There’s a folder on my computer labeled “Almost.” It contains proposals, manuscripts, and correspondence for books that ScrollWorks considered publishing but ultimately didn’t. Some we turned down for business reasons. Some we loved but couldn’t afford. A few we let… Read more →

The first one-star review one of our books received said, in its entirety: “Boring. Nothing happens.” The book in question was a literary novel about a retired schoolteacher coming to terms with the end of her career. Quite a lot… Read more →

It’s the last week of December and the office is quiet. Half the team is on vacation. The other half is here in body but drifting mentally, that pleasant end-of-year state where the urgency drains out of everything and you… Read more →

I spent the better part of last Tuesday evening watching a seventeen-year-old in Oklahoma City explain, with more passion than most literature professors I’ve met, why Donna Tartt’s The Secret History changed her life. She held the book up to… Read more →

I can tell you the exact moment a book loses me. It’s usually somewhere around page three. Not page fifty, not the midpoint, not the ending that falls apart. Page three. If I’m still pushing through the prose by then,… Read more →

Last October, I spent four days standing behind a folding table in a converted tobacco warehouse in Asheville, North Carolina, talking about books with strangers. My feet hurt. My voice was shot by day two. I ate more barbecue than… Read more →

Every time we run a promotion that includes free shipping, someone on our team does the math and sighs audibly. I understand the sigh. The numbers are not, by any conventional accounting standard, encouraging. But I keep running the promotions… Read more →

The paper for Still Waters took three months to select. Three months of requesting samples, holding pages up to different light sources, running test prints, debating opacity and texture with an intensity that, I’m aware, might seem absurd to anyone… Read more →

When someone asks me what kind of books we publish at ScrollWorks, I usually say “literary fiction” and then immediately regret it. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because the term is so loaded, so fought over, and so frequently misunderstood… Read more →

I own a first edition of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair that I bought at a used bookstore in Philadelphia about twelve years ago. The previous owner, whose name I don’t know, read it with a pencil. The… Read more →