I have been running an independent publishing house for long enough to know that optimism about the future needs to be earned. Plenty of indie publishers have folded over the years, killed by thin margins, distribution nightmares, or the slow… Read more →

I’ve been in three book clubs over the past fifteen years. The first one lasted four months. The second one lasted about a year. The third one is still going, seven years and counting, and it’s one of the things… Read more →

I’ve been reading submissions for ScrollWorks Media for a long time. Before that, I read submissions at two other publishing houses. In total, I’ve read somewhere in the range of fifteen thousand manuscripts, proposals, and query letters. I’ve said no… Read more →

We have two non-fiction books on our list that, on the surface, could not be more different. The Cartographer’s Dilemma by David Okonkwo is about maps, geography, and how the act of representing the world shapes our understanding of it.… Read more →

Most book marketing is forgettable. This is not a criticism, exactly. It is a description of reality. The standard playbook, advance review copies, a press release, some social media posts, maybe a book tour if the budget allows, gets the… Read more →

When I tell people in publishing that we’ve released a book about Bitcoin, the reaction usually falls into one of two categories. Some people are curious, even excited. Others give me a look that suggests I’ve just told them we’re… Read more →

Memoir submissions to ScrollWorks Media have tripled in the past three years. I checked the numbers twice because I thought someone had miscounted. They had not. Three years ago, we received roughly forty memoir proposals a year. Last year, it… Read more →

A few years ago, I read a novel translated from the Korean. The prose was extraordinary: precise, emotionally rich, full of rhythm and surprise. Afterward, I looked up other translations by the same translator and bought three more books on… Read more →

There’s an image of the writer that persists in popular culture despite decades of evidence against it: the solitary genius, alone in a room, producing a masterpiece from the pure force of individual talent. Hemingway at his standing desk. Emily… Read more →

When James Whitfield submitted the first draft of Echoes of Iron, he included a twenty-page bibliography. For a novel. This is unusual, and it told us something about the kind of historical fiction he was writing. He was not using… Read more →