In 1660, a woman named Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a collection of plays, poetry, and philosophical treatises under her own name. This was, at the time, borderline scandalous. Women in seventeenth-century England could write privately, as a… Read more →

I want to talk about diversity in our catalog, and I want to do it without the corporate preamble that usually accompanies these conversations. No mission statement. No aspirational language about “amplifying underrepresented voices.” Not because those sentiments are wrong,… Read more →

I finished the first draft of Echoes of Iron in about fourteen months. It was messy, overlong, and I loved it the way you love something you’ve been living inside for more than a year. When the editing was done… Read more →

I have a theory that you can judge a civilization by its bookshop cafes. Not its libraries, though those matter too. Not its chain bookstores with their loyalty programs and corporate coffee. I mean the independent bookshops that have a… Read more →

About two years ago, we made a decision at ScrollWorks that felt, at the time, slightly heretical. We stopped caring about bestseller lists. Not in the performative way where you say you don’t care while secretly refreshing the rankings every… Read more →

I was at a publishing conference in late 2022 when someone on a panel said, with considerable confidence, that the pandemic’s effect on reading habits had been “temporary” and that things were “returning to normal.” I wrote down the quote… Read more →

Last week, one of our authors received a box of finished copies of her new book. She posted a photo of herself holding it, beaming. The comments flooded in: congratulations, how exciting, you must be so proud. And she should… Read more →

Last week, one of our authors received a box of finished copies of her new book. She posted a photo of herself holding it, beaming. The comments flooded in: congratulations, how exciting, you must be so proud. And she should… Read more →

I read aloud to my partner on a road trip last summer. We were driving through western Pennsylvania, the kind of long, rolling highway that demands either a podcast or a conversation, and we’d run out of both. I pulled… Read more →

Every few months, an article goes viral about reading speed. The headline is usually something like “The Average Person Reads X Words Per Minute: Here’s How You Compare.” The comment sections fill up with people bragging about how fast they… Read more →