America creates a sense of dread that’s almost unbearable. If you want to understand how to structure a nonfiction narrative, this is the template.

What I specifically take from Capote is the willingness to slow down. Modern publishing is obsessed with pace. Every chapter has to end on a cliffhanger. Every scene has to advance the plot. Capote ignores all of that. He spends pages describing the Clutter family’s daily routines, their meals, their relationships with neighbors. None of this “advances the plot.” All of it is necessary. By the time the violence arrives, you feel it in your bones because Capote made you live in that house first. I encourage our authors to do the same thing: earn the big moments by investing in the small ones.

Third on my list is “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. I know, I know. It’s a cliche. Every editor cites this book. But there’s a reason it’s endured for almost a century while flashier writing guides have come and gone. The core principle, “omit needless words,” is the single most useful piece of writing advice ever formulated. I think about it constantly. I apply it to every manuscript that crosses my desk. Most first drafts use twice as many words as they need. Cutting them isn’t about making the book shorter; it’s about making every remaining word count for more.

Strunk and White have been criticized in recent years, some of it deservedly. Their prescriptive rules can feel dated, and their attitude toward non-standard English is narrow. I don’t treat the book as gospel. But its underlying philosophy, that good writing is clear writing, that clarity requires effort, that every sentence should be necessary, is as relevant now as it was in 1920. When I edit, I’m always asking: does this sentence earn its place? Would the paragraph work without it? If the answer is yes, the sentence goes. Strunk would approve.

The fourth book is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion. Didion’s essay collection taught me that voice can carry anything. Her sentences are strange and declarative and weirdly rhythmic. She starts “The White Album” with the line “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is one of those sentences that sounds obvious until you realize it contains an entire worldview. Didion writes like she’s solving a puzzle on the page, fitting pieces together and stepping back to see if the picture makes sense. Her influence on our house style is mostly about voice, about letting the writer’s personality come through without becoming the point.

What Didion does better than almost anyone is write from a position of uncertainty. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. She’s working things out in real time, and the reader gets to watch the process. This is something I actively seek in the manuscripts we publish. I don’t want authors who have everything figured out before they start writing. I want authors who are thinking on the page, who are willing to follow an idea somewhere unexpected, who trust the reader enough to share the mess of discovery. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and valuable, and Didion modeled it better than anyone.

Fifth is “Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders. This might seem like an odd choice for a book that influenced house style, since it’s so formally experimental. But what Saunders demonstrates here is that risk-taking and accessibility aren’t opposites. “Lincoln in the Bardo” is one of the strangest novels published in the last decade. It’s a chorus of ghostly voices, a collage of historical documents (some real, some invented), and a meditation on grief and parenthood. It sounds like it should be unreadable. Instead, it’s one of the most emotionally devastating books I’ve ever encountered.

The lesson I take from Saunders is: don’t be afraid to try something new, but make sure the reader can follow you. His innovations serve the story. They’re not showing off. Every formal choice he makes (the chorus structure, the mix of fact and fiction, the fractured timeline) exists because the conventional approach wouldn’t have achieved the same emotional effect. When our authors want to experiment with form, I point them to Saunders as proof that experimentation works when it’s in service of something larger than itself.

Sixth is “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I re-read it every couple of years, and every time I’m astonished by how perfectly constructed it is. At barely 50,000 words, it’s one of the most efficient novels ever written. There isn’t a wasted paragraph. The symbolism is layered but never heavy-handed. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is one of literature’s great inventions: a seemingly neutral observer who turns out to be deeply unreliable. As a model for first-person narration, I don’t think it’s ever been surpassed.

What Fitzgerald taught me about editing, specifically, is the power of the final line. The last page of “Gatsby” is so perfectly written that it elevates everything that came before it. A good ending doesn’t just conclude the story; it reframes it. It makes you want to go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again with new eyes. When I’m editing a manuscript, I spend disproportionate time on the ending, because a strong ending can save a flawed book and a weak ending can ruin a good one. Fitzgerald knew this instinctively.

Seventh is “Educated” by Tara Westover. This memoir influenced our approach to nonfiction specifically. Westover writes about her childhood in a survivalist family in Idaho, her lack of formal education, and her eventual path to a PhD from Cambridge. The story itself is extraordinary, but what I admire most is her refusal to simplify it. She doesn’t make herself a hero. She doesn’t make her family purely villains. She holds complexity without resolving it, and the book is more honest for that refusal.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve worked on memoirs and personal narratives, and the temptation to flatten real life into a neat arc is always there. The hero overcomes adversity. The villain gets their comeuppance. The lesson is learned. Westover resists all of that. She still loves her family. She’s still angry at them. Both things are true at once. When I edit memoir, I push authors toward that kind of complexity. Real life doesn’t have clean resolutions, and pretending it does is a form of dishonesty.

The eighth book is “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel. A post-apocalyptic novel about a traveling Shakespeare company might sound niche, but Mandel’s genius is making it feel universal. What I take from this book is the importance of structural ambition. “Station Eleven” jumps between timelines, characters, and settings with a confidence that’s breathtaking. Every fragment connects to every other fragment, and the connections aren’t always obvious at first. The reader has to trust the author and keep reading, and Mandel rewards that trust completely.

This is something I encourage in our authors: trust the reader. Don’t explain every connection. Don’t spell out every theme. If the structure is sound, the reader will figure it out, and the pleasure of figuring it out is part of the experience. Books that over-explain their own significance insult the reader’s intelligence. Books that trust the reader to assemble meaning on their own create a kind of collaborative magic. Mandel does this as well as any living novelist.

I could list more books, many more, but these eight represent the core of what I think of as our aesthetic at ScrollWorks. Restraint from Ishiguro. Structure from Capote. Economy from Strunk and White. Voice from Didion. Risk from Saunders. Craft from Fitzgerald. Complexity from Westover. Trust from Mandel. These aren’t rules. They’re tendencies, leanings, biases that shape how we read manuscripts and how we edit them. Every publishing house has them, whether they’ve articulated them or not.

What I’ve found is that having a clear set of influences makes editing easier. When I’m stuck on a manuscript, wondering what’s wrong or what it needs, I can often diagnose the problem by asking which of these principles it’s violating. Is the prose trying too hard? (It needs more Ishiguro.) Is the structure confusing without payoff? (It needs more Mandel.) Is the voice generic? (It needs more Didion.) These aren’t formulas. They’re compass points. They help me orient the work without constraining it.

I’d encourage any reader, and any writer, to build their own shelf of influences. Not the books you think you should admire, but the books that actually changed how you read and write. The books you go back to when you need to remember what the art form is capable of. Those books will tell you something about your own aesthetic that no writing manual can articulate. They’ll also give you a vocabulary for discussing what makes writing work, which is more useful than any set of rules. Rules are rigid. Influences are alive. They keep teaching you new things every time you return to them, which is, I think, one of the defining characteristics of great writing: it grows with you.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time last month adjusting the leading on a chapter opener. Leading, for the uninitiated, is the vertical space between lines of text. I was working on the interior layout of a forthcoming book, and something about the opening page felt wrong. The text was too cramped, or too loose, or somehow both at once. I nudged the leading up by half a point. Better, but not right. Down by a quarter point. Worse. Up by three-quarters of a point. There it was. The page suddenly looked like it wanted to be read.

My partner, who had been watching this over my shoulder, asked me if I honestly thought anyone would notice the difference. And the honest answer is: no, not consciously. Nobody picks up a book and thinks “ah, the leading on this chapter opener is exquisite.” But they feel it. They feel it the same way you feel the difference between a well-lit room and a poorly lit one. You might not be able to identify what’s wrong, but you know something is off. Typography is like that. It’s an invisible art that shapes your reading experience in ways you never think about, and that invisibility is precisely what makes it powerful.

I didn’t always care about typography. When I started in publishing, I thought fonts were fonts. You picked one that looked nice, set it at a reasonable size, and moved on. The idea that typographic choices could affect comprehension, mood, pacing, and emotional response seemed absurd. Then I started paying attention, and I couldn’t stop.

The rabbit hole started with a simple observation: why do some books feel easier to read than others, even when the prose quality is similar? I was comparing two novels, both literary fiction, both well-written, both about the same length. One was a pleasure to hold and read. The other felt like work. When I looked more carefully, the difference was entirely in the design. The pleasant book used Garamond, a typeface designed in the sixteenth century, with generous margins, comfortable leading, and chapter headings that gave the eye a place to rest. The difficult book used a modern sans-serif with tight spacing, narrow margins, and no visual breathing room. The words were fine. The container was wrong.

This sent me down a path of reading about typography that I’m still on years later. I read Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style,” which is to typography what Strunk and White is to writing: a slim, opinionated guide that makes you see the world differently. I read about the history of typeface design, from Gutenberg’s blackletter to the digital fonts we use today. I learned about kerning (the space between individual letter pairs), tracking (the overall spacing of a block of text), and the dozens of other micro-decisions that go into making text readable.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: typography is not decoration. It’s communication. Every typographic choice sends a message, whether the designer intended it or not. A serif font says something different from a sans-serif. A large x-height (the height of lowercase letters) conveys something different from a small one. Bold chapter headings create a different reading rhythm than italic ones. These signals are mostly subliminal, but they’re real, and they affect how readers process and respond to text.

Let me get specific. Serif fonts, the ones with the little feet and strokes at the ends of letters, have been the standard for book text for centuries. There’s a reason for this beyond tradition. The serifs create a visual baseline that guides the eye along the line. They connect letters into words and words into sentences. When you’re reading a long block of text, serifs reduce eye fatigue by providing subtle cues about letter shapes and word boundaries. This isn’t opinion; it’s been studied. For extended reading on paper, serif fonts consistently outperform sans-serif fonts in readability tests.

Screen reading is a different story. On low-resolution screens, serifs can appear fuzzy and actually hinder readability. This is why websites historically favored sans-serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica. But as screen resolution has improved (think Retina displays and modern e-readers), the gap has narrowed. Many e-readers now default to serif fonts, and they look beautiful on high-resolution screens. The old rule that “serif is for print, sans-serif is for screen” is becoming less true with each passing year.

Font size is another area where most people’s instincts are wrong. When I design a book interior, I typically set body text between 10.5 and 12 points, depending on the typeface. That might seem small, but point size is misleading. Different fonts at the same point size can look vastly different in apparent size because of variations in x-height, letter width, and stroke thickness. A 10-point Garamond looks considerably smaller than a 10-point Georgia. Judging by point size alone is like judging shoes by their number without specifying the brand.

Margins might be the most underappreciated element of book design. Most readers don’t notice margins at all, which is exactly the point. Good margins are invisible. Bad margins are distracting. Too narrow, and the text feels cramped, the words crowding against the edge of the page like commuters on a packed train. Too wide, and the text floats in a sea of white space, feeling unanchored. The inner margin (the gutter, where the pages meet at the spine) needs to be wider than the outer margin, because some of that space disappears into the binding. Getting this right requires physical prototyping: printing pages, binding test copies, and holding them the way a reader would hold them.

Line length is something I obsess over, and I think it’s the single most important factor in readability after font choice. The optimal line length for body text is generally considered to be 45 to 75 characters per line, including spaces. Shorter than that and your eye is constantly jumping to the next line, creating a choppy reading experience. Longer than that and your eye loses its place when moving from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Most well-designed books fall in the 60 to 66 character range, and it’s not a coincidence. That range feels right because it matches how our eyes naturally track across a page.

This has practical implications for book formatting that many self-publishers get wrong. If your page is a standard 6×9 trim size with reasonable margins, and you’re using a standard body font at a standard size, your line length will probably be fine. But if you’re using a larger trim size, or narrower margins, or a condensed font, you can easily end up with lines that are too long for comfortable reading. I’ve seen self-published books with lines running 90 or 100 characters, and they’re genuinely difficult to read even when the writing is good. The fix is usually some combination of wider margins, a larger font size, or a typeface with wider letterforms.

Chapter openings are where typography gets to be a little more expressive. The convention of starting a chapter with a drop cap (a large initial letter that extends down several lines) dates back to medieval manuscripts, where monks would hand-paint elaborate initial letters at the start of each section. Modern drop caps serve the same function: they signal a new beginning, give the eye a landing point, and add visual interest to the page. They’re not strictly necessary, and some books work better without them, but when they’re done well, they add a touch of elegance that readers feel even if they don’t notice.

I also care deeply about the small stuff: orphans and widows (single words or short lines stranded at the top or bottom of a page), hyphenation (which should be minimal and never occur on more than two consecutive lines), and the alignment of running headers and page numbers. These details might seem obsessive, but in aggregate, they’re the difference between a book that feels professionally made and one that feels homemade. Readers can’t usually articulate what’s different, but they respond to it. A well-typeset book feels authoritative. A poorly typeset one feels like something’s wrong.

Cover typography deserves its own discussion. The typeface on a book cover isn’t just conveying the title; it’s conveying the genre, the tone, and the intended audience. Look at the thriller section of a bookstore. You’ll see bold, stark sans-serif fonts, often in white or red against a dark background. Now look at literary fiction. More variation, but a tendency toward elegant serifs, sometimes hand-lettered. Romance? Flowing scripts and warm colors. Science fiction? Clean, geometric fonts that suggest technology and the future. These aren’t accidents. They’re genre signals, visual shorthand that tells a browser what kind of book they’re looking at before they read a single word of the description.

At ScrollWorks, we agonize over cover typography as much as any other element of design. The font we choose for a title has to work at thumbnail size (because most book browsing now happens online) and at full size. It has to be legible, distinctive, and tonally appropriate. It has to pair well with the author’s name, the subtitle (if any), and the cover art. Getting all of these things right simultaneously is harder than it sounds. I’ve spent entire days choosing between two fonts for a cover, printing test versions, pinning them to a wall, and staring at them from across the room to see which one reads better at a distance.

The digital age has been both a blessing and a curse for typography. On the positive side, we now have access to thousands of high-quality typefaces, sophisticated layout software, and the ability to adjust every typographic parameter with precision. On the negative side, that same accessibility has led to a lot of bad typography. When anyone can set type, many people do it badly. Poorly formatted e-books with no attention to leading or margins. Self-published print books with clashing fonts and erratic spacing. Websites with body text set in a decorative display font. The tools are better than ever. The average skill level of the people using them hasn’t kept pace.

E-books present a particular typographic challenge. Unlike print books, e-books are reflowable: the text adapts to the reader’s screen size, preferred font, and chosen font size. This means the designer has less control. You can’t guarantee line length, pagination, or even which font the reader will use. Some e-book readers override the publisher’s font choices entirely. This used to frustrate me, but I’ve come to accept it as a tradeoff. E-books prioritize reader control over designer control, and that’s not a bad thing. The designer’s job shifts from dictating the reading experience to establishing defaults that work well while being flexible enough to adapt.

If you’re a self-publishing author reading this and feeling overwhelmed, here’s my practical advice. First, use a serif font for your body text. Garamond, Caslon, Minion, Sabon, or any of the classic book fonts will serve you well. Second, set your body text between 10 and 12 points, depending on the font. Third, use generous margins, at least 0.75 inches on the outside edges and 1 inch in the gutter. Fourth, set your leading at 120 to 145 percent of your font size (so 12-point text gets 14.4 to 17.4 points of leading). Fifth, keep your line length under 70 characters. Sixth, use no more than two font families in the entire book, one for body text and one for headings. These six rules will get you 90 percent of the way to a professional-looking interior, and they don’t require a design degree to implement.

Typography matters because reading is a physical act, not just a mental one. Your eyes move across the page in patterns that are influenced by the letterforms, the spacing, the margins, and a hundred other design choices. When those choices are made well, reading feels effortless. When they’re made badly, reading becomes work, and the reader might not even know why they’re struggling. The best typography is the typography you never notice, the invisible architecture that holds the reading experience together. I realize that spending an afternoon on leading sounds ridiculous. But every reader who picks up that book and thinks “this is a pleasure to read” is proving that it wasn’t ridiculous at all. It was exactly the kind of care that the work deserved.

I’m going to say something that might lose us some friends in the traditional publishing world: self-publishing is a legitimate path, and it’s often the smarter choice. Not always. Not for everyone. But the stigma that still clings to self-published books in 2023 is, for the most part, outdated. I say this as someone who runs a small press. I have skin in the traditional game. And I’m telling you that the playing field has shifted in ways that many people in my position are reluctant to acknowledge.

Let me start with the economics, because that’s where the traditional publishing narrative breaks down fastest. A first-time author who lands a deal with one of the Big Five publishers can expect an advance somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000. That’s the median range. Yes, you hear about six-figure and seven-figure deals, but those are statistical anomalies. They happen to about 1 percent of authors. For the other 99 percent, the advance is modest, and here’s the thing most people don’t realize: most books never earn out their advance. That means the royalty rate (typically 10 to 15 percent of the cover price for hardcovers, less for paperbacks) never kicks in. Your advance is your total payment.

Now compare that to self-publishing on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). You set your own price. If you price your e-book between $2.99 and $9.99, you get 70 percent of the sale price. Seventy percent. On a $4.99 e-book, that’s $3.49 per sale. To earn $10,000, you need to sell about 2,865 copies. For a traditionally published author earning 10 percent on a $25 paperback, the same $10,000 requires 4,000 copies. And the self-published author keeps earning on every sale forever, while the traditionally published author might see their book go out of print in two or three years.

The math gets even more interesting for authors who can build an audience. I know self-published romance authors clearing $200,000 a year. I know self-published thriller writers making $50,000 a month during a good launch. These aren’t household names. They’re working writers with modest social media followings who figured out how to reach their specific readers. They don’t have publicists or marketing teams or shelf space at Barnes and Noble. They have email lists, Facebook groups, and a deep understanding of Amazon’s algorithm. The gatekeepers aren’t gone, exactly. They’ve just been replaced by different ones.

But, and this is a big but, the financial upside of self-publishing comes with serious responsibilities. When you self-publish, you are the publisher. That means you’re responsible for everything a publisher normally handles: editing, cover design, interior layout, proofreading, marketing, distribution, and metadata. You can hire people to do these things, and you should, but you’re still the project manager. You’re making decisions about things you might not understand well. And the quality of those decisions determines the quality of your book.

This is where many self-published books fail. Not because self-publishing is inherently inferior, but because many self-publishing authors cut corners on production. They skip professional editing. They design their own covers using Canva. They format the interior themselves and miss things a professional would catch. The result is a book that looks self-published, and in publishing, looking self-published is still a death sentence. Readers are brutal and fast judges. A bad cover means they never click on your book. A typo-riddled first page means they return it. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and the first impression in publishing is almost entirely about production quality.

My honest advice to anyone considering self-publishing is this: budget for professionals. At minimum, you need a developmental editor ($1,000 to $5,000), a copy editor ($500 to $2,000), a proofreader ($300 to $1,000), a cover designer ($500 to $2,000), and an interior formatter ($200 to $500). That’s $2,500 to $10,500 before you sell a single copy. It’s an investment, and there’s no guarantee you’ll earn it back. But without those professionals, your book is competing with professionally produced books while wearing a “I made this at home” sign. Some authors recoup that investment on their first book. Many don’t. It’s a gamble, and you should go in with your eyes open.

Traditional publishing, for all its problems, does handle all of this for you. That’s the trade: you give up control and most of the money, and in return, you get professional production, bookstore distribution, and (in theory) marketing support. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on your goals. If your primary goal is to see your book in bookstores, traditional publishing is still the only reliable way to make that happen. Self-published books can technically get into bookstores through Ingram distribution, but in practice, it’s rare. Bookstore buyers favor publishers they know and trust, and they’re skeptical of self-published titles.

If your goal is to maximize income per book, self-publishing almost always wins. If your goal is prestige, traditional publishing still carries more cultural weight, though that gap is narrowing. If your goal is speed to market, self-publishing is unbeatable; you can go from finished manuscript to published book in weeks. Traditional publishing takes 12 to 18 months minimum, often longer. If your goal is creative control, self-publishing gives you total authority over everything from the cover to the price to the marketing strategy. In traditional publishing, you get input on these decisions but rarely the final say.

The hybrid model is worth mentioning here. Some authors publish some books traditionally and others independently, depending on the project. This is increasingly common and increasingly smart. A literary novel that benefits from bookstore distribution and review attention? Go traditional. A genre series with a built-in audience that you want to release on a fast schedule? Self-publish. The authors who thrive in today’s market are often the ones who view traditional and self-publishing not as opposing camps but as different tools for different jobs.

I want to talk about the stigma for a moment, because it still exists and it still hurts. Among literary circles, self-publishing carries an unspoken assumption: you couldn’t get a real publisher. This assumption is sometimes true and sometimes wildly wrong. Some self-published authors chose that path strategically after receiving traditional offers. Others were rejected by publishers and decided to go it alone. The quality of the book is the same either way. But the perception differs, and perception affects everything from review coverage to award eligibility to how seriously people take you at a dinner party when you say you’re a published author.

This stigma is fading, slowly. Andy Weir self-published “The Martian” before it was picked up by a major publisher and adapted into a film. E.L. James self-published the “Fifty Shades” trilogy before it became one of the bestselling series in history. These are extreme examples, but they’ve shifted the conversation. The question is no longer “is this self-published?” but “is this good?” At least, that’s the direction we’re moving. We’re not there yet. But we’re closer than we were five years ago, and much closer than we were ten years ago.

From our perspective at ScrollWorks, we occupy a middle ground that I think is increasingly valuable. We’re not a Big Five publisher. We don’t offer six-figure advances. But we provide professional editing, design, and production support, along with distribution through standard channels. For authors who want more support than self-publishing provides but more attention and control than a large publisher offers, a small press can be the right fit. I’d be lying if I said it’s always the best choice. For some books and some authors, self-publishing is clearly better. For others, a large publisher with extensive distribution is worth the tradeoffs. The honest answer is that there’s no universal best path. There’s only the best path for your specific book, your specific goals, and your specific tolerance for risk.

Marketing is the elephant in the room for both paths. Traditional publishers provide some marketing support, but unless you’re one of their lead titles, that support is often minimal: a press release, a listing in their catalog, maybe some social media posts. The bulk of marketing for midlist traditionally published books falls on the author, which means you’re doing the same work a self-published author does, just with less money per sale. Self-published authors, on the other hand, have complete control over their marketing but have to fund it entirely themselves. Amazon advertising, Facebook ads, newsletter swaps, BookBub promotions; these cost money and require skills that have nothing to do with writing. The authors who succeed at self-publishing are often as good at marketing as they are at writing. If marketing makes you miserable, that’s a genuine argument for traditional publishing, even with its lower per-book income.

A word about Amazon, since it’s impossible to discuss self-publishing without discussing the company that essentially created the modern self-publishing market. Amazon controls roughly 80 percent of the US e-book market. Their Kindle Direct Publishing platform is the primary distribution channel for self-published authors. Their Kindle Unlimited subscription service is a major revenue source. This dominance is both empowering and concerning. It’s empowering because Amazon has genuinely democratized publishing. Anyone can publish a book. The barriers to entry are essentially zero. It’s concerning because a single company has that much control over an entire industry. A change in Amazon’s algorithm, commission structure, or policies can devastate authors overnight. Building your entire business on someone else’s platform is risky, and self-published authors should be clear-eyed about that risk.

I also want to address quality, because the quality argument is the one traditional publishing advocates lean on most heavily. The claim is that traditional publishers act as quality filters: agents and editors select the best manuscripts, improve them through editing, and only publish books that meet a professional standard. This is sometimes true. It’s also sometimes nonsense. Traditional publishers put out plenty of mediocre books, and some truly excellent books are self-published. The filter isn’t as reliable as the industry claims. What traditional publishing does provide is a floor. The worst traditionally published book is usually readable, if not great. The worst self-published book is genuinely terrible. The gap at the bottom is enormous. But at the top? The gap barely exists.

There’s one more angle I want to explore: the psychological dimension. Self-publishing requires a thick skin. When you’re traditionally published, your publisher absorbs some of the emotional burden. Bad reviews? The publisher has dealt with worse. Low sales? The publisher has other books to offset the loss. When you self-publish, every rejection, every one-star review, every disappointing sales day lands directly on you. There’s no buffer. For some authors, this direct exposure is motivating. For others, it’s crushing. Know yourself before you choose.

The flip side is that self-publishing provides immediate, unfiltered feedback. You know within days how your book is performing. You can see exactly who’s buying it, when they’re buying it, and how they’re finding it. Traditional publishing is opaque by comparison. Sales data arrives months late, filtered through your agent, and often incomplete. If you’re the kind of person who wants to understand your audience and respond to market signals, self-publishing gives you tools that traditional publishing simply can’t match.

I’ve also noticed that self-published authors tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs first and writers second, while traditionally published authors tend to identify primarily as writers. Neither identity is better, but they lead to very different career strategies. The entrepreneur-writer optimizes, tests, and iterates. They treat each book as a product launch. The writer-writer focuses on craft, trusts the process, and hopes the market follows. The most successful authors I know, in both camps, have found a way to be both at once.

If I had to give a single piece of advice to someone deciding between traditional and self-publishing, it would be: don’t make the decision based on ideology. Make it based on your book, your audience, and your career goals. Research both paths thoroughly. Talk to authors who’ve done both. Look at the actual numbers for books in your genre. And whatever you choose, commit to producing a professional product. The market doesn’t care how your book was published. It cares whether your book is worth reading. If it is, readers will find it. Eventually. Probably. Publishing is still a gamble, regardless of the path. The honest take is that both paths can work, both paths can fail, and anyone who tells you one is always better than the other is selling you something.