Advertise on podcast: The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

Last year 4.2 million books were published in the United States with an ISBN. Three and a half million of them were self-published. Traditional publishers put out 642,000. So for every book that came through the old machine, more than five came through the side door, and this year almost a third of new titles on Amazon’s platform arrive with a disclosure that a machine wrote some of it. I’m not here to tell you the sky is falling. I run a press and I’m betting my working life on people wanting books. But if you’re sitting on a manuscript and wondering what it costs to put it into the world, you’re asking in a year when the shelf got very crowded very fast. So this episode is the arithmetic, line by line: editing, cover, typesetting, audio, ISBNs, the roughly eighteen thousand dollars you can spend before anyone knows your book exists. And then the question underneath the numbers, which is what you’re actually buying when you work with a publisher, and whether you need one at all. The difficulty in life is the choice. In this episode: * Why 4.2 million ISBNs in a year is not the end of the world, and what it does change * The printer-and-ink problem: what “free to publish” leaves out * The three-year Amazon picture: catalog, sellers, and revenue growing at very different speeds * The line-by-line cost of a sixty-thousand-word nonfiction book, from developmental edit to ISBNs * Why print-on-demand hardcovers cost a self-publisher more than they cost a big house, and what to do about it * Audio: what it takes to record, edit, and upload your own audiobook, and why Crossroads is baking it in for the founding cohort * What a publisher is actually selling: representation, selection, and a partner in the room * The nonprofit-press volume play, the vanity-press TV commercial, and the difference between a book and a zine * Three questions before you decide: do you already have readers, could you hire every service separately, and do you want to run the account yourself * Why I’m in this at all If you’re an author with a fine nonfiction book and you’re wondering where to take it, send a submission inquiry through the press site and let’s have a conversation about whether this is a fit, for you and for us. Deciding against it is a real answer, and I’d rather you decide clearly than sign up for something you didn’t want. If you know a writer who’s sitting on a manuscript and doing this arithmetic right now, forward them this episode. That helps more than anything I can do on my own. Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press. Show page: crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty. More at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Last week I mentioned an agent who read 6,152 queries and signed two writers. This week I want to talk about the other 6,150. Every one of them got a letter—or possibly just a long and unreturned response—but one way or another the message said some version of: thank you, but this isn’t the right fit for our list. That sentence contains no information. It doesn’t tell you whether your book was almost there or nowhere close, whether to revise for a year or send it out again Tuesday. I read every manuscript that comes to my press myself, and everyone who sends pages gets one of three answers in writing, with the reasons. Ready. Nearly. Not yet. This episode is what those three words actually mean, why nobody upstream in the industry is checking readiness at all, and then the question I get at dinner parties: can’t I just edit my own book? The honest answer has a wall in it that has nothing to do with how good a writer you are. Follow The Difficulty: Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press. More also at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

In 1983 the screenwriter William Goldman wrote three words that people in Hollywood have been quoting ever since. Nobody knows anything. About twenty years later a psychologist spent two decades testing whether that's true about everything, collecting somewhere near twenty-eight thousand predictions from the experts we put on television. It did not go well for the experts. There's a second finding buried in that study that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

In the summer of 2022 the federal government sued to stop the biggest publisher in the world from buying the fourth biggest, and for two weeks the people who run American publishing had to explain their business under oath. Asked how publishing decides what succeeds, the CEO of Penguin Random House said this: “Everything is random in publishing. Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that is why we are the Random House.” That isn’t a critic. It isn’t a bitter writer with a drawer full of rejections. That’s the man running the largest publishing company on earth, telling you the system doesn’t know. This is the first of a series of weeks on what’s actually happening in publishing right now, and what I think a publisher is for. Today: the real numbers, including the viral one that’s false. Why an indie musician gets romance and an indie author still gets an asterisk. And what the word hybrid actually means, which turns out to be a story about Mendel’s peas. Follow The Difficulty: Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press. More at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Forty-six and twenty-three. Then forty-eight and eight. Those four numbers come from an experiment where college students had to wear a Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of strangers, and I think the second pair might be the most freeing finding in social psychology. Especially if you have something finished sitting on your desk that you haven't published yet. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Did you keep two fingers in the book? One on the page you were on, one back at the choice, so a bad ending never had to count. Guilty! I’ve never met a Choose Your Own Adventure reader who didn’t. And if you were a purist, I genuinely want to hear from you, because maybe you’re my ideal reader. This week my own interactive novel came out. The Escape Artist drops you into Lester Honeycutt, a teenager in mid-century Delaware, Ohio, who owns a pair of striped pants he considers part of his act and wants to be the greatest magician in the world. Two legends come to town on the same Saturday at eight o’clock, the escape artist and the knife thrower, and you can only see one of them. Thirty endings. Four complete life cycles. A gang, a rival magician, a hot air balloon, and one moment where you nudge your best friend up on stage to be generous and it costs you everything. Kirkus calls it “entertaining escapades bolstered by a bevy of gleefully unpredictable endings.” Play the opening free, ten minutes: https://chadprevost.com/ea The book: https://chadprevost.com/if-then-books/the-escape-artist/ Buy it anywhere, forward the receipt to [email protected], and the full online version is yours free. Illustrations by Annabelle Tarter. Ages 14–17. Teachers, librarians, principals: I’ll come run this live in your classroom, and the room votes on every choice. Book two sessions and the second is a writing workshop where students write their own endings. Same address.Substack: Apple Podcasts: Spotify: Show page: https://crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty/ Personal site: https://chadprevost.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Live from Home Bar with Genesis, on a Friday evening in August. I brought a poem this time. The last time we sat down together I got self-conscious about which one to read and never read any of them, and then a night or two later I had a dream: a baby left with me in an upstairs room, a baby I ignored for a while before I finally drew close and started building trust with her. Robert A. Johnson says don’t just tell a dream, walk with it. So I walked with it, and this episode is some of what came of that. Genesis talks about why creative people need frequent times of silly, and why that’s the thing that keeps you limber enough to lift something heavy later. He tells the story behind the Brothers painting hanging on the wall behind us, which is a better story than I knew. And he hands me a line I haven’t been able to put down since: every day is a birthday. The poem is “On Your Birthday,” from Mirage and Tar, my first collection in twelve years, on its way back from the printer now. Order a copy here. Follow The Difficulty: Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press. More at chadprevost.com. Recorded live at Home Bar, Fourth and Market, Chattanooga. Art and conversation by Genesis. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Almost every piece of writing advice you have ever received came from a survivor. In 1943 a statistician looked at where returning bombers had been shot and realized the military was about to armor exactly the wrong parts of the plane. This episode is about what his correction has to do with every craft book, agent story, and five-a.m. routine you've ever read, and why the most important information is the part that never made it back. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

If you’ve spent any real time with the Enneagram, you’ve probably felt Chris Heuertz’s influence whether you knew his name or not. Chris is the author of seven books, including The Sacred Enneagram (foreword by Richard Rohr) and The Enneagram of Belonging, with an eighth on pilgrimage coming from Simon & Schuster. But the books came out of a life: nearly three decades of humanitarian work across 70 countries, years in the anti-trafficking movement, time serving alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta. We recorded this a couple of weeks before his wedding, and I wanted it out in the world before he walks into that new life. We talk about learning to tell stories on a word processor in India, burying 700 of the women and children he served and what that does to a person, the end of a twenty-year marriage and the strange welcome into the human family on the other side of it, rewriting sloth for the Nines, what Eights actually feel under the armor, and why the detours are sacred and the arrival is a myth. The difficulty in life is the choice. Show-note links: * Chris’s site: chrisheuertz.com * The Sacred Enneagram and The Enneagram of Belonging (Bookshop.org) * Chris’s Substack: Sacred Detours * Instagram: @chrisheuertz * Subscribe to The Difficulty: chadprevost.substack.com * Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. * The press where it all makes sense: crossroadspublishing.group * Chad’s site: chadprevost.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

You open the app and it seems like every writer you know is having a better year than you are. There’s a name for what’s happening in your head and it isn’t envy. Two psychologists went and read what NFL fans posted when the season schedule came out, and found that every single fanbase was certain their team had drawn the hardest one. Same thing is happening to you on a Tuesday night, and once you see the shape of it, it loses most of its power. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Everyone has a GO button. Mine was a drawer holding seven unpublished choose-your-path books I finally published under my own name. What happened after? On what courage actually is (a heart energy, not a head energy), what it isn’t (recklessness refuses feedback; courage subscribes to it), and why the unlived life is the one certain loss.In this episode: * The confession: a decade in the drawer, three books shipped, and what the children’s book market taught me the hard way * David Whyte’s Consolations on courage as “heartfelt participation” * David Hawkins on courage at level 200 — the threshold where a life stops draining energy and starts giving it back * Dr. Spalding’s cliff: courage without readiness is just another form of impulse * Roethke’s permission: “I learn by going where I have to go” * Readings from my forthcoming nonfiction book, arriving January Bring us your book. Crossroads publishes serious nonfiction of the inner life—memoir, essay, contemplative work. Six openings remain for fall authors, and founding-author rates hold through September 30: $5,000 for a short book we call a Crossing, up to $7,000 for a full-length book, with the audio edition included in every tier. → Book the free 20-minute discovery call · See the engagement ladder · Tell us about your book in writing The pricing on the site is the pricing. On the horizon: our reissue of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (September 8) · Mirage and Tar, a numbered first edition of 100 copies, this fall · the book read from in today’s episode, January. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Last week I told you to stick with things. This week I want to tell you about the afternoon Daniel Kahneman sat in a room, was handed the exact information that should have made him quit, and carried on as if nothing had happened. It cost him eight years, and the thing they were building was never used. I try to work out honestly which one of us is right. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much is the ball? If you said ten cents, you're in good company, because more than half the students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton said the same thing. It's wrong. This episode is about why the wrong answer arrives so fast and feels so finished, and it starts with a seven-year-old boy in occupied Paris who turned his sweater inside out to hide the yellow star, and the SS officer who stopped him on the street. Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a good one. The difficulty in life is the choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

The Anthropic settlement got final approval, Amazon raised its royalty ceiling for the first time since 2007, and the first half sales numbers say something uncomfortable about nonfiction. Three answers to one question, and none of them came from a reader. The difficulty in life is the choice. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one. I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase. And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

I spent last week in a cabin outside Ellijay, Georgia, a couple of hours north of here. I’d thought about doing something more epic with my one week away, driving out to Chaco Canyon or somewhere like it, and then realized I’d spend most of the week driving and arrive exhausted. So, a cabin. I went to work on the nonfiction book I’ve been close to finishing and then taking apart again more times than I care to admit. I brought a lot of music gear with me too, just in case the writing didn’t go. Turns out that having only so much time is its own kind of help. I didn’t play much. This week’s episode came out of that. I want to talk to two people. The first has never written a book and can’t get past the question of who am I to do this. No platform. A few hundred people on Facebook, half of them from high school. Write the thing and you’re speaking into the wilderness. The second already wrote the book. It came out, it did fine or it didn’t, and now they’re quietly wondering whether it was worth what they gave it. Here’s the honest part, and I think the honest version is more useful than the pitch. Books don’t make people famous anymore. Even really good ones. That’s most of the reason the Big Five look for authors who already have an audience, because they aren’t in the platform-building business so much as the fire-to-it business. But a book is still a different form of distribution, and it reaches people who will never find you in a feed. Somebody they trust hands them a copy and says you should read this. That’s a door your other work doesn’t open. So the question I’ve landed on isn’t whether you should write a book. It’s whether you want to inhabit the identity of someone who writes. If you want somebody to read your one book, shouldn’t they be able to see that you’re a person who writes? I also get into why three-year and five-year plans have never worked for me, what David Perell’s 250,000 subscribers actually took in years, why a book that doesn’t sell in its first year is the moment most people quit and the wrong moment to do it, and my own fairly fragmented record of sticking with anything. The difficulty in life is the choice. If you’re sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can’t shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn’t for you, that’s a real answer and a fine one. I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That’s a conversation, not a purchase. And I’m taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com