The question is shifting from “should writers use AI” to “what kind of writing is worth doing.” Tim Moon argues the shame regime around AI use is making honest conversation harder. The Atlantic piece shows the detection question is real but temporary — and the deeper question is what’s lost when the thinking that produces writing goes away.

Ramachandran shows the Commonwealth Prize fiasco was really a story about what we’d been rewarding. Sun and Morine both argue the writer’s comparative advantage is not the absence of AI but the presence of voice and testimony and the kind of writing only this writer would do.

For the writers I’m trying to publish at Crossroads—for the writers in the cohort, for the writers I’m talking to in discovery calls—this is the frame I want to model. We are not the press that takes a position on AI. We are the press that asks whether every paragraph is bearing weight, whether the voice on the page is the writer’s voice, whether the manuscript contains things the writer brought back from somewhere only they have been.

Those questions can be asked of a manuscript written entirely by hand or one written with AI assistance or anything in between. The questions are the editorial standard. The tools the writer used to get there are the writer’s business.

What’s freeing about this conversation is that it lets serious writers be honest about their actual practice without performing a position. That’s what Sun and Ramachandran and Moon and Morine are doing. That’s the tone I want for Crossroads, for the show, and for the writers we’re working with.

THE READING LIST

- Sanjana Ramachandran, The Print — Should we leave writing to AI?

- The Atlantic — How to Tell AI Writing (May 2026)

- Tim Moon, Substack — AI: The Scarlet Letters

- Jasmine Sun, jasmi.news — Comparative Advantage of Independent Writers

- Nicholas Morine on LinkedIn — Mile Wide, Inch Deep

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If you’re working on a manuscript and want a publisher who thinks this way about the editorial standard—voice, testimony, weight per paragraph—Crossroads is that press.

We’re in our founding season through summer 2026 with founding-rate engagements.

Discovery call → 20 min, free, let’s chat.

Author Engagement and First Draft Cohort here!

—Chad

This is from a nonfiction book I’m working on. If the reflection register resonates, stay close—these weekend episodes will keep coming.

The Difficulty is the podcast of Crossroads Publishing Group, a new IBPA-pledged hybrid press based in Chattanooga, TN. We publish serious nonfiction in three lanes—Argument, Reflection, Witness.

00:00 What this episode is — the weekend reflection lane
01:00 Dante’s lustful — swept endlessly by the wind
02:30 The id, duende, and Heraclitus on fire
03:30 The Cyclops — single eye, all surface, all appetite
05:00 Odysseus calls himself “Nobody” — and it saves his life
06:00 Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody. Who are you?”
07:00 The American problem with being Somebody
08:00 Personal — what got abandoned along the way
09:00 Failure vs. self-abandonment
10:00 Soul work, calling, and the descent

Crossroads Publishing Group: crossroadspublishing.group
Learn more about two engagement opportunities happening right now: https://crossroadspublishing.group/start/

A field report from week one of Crossroads Publishing Group—what’s coming in the door, what’s surprising, what’s confirming.

What a hybrid press actually is. A working definition: a publisher where the author shares the financial risk via a fee (broadly $5K to $45K, depending on the engagement), in exchange for real editorial work, professional production, distribution under the press’s imprint, and a higher royalty share than traditional contracts.

Why the vanity-press confusion exists, and why it’s no longer accurate to the category as it stands in 2026.

The IBPA Hybrid Publisher Pledge—the trade-association standard the legitimate hybrid presses meet (and the vanity operations don’t).

Three case studies of serious hybrid presses: She Writes Press (founded by Brooke Warner, 2012; 500+ titles; Industry Innovator Award from the Book Industry Study Group in 2017; Warner is chair of the IBPA) Greenleaf Book Group (Austin; operating since 2003; 1,500+ titles; multiple New York Times bestsellers) Lucid Books (Texas Christian hybrid; 5,000 authors in 20 years of operation)

Three structural reasons the hybrid category is growing while the Big Five contracts:

• The agent and Big Five pipeline is capped (≈1,000 active US agents, 3-5 new clients each per year)

• Platform requirements at traditional imprints have become unworkable for serious working writers

• The math of a hybrid contract is often better for the author: The traditional advance reality in 2026: $5K-$25K for non-celebrity nonfiction, declining year over year, with the author doing the marketing anyway, on a 10-15% royalty, with the publisher owning the ISBN.

Why this matters for The Difficulty‘s actual listeners — coaches, therapists, consultants, pastors, mission-driven leaders, retired executives in second and third acts, working professionals in midlife transition.

Five questions to ask any hybrid press before you give them a dollar:

One — Are they IBPA pledged? If not, why not? Two — What is the author royalty split, in a specific number, with accounting schedule? Three — What editorial work is actually included in the price — developmental, line, copy, proofreading; at what stage; how many rounds? Four — Where does your book actually go after publication? Real distribution (Ingram, Amazon, Bookshop.org, library channels like Baker & Taylor and OverDrive) or just a SKU on a website? Five — What is the editorial selection rate? A serious hybrid press turns books down.

About Crossroads Publishing Group:

Crossroads is a hybrid press for practitioner authors—coaches, therapists, consultants, mission-driven leaders, and working professionals with a serious book and a body of insight. Three main category lanes on the site. 80% net royalties to the author. IBPA-pledged criteria built into the model.

Inquiry door: crossroadspublishing.group

Call to action:

If you’re a practitioner author with a serious book and the hybrid path sounds like it could be yours, visit crossroadspublishing.group to start the conversation. Feedback on the show is welcome — what episodes are speaking to you, what you’d like to hear more or less of.

Okay, so what about all this perception versus reality thing? Is it all as hopeless and weird and full of overwhelming odds and obstacles? It doesn’t have to be, but here we do get at the heart of why I wanted to write this essay. As I iterated and explored and evolved in my strategies for a model that I thought could work for a publishing house that didn’t require enormous upfront investment, I was stuck for a long time at, say, all the above.

It did feel like an intractable problem in an industry I was exhausted by, even if a great deal of my skills and experience lay therein. And not only that, but my own aspirations. That is, I don’t just like writing. I like collaboration. I like partnering with others. I like supporting others, providing the means for their voices to be heard. That’s a part of my own “hybrid” sense of self and calling I guess you might say.

So, in my curiosity, one thing I started looking at is this whole model we call “traditional” in the first place. How long has publishing been tightly gatekept? Has it always been this way? Is it really traditional? I admit I was somewhat surprised how varied other examples of publishing partnering really is, as well as how recent our so-called traditional approach also really is. Here are a few standout examples:

• Alexander Pope funded his Iliad translation by subscription in 1715. Sold the volumes to readers directly, in advance, before a word was set in type. Made enough to buy his villa at Twickenham and never need a patron again. The most respected poet of his age—not gatekept, crowd-funded three hundred years before the word existed.

• Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility “on commission”—she absorbed the risk. The publisher was effectively a service provider.

• Walt Whitman set the type for Leaves of Grass himself. Self-published. Sent a copy to Emerson, who wrote back the now-famous letter. Whitman printed Emerson’s praise on the spine of the next edition without asking. The most American poet of the nineteenth century—self-published and self-promoting. Also wrote anonymous reviews that he sent to the paper.

• Mark Twain founded his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., to publish Huckleberry Finn and Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.

• Marcel Proust paid for the publication of Swann’s Way after Gallimard rejected it. Gide later admitted that rejection was the worst mistake of his editorial life. Some consider it the most important novel of the 20th century. (Maybe the most important one you’ve never read, it’s really long.)

• Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press out of their dining room. Hand-set the type on a press they bought as a hobby. Published Eliot’s The Waste Land. Published Freud in English.

The pattern: the gatekept publishing model—agent, editor, advance, distribution—is roughly a hundred-year regime. The longer literary tradition is “hybrid” by default. Maybe what we’re calling “traditional” isn’t so traditional after all.

Before you jump ship and just assume where I’m heading with this, let’s acknowledge what’s been good about traditional publishing this past century. It had real virtues. I mourn the disintegration in many respects. Let’s name a few features that really do sound as if they’ve gone the way of the Dodo:

• The editor as collaborator. Maxwell Perkins shaping Fitzgerald and Wolfe. Robert Gottlieb shaping Toni Morrison and John Cheever. Toni Morrison herself as editor at Random House, building the careers of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones. The editor wasn’t a content manager. The editor was a developmental partner over a career.

• The advance that bought time. A real advance—not the $5,000 token, but the kind that paid the rent for two years—was a writer’s residency in disguise. It bought the slow book.

• The independent bookstore network. Before Borders, before Amazon, before B&N’s wave of expansion, the country had thousands of independent booksellers who hand-sold the books they loved. A title could actually find its audience through evangelism, not just through algorithm.

• The literary magazines as discovery infrastructure. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, Esquire in its mid-century fiction era. Magazines paid real rates and broke real careers. Goodbye, Columbus was a Paris Review novella before it was a National Book Award.

• The Sunday book sections. When every major American newspaper had a real books page, criticism was a discovery channel. A John Leonard rave in the Times could make a midlist book a midlist book that sold.

• The book tour as event. Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer—the tour was a literary occasion, not a content obligation.

• The Barnes & Noble paradox. B&N was where I went on Saturdays as a young man—the café, the magazine rack, the calm of it. B&N also gutted the independent bookstore network in the 1990s before Amazon gutted B&N. The chain that was my sanctuary was also the consolidator that killed the previous ecosystem. Remember the rise of the Barnes and Nobles and going to these grand bookstores with the smell of high end coffee and journals and surrounded by literature? I was in Waco, Texas and starting seminary after graduating as an English Major, and out there in the middle of nowhere in central Texas I had a B&N. I would go there with my journal, and that’s where I discovered The Artist’s Way and went through the whole thing and did my morning pages religiously and just knew through and through that I was destined, “called” to be a writer. It’s simply not the same ethos anymore. There’s hardly anywhere to go.

The gatekept century gave us infrastructure that genuinely served literature, and that infrastructure has collapsed. Hybrid isn’t an argument for what we lost. It’s an argument for what’s actually available now. The publishing industry has spent thirty years training writers to want one thing—the deal—and to read every other path as failure. This isn’t malice. It’s the natural posture of any institution: the gatekeeper preserves the gate. But the result is a generation of writers who measure their lives against a contract that, for most of them, was never coming, and for many of those who got one, paid them so little it functioned as a vanity title with worse royalties than what we now might call hybrid, or for those self-publishers who were also excellent marketers and promoters.

Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press, has been clear about this for a decade. The line that lands for me: Legitimacy cannot be bestowed. It can only be claimed. When I started back down this publishing path and discovered how she’s persevered and advocated and won awards and landed greater distribution and grown into other imprints, I saw my first example of a hybrid model that works (and I’ve since discovered numerous others). The gatekeeper has an interest in convincing you it’s the other way around.

Then, I got curious simply about the very word, hybrid. The word itself has been weaponized. Hybrid author is used as dismissively as indie author. It’s as if it means neither this nor that. But I took a look at the etymology via the OED.

Hybrid enters English in 1601, in Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny—from the Latin hybrida, the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. The word was already a slur in Latin: impure, mongrel, of mixed origin.

In the nineteenth century it migrates to horticulture. Mendel, the monk, breeding peas. And here the word turns: hybrid vigor. Heterosis. The phenomenon in which the offspring of two distinct parent lines outperforms either parent. The biology has been telling us a truth the culture doesn’t hear: hybrids are not lesser. Hybrids are often stronger.

So, I guess I really am a hybrid publisher. Maybe it’s my DNA, or maybe it’s my ADHD. I do some things the legacy way, and I work with collaborators that fit the brand and the material we’re seeking to put out in the world. I am constitutionally a hybrid; I range because that’s how my brain works. Maybe the gate was never built for someone like me anyway.

Or maybe the hybrid author is merely a structural description, as in how the financial arrangements for books get produced and distributed. The generalist is more of an identity, and one that’s been lost—how the writer relates to the work and to what counts as legitimate range.

The Renaissance had a name for this: uomo universale, the universal person. Leonardo painted and engineered and anatomized. Erasmus translated and satirized and wrote theology. The figure of the humanist was, by definition, the person who refused to be only one thing. The liberal arts tradition is the inheritance: a literate person reads widely, writes across genres, thinks across disciplines. John Stuart Mill spent his mornings on logic, his afternoons on political economy, his evenings on poetry. He didn’t think of himself as having a “vertical.” He certainly didn’t niche. He thought of himself as a thinking person.

The twentieth century turned against the generalist. The university went specialist. The publishing house went Category. The marketing department wanted to know your one thing.

And now look at who is actually moving the culture forward. Adam Tooze writes economic history, the war in Ukraine, climate finance, and a Substack about all of it. Ezra Klein writes politics and policy and books and runs a podcast across disciplines. Rebecca Solnit writes activism, walking, hope, men explaining things, the West, climate. James Hollis writes Jungian depth psychology, midlife, meaning, grief, and aging.

These are generalists. They are not less serious for being generalists. They are more serious because the questions they’re tracking don’t respect the category boundaries.

Hybrid is the form. Generalist is the posture. They are the same argument said two ways: the gate doesn’t want you to range, structurally or intellectually. Range anyway.

Innovation over disruption
All the talk right now, and I mean to say I am swamped by it in this industry, is about AI. People are upset. People are afraid. People are talking about AI in such black and white terms, and such naivety–like certain institutions that don’t allow for its use–it’s clear the end is not in sight. Issues like the very nature of authorship and copyright are bound to be the stuff of decades of sorting through. And as a brief aside, if I may, institutions that don’t allow for its use are truly, let’s just say, out of touch. You might as well just say you can’t use Google or the Internet. Seriously, searching a term on Google is okay with you, but not the use of any AI?

The hybrid model is actually better positioned for the AI moment than the gatekept one is—when you own your distribution, your list, your relationship with readers, you adapt. You use AI for what it's good at: manuscript hygiene passes, comp title research, file conversion, metadata drafts, marketing-copy iteration. You don't use it for what requires human judgment: editorial decisions, voice and tone work, cover design, the actual creative content. When you’re waiting for permission, you don’t. I've spelled out Crossroads's specific AI position here. The bigger debates about AI in publishing—copyright, training data, displacement—are real and need their own essays. This isn't that essay.

Disruption is the word the venture-capital class uses for what they want to do to industries they don’t already own. It means: tear it down and rebuild it under different ownership. That isn’t what’s happening with hybrid publishing, and it isn’t what should happen.

The right word we should aspire to is innovation—and innovation, properly understood, is incremental, continuous, additive. It honors what came before. It keeps what works.

The independent bookstores that survived are innovating. They curate, they host, they build community in ways B&N never could. The literary magazines that survived have moved online and onto Substack. The form changed; the function—discovery, evangelism, criticism—remains.

The editor-as-collaborator role hasn’t died; it’s been distributed. Developmental editors work directly with writers now, paid by the writer instead of bundled into an advance. The good ones are as good as Perkins ever was.

The hybrid author isn’t tearing down the literary tradition. The hybrid author is the literary tradition, continued by other means.

The gatekept model wasn’t a wall. It was a doorway with a guard. The hybrid model isn’t a wall coming down. It’s the recognition that there were always other doorways: Pope’s subscription list, Whitman’s typeset hands, Woolf’s dining-room press; and that some of those doorways were better, for some writers, than the guarded one.

I’m not arguing against the legacy publishing industry. I’m arguing against the idea that it’s the only legitimate path. I’m arguing for a literary culture where a writer can choose the path that fits the book.

Some of my books might still go to a publisher. Some I’ll publish myself. Some I’ll publish in collaboration. Each book gets the path that serves the work.

And I won’t apologize for the ones that don’t go through the guarded door.

Nobody asked who our label was for One Shoe Untied. They asked what we were playing. Sometimes they asked if we’d come to play for them. Those were the only questions that mattered.

The line from her talk that I cannot let go: “Legitimacy cannot be bestowed. You have to take it.”

This episode is about what that line means in 2026.

There is a question every writer who has been carrying a book for a long time eventually has to face. Are you going to keep waiting for someone to greenlight your work, or are you going to greenlight it yourself.

In this episode I share three of my own green-lighter moments. Co-founding C&R Press at thirty-two. Launching Crossroads at fifty-two. And the book I am writing right now, The Crisis of Being Nobody, which will publish through Crossroads because no traditional gatekeeper is going to greenlight it on my behalf.

I also talk about what green-lighting actually requires, beyond the romanticized version. Four specific things. The work has to be good. The practical labor of getting the book into the world has to be done. The waiting for institutional bestowal has to end. And the writer has to return to what made them want to do the work in the first place.

The episode closes with an invitation. What is the work you have been carrying that you have not yet greenlighted. Notice what happens in your body when you sit with that question. Whether something opens or something flinches. The answer the institution is not going to give you is one you have always been able to give yourself.

The Founding Voice cohort, for the first three writers signing a publishing engagement with Crossroads, is open through August 31, 2026.

• Submit a project: https://crossroadspublishing.group/inquire

• Book a discovery call: Calendly link here.

The Descent

Exploring descent and return through psychology, literature, and lived experience. Essays, poetry, stories for those navigating transformation.

This episode is an essay reading. The material is personal. Three stories from my reckless adolescence in Richmond, Virginia, told plainly. The drinking and driving. The LSD afternoon at a Goochland County rock quarry. The way my parents finally put me in rehab and the way I was outraged when they did. I survived my adolescence on a margin of unearned protection that I did not deserve, and the survival did not feel, then, like the gift it was.

The essay turns to the strangest passage in the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 32. Jacob wrestling the man who turns out to be God, holding on through the dislocated hip, refusing to let go without the blessing. The man gives Jacob a new name. Jacob leaves with a permanent limp. The limp is, in the strange grammar of the story, the proof that the blessing was real.

The argument the essay makes is the argument the book it comes from rests on. The crisis of being nobody is not solved by the world finally recognizing you. The world is busy. The crisis is solved by the wrestling. The wrestling produces a self that can speak. The wrestling produces the work. The wrestling produces a person who has something to say because they have done the work of finding out what they are.

The blessing is real. The limp is yours forever. So is the name.

→ The Crisis of Being Nobody: forthcoming late 2026 from Crossroads Press
→ Submit a project: crossroadspublishing.group/inquire
→ Subscribe to The Descent: chadprevost.substack.com
→ Book a discovery call: Calendly here

Part 1 of 2 in "In Defense of the Hybrid Press."

I’ve always loved writing. Writing works in a lot of different ways for me. I think through my writing, I engage with the world artistically as a writer. Writing evolved as a means of personal expression from short stories and poems and journals through elementary, middle, and high school into a means of profession as my Generation X existence was corralled through the four buffered years into adulthood. My wife has recently diagnosed me with ADHD. It is a lens that explains a lot to be sure, part of why I’ve tried so many different kinds of writing perhaps and never fully sticking with one, or even just a couple. As an ADHD-esque sidenote: in the 1980’s you didn’t have ADD (as it was generally referred to) or ADHD unless you were “hyper” or difficult to manage in the classroom. I saw a fair share of such boys who went virtually catatonic under their overdosed prescriptions. Eventually, I knew Ritalin helped (a freshman friend in college gave me one and I suddenly felt inclined to read my entire Zoology textbook that had previously felt impenetrable), but I attributed that to the simple fact that it was a neurological stimulant. Ritalin helped everyone, I figured, it didn’t mean you should take it regularly. It was my secret weapon when I could find it. Turns out, I really needed it. But I digress.

You name it, and I’ve probably tried it as a writer. And this has led to not only personal identity confusion but also professional. “He’s a poet and trade journalist in trucking?” Plenty of combinations we could look askance at. One particular mode that I’ve engaged with at various times, that isn’t as public as some other modes, is songwriting. I’ve wanted to play in bands at various life stages because I wanted to write original material. I don’t possess much raw talent musically, although it’s in my DNA on both sides. Guitar was my instrument “drug of choice,” but I’ve spent years on the bass, and then piano in various projects, and some in which I sang. It’s hard to be a songwriter in a band and let someone else sing for a variety of reasons. I draw on this experience in this capacity only to say that while music hasn’t been “my main bag,” I’ve loved playing and recording in various projects over the years. When my brother and I put a power trio together called One Shoe Untied in 2008, we both realized that even rock songwriting is much harder than meets the eye. I guess it’s my “eye” I’m referring to, because I considered the simplicity of so many songs I liked and they seemed very in reach. The obvious rhyming would be simple enough. I considered the many poems I’d written up to that point, the CV of publications under my academic belt, and figured I’d kill it if I just applied myself.

I’ll get to the point. I’ve had the personal experience of being in bands, and I know from the inside out how it’s generally “cool” to be in an indie band, rock or folk. The genre hardly matters. Indie is cool in music. And by contrast, I’ve had the experience from the inside out of being what they call an “indie author,” and let me tell you, the association is not the same thing.

Think about it. The indie musician has at least a fifty-year aesthetic genealogy: punk, DIY, Dischord, K Records, Bandcamp, SoundCloud. The word indie means good taste in music. It means uncompromised. From big to small to in-between. If you’re making and managing it as an “indie artist” (as they’re also frequently referred to), you’re, well, you’re an artist. You’re in. Even anecdotally I think of a favorite living songwriter of mine, only about five years older than myself, one Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. Wilco has an interesting and one might say “fraught” relationship with their labels, but in the end, when they finally took it upon themselves to start their own and distribute from their own now-famous production studio (The Loft in Chicago), does anyone even remotely think twice about it? Maybe a bad example since he was already established, I can see that, but do you see how the parallel works for an author? Let’s just say it’s looked at askance. Perhaps marveled at. But people wonder, they talk.

The indie author has around a thirty-year aesthetic genealogy of being told the work is suspect. Vanity press. Subsidy publishing. Amateur hour at the public library. Needy, egocentric, constantly self-promoting their work, which is simultaneously assessed as substandard–and for that matter often is if a book can be judged by its cover.

I don’t know all the reasons why. Some say it’s because music’s gatekeepers lost their monopoly in the late ‘90s. Napster disruption, the bedroom studio, the laptop as recording rig. The industry adapted by absorbing indie as a marketing category. Indie became a sound as much as a structural complaint over rights and legitimacy.

And perhaps there’s some connection to how publishing’s gatekeepers held the line longer. The Big Five responded to the likely same technology “disruption” by consolidating rather than fragmenting—at least through one lens of market force interpretation. The agent-editor pipeline stayed roughly intact. So indie author still reads, to a lot of people, as couldn’t get in. The asymmetry isn’t about quality. It’s about which industry capitulated first to the people making the work.

There’s more to this, and it’s actually the stuff of a really interesting exploration we could do on the book publishing industry, which has its share of corporate distinctions, as well as culture at large and how these subcultures fit in, but my ADHD brain will have to hold that discussion for another time.

Why it takes a lot of guts to write a book today
First basic premise: it takes courage to commit to writing a thing that you’d like others to read. Often that courage is immediately met with many kinds of very real resistance, not merely the psychological kind. That is, it’s hard to write a book. It’s a commitment of time, energy, and resources of one kind or another. Second, it’s hard to find a place that will publish your book. Your stance, your internal position of the kind of book you’re writing, and whether or not it will be “picked up” is another level of reckoning. And to add a third while keeping basic: regardless of where or how it comes into published existence, what then?

Let me be clear, I’ve never not wanted the honor of winning a major award for a collection of poems, or “breaking through” and having a novel picked up not only by an agent but then by a big publisher. For a long time that kind of honor felt important. Because honor is exactly what it feels like. The success, the recognition, the bestowal of prestige on the work that deserved to be read and acknowledged and so on. And to advance that assertion a step further, on some level it does seem like an escape hatch from all the things so many (most?) authors detest: the promotion scramble.

Yes, there’s at least the perception that when one is hereby therein granted holdings to the use and dissemination of the likeness of ____ Major Press, one has now, finally, at long last, made it. Yes, one is now in that everflowing stream of scalable distribution. One will be on the shelves. Now one can finally expect the grander and greater audience because, after all, that audience knows the real thing when they see it: the logo’s seal of approval, the prestige branding.

And whether or not it took a platform in the first place (increasingly a requirement, not just a nice-to-have), now that one has made it, one speaks from an authority pedestal of sorts. The automatic brand recognition connotes a legitimacy that one can now rest assured whether or not the mass’s tastes are even necessarily ready for the work, one has made it. Forever with the byline of ____ Major Press.

Nice work if you can get it, right? Sure, there are plenty of caveats and assessments to undercut this stake, like how authors virtually always do need that platform in the first place, and how you’re now judged on the sales of that first book more than ever, and how all the marketing and promotion expectations are virtually the same as when/if you published with some Lesser Press, but let’s stay with the truth about prestige and distribution.

And the point about the escape hatch. Recently I decided that besides launching this press of dubious structure (we’re not granted membership into places like the Council for Literary Arts and Magazines for instance), that I would also release a number of choose-your-own-adventure style books I’d written between 2015 and 2017. I won’t explain those reasons here, I only announce it because I recently accepted the idea that I’m an “Indie author.” And so, in order to give the books a fighting chance at the requisite marketing and promotion they’ll require, I followed through with some of the suggested “organic” strategies by all the marketers and experts. I sought out online book clubs and author forums of a wide variety of kinds. And, as you might expect, into a spammy world of desperate authors and overwhelmed and not always discerning “reviewers” and bloggers and librarians. And by extension, all the algorithms on the social media platforms required for your outreach and community building.

The line you hear from every indie-publishing podcast, every marketing course, every author conference: “Writing the book is the easy part.” That statement is so commonplace, so accepted, in fact, let’s just start an off-the-top series of mantras and opinions that become the background chatter, the actual ambient sound of the indie author marketing economy without prejudice:

• The riches are in the niches.

• Find your tribe of 1,000 true fans.

• Your email list is the only thing you own.

• No one does email marketing anymore.

• Email is all you have.

• Feed the algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care about your art.

• Write to market.

• Niche down until it hurts. Then niche down again.

• Ship fast. Ship often. Series sell, standalones starve.

• Rapid release: three books in ninety days.

• Treat your books like a product. Your covers are billboards. Your blurbs are conversion copy.

• Become the brand. You are the brand.

What every single one of these says, however useful they may or may not be, just under the surface: the writing doesn’t matter as much as the funnel. In a way, sadly enough, it’s true. You could write like Tolstoy, even put together a brilliant cover with a few nice blurbs and an excellent editor to back you, but without effective marketing your book may literally not sell a dozen copies. And, also unfortunately but by contrast, it also surfaces excellent marketers and campaign strategists who really aren’t very good writers.

The advice industry has decided the work itself is the commodity input and the real value is downstream in the list, the funnel, the click-through, the sell-through. And these efforts, in all their complexity, are businesses unto themselves. To follow through with a coherent brand strategy and funnel-building campaign to sell your book is not just a matter of overwhelm in the face of technical specialization, it is simply a matter of time and focus. This is the moment the indie author market starts sounding like late-stage SaaS marketing, and stops sounding like anything remotely related to a literary life.

Part 2 lands Monday—on why what we call "traditional" isn't, and what biology tells us about what hybrid really is.

I sit down with Andrew Najberg, novelist, poet, editor at Symposium Magazine, co-owner and co-editor-in-chief of Aethon Books: Wicked House, college teacher, husband, father, and my Chattanooga neighbor. Andrew has five novels out, including The Mobius Door, Golotok, The Neverborn Thief, and Eat the Light, which dropped last month from Wicked House. He has two poetry collections out, with Paradise Falls forthcoming.

What I wanted from this conversation was to understand how Andrew actually does the work. Day to day. Hour to hour. We talk about:

• The book Andrew is writing right now, a horror comedy about a cottage and a Bugaboo, with themes about AI and user-generated material running underneath

• The day he scrapped 125 to 150 pages of The Mobius Door because the structure wasn’t working

• The voice memos he records while driving his kids to school, then refines into prose in his office between teaching and editing

• The daily wordcount rhythm that gets him 2,000 words a day while running a press publishing 40 titles a year

• His reading recommendations for horror sci-fi

• And his clear-eyed read of Amazon’s algorithm, including the 25-review threshold, the two-week launch window, and the 90-day placement decision that determines a book’s three-year life

First, the news: The Working Publisher news digest. Five stories from the past week in publishing that share a single shape. Authors organized at a 91.3 percent claims rate in the Bartz settlement against Anthropic. Scott Turow and five major publishers filed a class action against Meta. Audible flipped ACX into a Spotify-style royalty pool. Draft2Digital introduced fees for the first time in the platform’s history. And Independent Bookstore Day quietly celebrated its fourteenth year, with the indie bookstore count continuing its slow recovery.

The pattern: the platform middlemen are tightening their grip on writers, and writers are starting to push back.

Find Andrew’s books on Amazon. Reviews are how Andrew’s press depends on hitting the 25-review threshold that gets his next book in front of new readers.

• Andrew Najberg on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Najberg/e/[author-page]

• Symposium Magazine:

https://symposiummagazine.com

• Crossroads Publishing Group:

https://crossroadspublishing.group

• The Founding Voice cohort, for the first three writers signing a publishing engagement, is open through August 31, 2026.

The publishing moment we are living through in 2026 looks remarkably like that one. The big houses have closed their doors to the writer of serious nonfiction without an existing platform. Agents have become the new editorial gatekeepers. The book that takes seven years to write is structurally homeless in the corporate system.

This episode argues for what comes next — a return to the editorial tradition that produced the literary canon. Crossroads Publishing Group is a boutique press in that tradition. Two lanes: Leadership (Covey/Lencioni/Collins) and Reflective (Solnit/Whyte/Hollis/Tooze/Klein). Hybrid model, legitimately operated. IBPA-pledged. CLMP member.

The Founding Voice cohort opens today. The first three writers signing a publishing engagement — Editorial Framing Brief or above — receive a dedicated Difficulty episode profile, inclusion in the first seasonal catalog, and permanent recognition on the Crossroads website as a Founding Voice. Pricing is not discounted. The recognition is structural.

→ Engagements: crossroadspublishing.group/engagements
→ Submit: crossroadspublishing.group/inquire
→ Discovery call: Book on Calendly

This is the first interview episode of The Difficulty, and Scott is the right writer to launch the format with. His through-line is storyteller, and the way he’s threaded that line — from sports journalism through self-publishing Lessons from Legends (interviews with twelve College Football Hall of Fame coaches including Barry Switzer, Steve Spurrier, and Tom Osborne) into a stand-up comedy career that started as a newsletter project four years ago — is exactly the kind of working-writer path this show exists to surface.

𝗪𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼: · Writing as the through-line beneath every other identity (journalism, content marketing, books, stand-up) · The meaningful work vs. paying the bills continuum, and where Scott actually lands · How self-publishing Lessons from Legends worked because Barry Switzer talks about it on national radio · The push-pull between strategic thinking and pure creative impulse — and what it costs · How stand-up comedy started as a Trial and Error newsletter assignment in October 2021 · Why clean comedy is harder (no shock-laugh escape hatch) and what bombing teaches you · The Zanies New Material Monday vs. Nate Land room story · Balancing the touring schedule with two kids, a wife, two dogs, and Signal Mountain life · What “five years from now if everything goes right” looks like

𝗦𝗰𝗼𝘁𝘁’𝘀 𝘂𝗽𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄𝘀:
· June 30 — opening for Chris D’Elia, The Ryman, Nashville · July 9 — hosting for Brian Bates, The Comedy Catch, Chattanooga · July 10 — headlining Billy Goat Coffee, Mount Juliet, TN · July 21 — headlining Mic Drop Comedy, Plano, TX

𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝘁𝘁:
https://scottbedgood.com
· Instagram — @scottbedgood

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:
00:00 Show Mission Setup
02:11 Meet Scott Bedgood
04:34 Writer or Storyteller
06:16 Meaning vs Money
08:11 Content Marketing Deep Dives
10:21 Journalism to First Book
13:15 Strategy vs Creativity
17:04 Midlife Stand-Up Origin
20:10 Comedy Snowballing Career
22:17 Big Stages Ahead
22:49 Tour Dates Rundown
24:07 Clean Comedy When Bombing
25:44 Zanies Two Room Lesson
28:29 Balancing Family And Work
32:32 Rapid Fire Round Begins
33:12 Alligator Article And Hunting
36:35 Road Dog Life And Chattanooga
39:09 Five Year Tuesday Vision
40:20 Wrap Up And Where To Find Scott

𝗖𝗿𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄:
· Crossroads Publishing Group
https://crossroadspublishing.group

· The Descent (Substack) —

The Descent

Exploring descent and return through psychology, literature, and lived experience. Essays, poetry, stories for those navigating transformation.

· Interested in being a future guest? Email cthomasprevost@gmail.com — guest form coming to the website.

The Difficulty is a podcast about the choices that shape a creative life. The difficulty in life is the choice.

— Chad

This episode of The Difficulty is the one I’ve been building toward without realizing it. I want to tell you what I’m doing now with Crossroads Publishing Group, why I’m doing it now, and what it has to do with you whether you’re a writer, a reader, or someone who has ever wondered why the books you find on the shelf increasingly feel like they came off the same conveyor belt.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱: · The twenty-year arc, running C&R Press, what came after, and what kept nagging · What’s actually happened to publishing, why agents have become the people who shape books · Anne Trubek’s “ready to go” diagnosis and why it explains everything else · Publishing as a creative act, presses with a form · What Crossroads publishes, books that take the difficulty seriously · The model: two paths under one imprint (Crossroads Press + Ouroboros Editions) · Brooke Warner’s She Writes Press as the operational template · What’s launching at Crossroads in May 2026 and beyond · An honest framing of the commercial reality of hybrid publishing

𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: · Crossroads Publishing Group

https://crossroadspublishing.group

· Tell us about your book (inquiry form) — https://crossroadspublishing.group/inquire/ · The Descent (Substack) —

The Descent

Exploring descent and return through psychology, literature, and lived experience. Essays, poetry, stories for those navigating transformation.

02:06 The Missing Middle
06:42 If Then Books Return
11:32 Publishing Breakthrough
12:46 Why Books Feel Same
18:12 Press With A Form
20:36 Crossroads Mission
23:42 Sustainable Model
29:45 Three Imprints Plan
30:54 Two Paths One Craft
35:05 Founding Author Window
36:52 Launching Titles Now
41:13 Why This Matters
44:34 How To Join In
45:36 Final Vision

· Anne Trubek, “Are Agents Now The Real Publishers?” —

· She Writes Press — https://shewritespress.com

· Brooke Warner on The Stable Book Group —

Writerly Things with Brooke Warner

Introducing The Stable Book Group

This week, it was announced in Publishers Weekly that She Writes Press (the hybrid publishing company I cofounded with my friend and colleague Kamy Wicoff in 2012) will be joining forces with The Stable Book Group…

Read more

a year ago · 120 likes · 51 comments · Brooke Warner

FREE — THE DIFFICULTY FIELD GUIDE

Eight difficulties every working writer faces, and what to ask when each one shows up.

→ crossroadspublishing.group/assets/pdfs/The_Difficulty_Field_Guide.pdf

—

WHERE TO FIND ME

Substack — new essays Wednesdays, the Working Publisher news digest Fridays

→ chadprevost.substack.com

The Difficulty — Monday (the why), Thursday (the how), Saturday (essay readings) — wherever you listen to podcasts

→ chadprevost.com/the-difficulty

Crossroads Publishing Group — publishing services, IF/THEN Books, the Iris Blackwood mystery series

→ crossroadspublishing.group

—

“The difficulty in life is the choice.”

This Thursday it ended.

I’m not being dramatic about it. I’m reporting a calendar. On a single day, May 14, 2026, three of the biggest stories I tracked last week stopped being stories and became events. The largest AI-copyright fairness hearing in publishing history convened in San Francisco. Draft2Digital, the most-used non-Amazon aggregator in indie publishing, began charging existence fees to legitimate small accounts. Barnes & Noble Press started deleting print listings priced below fifteen dollars. The thing I described last week as a forecast became, in the space of a Thursday afternoon, a thing that had happened.

So this week’s Working Publisher is, in part, a status check on the predictions. And in part, something stranger: a look at what is quietly growing while the platform layer is tightening.

What happened today

Bartz v. Anthropic. This afternoon, at 2:00 p.m. Pacific time, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín convened the fairness hearing for the largest AI-copyright class action settlement to reach this stage. One and a half billion dollars. Four hundred eighty-two thousand four hundred sixty works on the official Works List. Approximately three thousand dollars per eligible title in expected payout to the rightsholders, split between authors and publishers per individual contracts.

The number underneath those numbers is the one I keep coming back to. Of the 482,460 works in the class, 440,490 have been claimed. That is 91.3 percent.

If you have ever filed a paper claim form, ever tried to sort a settlement notification out of a pile of inbox mail you don’t read carefully, ever wondered whether the people who should know about a thing actually find out about it, the 91.3 percent number is a quiet astonishment. It means the publishing industry’s collective infrastructure, the writer’s organizations and the small-press networks and the agent emails and the social media echo, did its job. The class notification process actually reached the people it was supposed to reach.

That doesn’t happen often in class actions. It is happening here. Whatever you think about the case, that piece of it is worth naming.

As of press time this morning, the hearing had concluded but no written ruling had been issued.

The objections being heard are not trivial. Class members have argued, with some merit, that foreign and non-US-registered works were improperly excluded, that the distribution mechanism favors publishers over authors, that the notice was coercive, that the per-title payout is inadequate given the scope of infringement, that class counsel had conflicts. Whether the court sustains any of those objections will determine whether the June 11 distribution-calculation date holds or slips.

The number to watch over the next two to three weeks is whether the per-title payout stays in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars or moves. If it holds, the first real money from an AI-training copyright settlement begins moving to working authors in early Fall (not June as was being previously reported). That is a thing that, two years ago, would have struck me as fiction.

Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble Press

While the hearing was running in San Francisco, the second story of the day was unfolding much more quietly. Draft2Digital’s twelve-dollar annual maintenance fee for accounts earning less than one hundred dollars in net royalties went into effect today, calculated on individual account anniversary dates. The twenty-dollar activation fee for new accounts also took effect. The stated rationale is rising compliance, security, and infrastructure costs combined with a surge of AI-generated book spam.

At Barnes & Noble Press, today is the day the platform began removing existing print listings priced below the new fourteen-ninety-nine floor. Accounts are capped at one hundred individual titles. Public domain content is no longer accepted.

Both moves are reasonable as anti-spam measures and indefensible as economic policy for working authors going wide. The community reaction, from what I have read on the indie author forums, has been hot. The structure penalizes the legitimate small publisher with a low-volume backlist while doing relatively little to deter actual AI book-spam operations, which can absorb a twelve-dollar fee as a cost of doing business. The people who feel this in their actual revenue are not the AI-slop operators. They are the working writers with eight or twelve or twenty books out, distributed wide to reach libraries and fringe retailers, earning slowly and steadily across the long tail.

If you have been treating wide distribution as a near-free-overhead strategy, today the math changed. Not catastrophically. Measurably.

The Audible number nobody is reporting

The third event of the week was supposed to be a slow-burn announcement. Audible’s legacy royalty model is being phased out by year-end. Authors must enroll in the new pooled, consumption-based model or remove their audiobooks from Audible distribution. The community access to the new model opens on May 26, twelve days from today.

Since April, the dominant coverage of this change has been some version of this is bad for authors. The pooled structure, the concerns about predictability, the fear that AI-narrated audio will flood the All-You-Can-Listen catalog and dilute the subscription pool. Robin Sullivan launched a petition this week asking Audible to separate credit-based purchases from AYCL subscription listening. Those concerns are legitimate, and they will keep being legitimate.

But this week Audible published a number that hasn’t gotten much oxygen, and the number is striking.

Authors who enrolled in the new model during the early-access testing phase, roughly four months of real data, are earning an average increase of about forty-five percent compared to the legacy structure.

That is not a press release talking point. That is an actual revenue comparison from people who have been in the new model long enough for the early-month volatility to settle. And the increase is large.

Now, an average masks a distribution. Some of those early adopters are presumably doing much better than the average, which means some are doing worse, possibly much worse. The pooled model produces a wider spread of outcomes than the per-unit model does. That is the trade-off. Higher headline rates and broader discovery through AYCL, against more month-to-month variation.

What the forty-five percent number tells me is that the dominant narrative since April has been wrong, or at least incomplete. The new structure is not a uniform downgrade. For a substantial fraction of authors, possibly a majority, the new model pays better than the old one did. That is the kind of fact that should change how you think about your May 26 enrollment decision.

I am not telling you to enroll, and I am not telling you not to. I am telling you that the math is more interesting than the headlines, and that the decision deserves more than a default.

What is growing while the platforms tighten

Here is the part I find more interesting than any of the three lead stories.

Three weeks ago, on April 25, two thousand bookstores in the United States and two hundred more in Canada celebrated Independent Bookstore Day. The results that have been coming in over the past two weeks are remarkable. Comma Bookstore in Minneapolis reported sales more than eight times a typical Saturday. Green Apple Books in San Francisco posted sixty and seventy percent year-over-year increases at its two locations. The pattern is consistent across reporting stores: not modest increases, but transformational ones.

One report stuck with me. Phil Bevis, who owns Arundel Books in Seattle, said that Indie Bookstore Day 2026 was the best retail new-book sales day in his store’s history, on every measure, units, dollars, and number of transactions. “Our top three days of all time are all the last three Indie Bookstore Days,” he told Publishers Weekly.

That detail is interesting on its own. It becomes more interesting when you know that Phil Bevis is also the co-founder of Asterism Books, the post-SPD literary distributor that has been quietly becoming the realistic home for the kind of small literary press that does not yet meet Consortium or IPG thresholds.

Same person, two data points. The independent bookseller running his shop’s best year. The trade distributor that small literary presses are queuing up to work with. The bottom-up community-bookselling layer of the industry is, by his own measure, growing, while the top-down platform-distribution layer is by every measure tightening. Two opposite directions, at the same time, for the same product.

And here is the third data point, the one that pushed me from suspecting the bifurcation to believing it.

This week the Authors Alliance and the eBook Study Group issued a joint statement supporting Illinois HB5236, the Digital Library Protection Act. The bill passed the Illinois House without a single no vote and heads to the Senate. It follows Connecticut’s 2025 landmark law on the same subject, and it parallels active legislation in Minnesota and elsewhere.

The bill does not dictate ebook prices and does not compel publishers or authors to license. What it does is regulate the terms libraries can agree to when they license ebooks: terms that protect patron privacy, terms that allow ordinary library functions like preservation and lending, terms consistent with libraries’ public mission. The underlying problem is real. A small number of publishers charge libraries ten times or more the retail price of an ebook and require repeated re-licensing to maintain access. The result is that most public library digital collections are dominated by a handful of high-demand bestsellers, while mid-list authors, debut authors, and backlist authors are essentially absent from libraries’ digital shelves.

Libraries are where readers find writers they would not otherwise encounter. Libraries are where backlists stay alive after commercial demand has faded. Libraries are, for most working authors, a more important long-tail revenue and discovery channel than the platform statistics suggest. The fact that state legislatures are now writing rules to protect libraries’ ability to fulfill that mission, from a position of broad bipartisan support, is the same story Phil Bevis is telling with his bookstore numbers. The community-and-civic layer of the industry is organizing. It is asserting different rules than the platform-and-publisher layer wants to set. And it is starting to win.

That is the story I think is actually going on this year.

What it means

If you are building a working publishing practice in 2026, the news of the last six weeks is asking you a question, and the question is not whether to keep going. The question is which layer of the industry you are building toward.

The platform layer is the one we have all been on. Amazon, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Audible, the wide-distribution stack that the past decade taught working writers to assume was nearly free. That layer is repricing. Not collapsing. Repricing. The fees are real, the deadlines are arriving, the platform terms are tightening, and the people who absorb the cost are mostly the small operators.

The community layer is the one that does not have a single name. It is bookstores and bookstore owners. It is small distributors run by people who are also booksellers. It is the editorial methodologies that small literary presses are reclaiming from agents. It is the kind of audience you build by being knowable to a particular group of readers, instead of being findable to all of them.

Both layers are real. Most working writers I know are on both. But the trend lines this year are pointing different directions, and at some point soon, the working writer has to decide which layer they are betting the next five years on.

I am, increasingly, betting on the community layer. Not exclusively. Not naively. The platforms still pay the rent for a lot of working writers, mine included. But the platforms are getting more expensive to operate on, and the community is getting more responsive to operate within. The math is shifting.

Whatever you decide, decide deliberately. The deadlines are arriving and the easy choices are getting taken off the table.

Last Friday I wrote that the free lunch was ending. This Friday I am writing that three of the meals on that table got pulled at once, on a single day, while the kitchen down the street was having the best night it has ever had.

Pay attention. Decide. Build.

I will be back next Friday with another one of these.

Working Publisher is a weekly Friday post for working writers and small-press operators. It runs alongside The Difficulty podcast and the Crossroads Publishing Group editorial work. If a friend forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com.

Crossroads Press is currently taking on a limited number of founding authors at pre-September-1 pricing. If you have a book you are working on and want to talk, the easiest path is to fill out a short inquiry at crossroadspublishing.group or grab fifteen minutes on the Calendly.

Until next Friday.

—Chad

Seneca wrote the most systematic argument against anger ever produced. He called it the most savage of all emotions, the one that blinds, creates haste, conquers the mind. Never let it in your house, he said. Not even justified anger pursued for the right reasons should be pursued in anger. Channel the grievance, perhaps. But not the rage.

You might reasonably wonder what kind of life produces that kind of clarity about anger. The answer is: Caligula’s court. Seneca had a front-row seat to what happens when unrestrained anger reaches the apex of power. What Caligula did, and what Nero did after him, cannot be summarized cleanly. Grotesque is the word. Monstrous. Seneca watched it up close for years, survived it, and wrote De Ira (Against Anger). He wrote it, you might say, the way a person writes who has seen the thing itself in its fullest expression and decided, quietly and permanently, that they wanted no part of it.

That’s the biography beneath the argument for what it’s worth.

Still, you might push back. Seneca was a Stoic, an exceptional man with exceptional teachers, shaped by exceptional circumstances into exceptional self-mastery. What about how anger is a real emotion that we also not only need, will in fact inevitably access. So what about the rest of us? What about the accumulated disappointments and the childhood wounds and the traffic on I-75 and the long slow burning awareness that we were wronged, that something was taken, that the world did not deliver what it seemed to promise? Or the realization that this might really be all there is. Or just anger with something truly unjust impacting your life in real time.

Anger exists within us for reasons. The athlete with the chip on the shoulder. The engine runs and anger is part of the fuel. And it’s true that anger energizes us. It drives us. There’s a temporary power in it. It feels, for a while, like compensation.

The question is what you’re compensating for. And what the compensation costs. That’s what they tell you in those Learning Circle 360 Profiles: You can get people to get things done under stress, but at what cost?

Dante splits anger into two distinct directions, and this is his most psychologically precise observation in the entire Inferno.

In the Fifth Circle of Hell, the wrathful fight eternally in the muddy waters of the River Styx thrashing, tearing at each other, unable to stop, unable to rest. On the surface: visible, violent, outward. All heat and motion. But beneath the surface of the same river, the sullen are drowning. They sink slowly in their own bitterness, the inward-turned anger that never got expressed, never got named, never got released. Just compressed, year after year, into something heavier than water.

Dante’s point is that both destroy. The difference is only in direction. The wrathful destroy outward. The sullen destroy inward. One is a fire. The other is a slow flood.

Most of us know which one is ours. Or we think we do, until someone who loves us tells us otherwise.

Dante himself, walking through the Fifth Circle, encounters Filippo Argenti, a political rival, a notorious hothead, a man whose anger defined him in life and defines him still in death, thrashing in the muddy Styx. And Dante, usually depicted as compassionate, feels something he doesn’t suppress or apologize for: satisfaction. Schadenfreude. The pilgrim of the Divine Comedy watches the angry man suffer and is glad.

It’s one of the most honest moments in the poem. Because Dante knows, and shows us that he knows, that the journey through Hell is also a journey through his own darkness. He has to witness his own capacity for wrath before he can move beyond it. He doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. He looks at it directly. And then he keeps walking.

I was told once, by a neighborhood friend in high school, that I could be a little intimidating at times. Like to others, not necessarily himself. I don’t completely know what he meant, but I remember smiling first in surprise, and then, underneath the surprise, something else. Something that felt uncomfortably like satisfaction. I kind of liked it.

Only much later would I understand what that moment was actually showing me. Not confidence. Not strength. The quieted self that had spent years feeling overlooked, misunderstood, not quite legible to the people around it, had found something that made people move. Had found that a certain edge, a certain tone, a certain compressed impatience could function as a kind of power. And power, to someone who had felt powerless, is intoxicating before it is examined.

I practiced translating disappointment into irritability. Sadness into sharpness. Frustration into a tone that I am not proud of now: impatient, and it’s hard to admit, sometimes condescending. I didn’t know it for a long time. I would not have named it anger, because I had a particular image of what anger looked like, and it wasn’t me. I wasn’t throwing things. I wasn’t screaming. I was just — efficient. Direct. Occasionally short. I told myself this was professionalism. I told myself this was simply high standards.

The feedback, when it came, came from people who cared enough to give it honestly. And the first response, honestly, was denial. Because I hated that version of myself so much that I could not afford to acknowledge it. To admit you have been condescending to people you care about, that your impatience has made the room smaller, that the intimacy of collaboration has been where the anger leaks out most freely — that requires looking at something you’d rather not see.

It permeated more of my inner life than I cared to admit. The anger that I thought was occasional and contextual turned out to be more like weather, a prevailing condition that shaped the atmosphere even when there was no visible storm.

A coach once gave me a frame I’ve held onto: playing in an old sandbox.

The sandbox is the pattern. The grooves worn deep by repetition, the reflexive translation of hurt into edge, of disappointment into distance, of frustration into a tone that communicates, before any words arrive, that something has already been decided against the person in front of you. You didn’t choose the sandbox originally. It was given to you, assembled from what you witnessed and absorbed and survived. But at some point, and this is the hard turn, you started choosing it. Not consciously. But choosing it nonetheless. Climbing back in because it was familiar. Because the anger has a familiarity. It’s a pattern of course, and perhaps we could say “it chooses you,” which is true enough. But at a certain point in your life, you do have a choice, and that choice is within the power of your will. So, in that way, you can also stop choosing.

I recently got tired of playing in that particular sandbox.

That’s not a dramatic statement. It’s just true. I can see the box now. Its edges, its dimensions, the specific triggers that want to pull me back into the box. I can see the old patterns assembling themselves, the familiar sequence: pressure, disappointment, the tightening that precedes the tone. I can see it. And increasingly — not always, not perfectly, but more than before — I can step out. Reframe. Choose differently. Recognize that the pattern is not me, that I am not obligated to it, that the anger’s felt legitimacy does not require expression to be honored.

This is what recovery from anger actually looks like. Not suppression. Dante is clear that the sullen drown in what they won’t release. Not explosion. The wrathful fight forever and get nowhere. Something more like what Odysseus does when he finally returns to Ithaca.

He doesn’t attack immediately. He disguises himself. He watches. He waits.

The suitors have taken over his house, consumed his resources, courted his wife, disrespected everything he built. He has every justification for immediate, explosive wrath. And he doesn’t. He bides his time with the particular patience of a man who has learned, across ten years of suffering, what impatience costs. When the moment comes, when it is precisely, strategically, completely right, the righteous anger is unleashed. Not as explosion. As justice. Controlled, purposeful, devastating in its precision.

That’s the ideal, and I won’t pretend it’s easily achieved. But it points toward something real: anger that has been examined, metabolized, given its proper weight and voice — that anger can become something other than destruction. It can become clarity. It can become the line held, the boundary named, the necessary confrontation finally arrived at.

Poseidon’s anger, by contrast, the sustained divine fury at Odysseus for blinding Polyphemus, the curse that extended a ten-year journey into exhaustion and grief, is what unexamined anger produces over time. Not resolution. Not justice. Just the prolonged punishment of everyone in the vicinity, including yourself.

Frederick Buechner, theologian and novelist, describes it as precisely as anyone has:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king.

The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

The feast is real. The satisfaction of the grievance nursed, the wrong remembered, the edge maintained. It delivers something. It just delivers it at the cost of the self that could have been spending that energy elsewhere. Every morsel of sustained anger is a morsel of your own life consumed. The skeleton at the feast has always been you. You just couldn’t see it clearly from inside the sandbox.

If anger is part of your story, and it is part of most stories, if we’re honest, simply learning control techniques won’t reach the root. What works is what’s hardest: allowing the anger to be confirmed, validated, given a voice in a safe enough space that it can finally be released. Honoring its felt legitimacy without being obligated to its expression. Tracing it back past the person who triggered it today, past the last ten triggering incidents, back to the original source, acknowledging, accepting, and turning away from it. Choosing to make a different commitment to a different response.

Repressed anger becomes depression. Frequently expressed anger is a signal that you are at war with yourself. The middle path, maybe we could call it the Odyssean path, is the one that examines the anger clearly enough to know what it’s actually about, honors it enough to not simply suppress it, and chooses the moment and manner of its expression with something approaching wisdom. (And I’ll just ignore the brutality of the revenge, and chalk it up as the entertainment part of Homer’s climactic spectacle for now.)

Seriously, this stuff can be a lifetime’s work. And like Dante, I’m in the middle of it.

But I can see the sandbox now. And I don’t have to stay in it.

That, for today, is enough.

Next: “The Land of the Dead” — on fear, the ghosts we carry, and what waits on the other side of everything we’ve been avoiding.

— Chad

This is the first essay in the Saturday series at The Difficulty — longer pieces from a series I’ve been writing on Substack called The Descent, about the choices that shape a creative life. Saturday is for the essays that don’t fit the news-cycle pace of the rest of the week.

Today’s is about how hard it is to ask for help — and the deeper, harder thing underneath it: the surrender we resist for years before we know we’re resisting it. Drawing on David Whyte, David Hawkins, and Carl Jung’s “shoes too small” image, with a near-drowning story I haven’t told publicly before.

Closing question: What am I holding onto that I already know isn’t working?

—

CHAPTERS

00:00 Saturday Series Intro

01:01 The Hard Word — Help

03:26 The Near-Drowning Lesson

04:52 Two Kinds of Help

06:52 Surrender vs Giving Up

07:57 Shoes Too Small

09:40 Letting Go Changes You

10:46 Readiness and Courage

12:55 Modern Ways to Give Up

14:47 The Question to Ask

15:07 Closing and Where to Find More

—

FREE — THE DIFFICULTY FIELD GUIDE

Eight difficulties every working writer faces, and what to ask when each one shows up.

→ crossroadspublishing.group/assets/pdfs/The_Difficulty_Field_Guide.pdf

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WHERE TO FIND ME

Substack — new essays Wednesdays, the Working Publisher news digest Fridays

→ chadprevost.substack.com

The Difficulty — Monday (the why), Thursday (the how), Saturday (essay readings) — wherever you listen to podcasts

→ chadprevost.com/the-difficulty

Crossroads Publishing Group — publishing services, IF/THEN Books, the Iris Blackwood mystery series

→ crossroadspublishing.group

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“The difficulty in life is the choice.”

Five stories crossed my desk this week. They came from completely different corners of publishing: a federal lawsuit, a royalty restructure, a fee announcement, a print-pricing rule, an industry advocacy update. Different mechanisms, different stakes. But they’re all the same story told five different ways.

The free lunch is ending.

For more than a decade, the operating premise for the working independent writer has been this: the infrastructure is free or close to it. Free distribution to a global retailer. Free hosting on aggregator platforms. Free royalty pools to dip into without commitment. Free training data for every AI tool that turns around and resells what your books taught it. Zero cost, zero risk, zero meaningful entry barrier.

That premise is being quietly repriced, and most working writers I know haven’t noticed.

Here’s what landed this week.

Audible is forcing every ACX author off the legacy royalty model.

Enrollment in the new pooled, consumption-based model opens May 26. By end of year, the legacy structure is gone. If you have audiobooks on ACX, you have a real decision to make: enroll, or pull your distribution. There is no middle path.

The headline royalty rates are higher under the new model — 50% exclusive, 30% non-exclusive — but those percentages are calculated against a monthly revenue pool that fluctuates with platform-wide listening behavior. Your audiobook’s earnings will now depend on what other people listen to, how long they stay with your title relative to the next, and which subscription tier they’re on. Predictability, the thing audiobooks once offered as a steady second revenue stream, is gone.

Kindlepreneur did the actual math on the new vs. legacy model and concluded what most of us suspected reading the announcement: the answer depends on factors no individual author controls. The cleanest source for the mechanics is ACX’s official announcement. ALLi’s reporting is solid. The Kindlepreneur breakdown is here.

Decide deliberately, not by default.

In the same week, two major non-Amazon distribution platforms also raised their costs.

Draft2Digital announced its first-ever account fees — a $20 one-time activation fee and a $12 annual maintenance fee for accounts earning under $100/year in royalties. Maintenance fees begin May 14. The stated rationale is combating AI-generated book spam, and the small-publisher community has been particularly heated, arguing the fee disproportionately targets legitimate operators going wide.

Barnes & Noble Press raised its minimum print price floor to $14.99 and on May 14 will remove existing titles below that threshold. They’re also capping accounts at 100 titles and prohibiting public domain content.

Two of the three biggest non-Amazon platforms tightening their economics in the same week is a structural signal. The third (IngramSpark) is the one to watch next.

On May 5, the publishing industry filed its biggest collective bet against an AI company yet.

Five major publishing houses — Hachette, Macmillan, Elsevier, Cengage, and McGraw Hill — joined Scott Turow in a putative class action against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for willful copyright infringement in the training of Llama. This is the first time the industry has filed as a unified class against an AI company.

The complaint is specific. Meta discussed increasing its “dataset licensing” budget to as much as $200 million in early 2023 — and then abandoned that strategy at, the filing alleges, Zuckerberg’s personal direction. A Meta employee is quoted: “If we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.”

The procedural calendar will move at the speed of publishing-industry litigation, which is to say slowly. Expect motion-to-dismiss briefing in 60–90 days; trial in 18–24 months. But the case matters now because of who’s filing it. After Bartz v. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion last year, the industry has been waiting for the right plaintiff slate. This is it.

Hachette’s press release is direct.
NPR and Variety both ran solid pieces.

Read the actual complaint if you have time. The licensing-budget allegations are striking.

The Authors Guild consolidated its AI contract clauses, with two new provisions worth knowing.

There’s a clause requiring publisher approval before authors’ manuscripts can be uploaded into consumer-facing chatbots — a direct response to editors and agents pasting work into ChatGPT during editorial. And there’s a clause specifying that authors must disclose any AI-generated text in their manuscripts and may not use more than a “de minimis amount.”

On revenue, the framework is specific: training rights, licensing a book to train a machine learning model, are recommended to return 80–90% to the author, with the publisher receiving 10–20%. The reasoning: the publisher’s role in such a deal is closer to a licensing agent than a creative partner.

These clauses are technically for negotiation with traditional publishers, less immediately relevant to pure self-publishers. But the underlying issues are live for everyone working with editors, agents, narrators, or distribution partners. Knowing the standard exists helps you articulate what you won’t allow. The full set is on the Authors Guild’s AI clauses page.

Bookshop.org posted $70 million in sales last year: a 55% year-over-year increase.

Worth watching as a counter-Amazon distribution signal, particularly for indie-press positioning. Readers are, slowly, willing to spend a bit more to support independent retail. Not a flood. But not noise.

Quick Take: Different mechanisms. Same direction.

Some of this is platform greed (D2D, B&N raising prices because they can). Some of it is genuine cost pressure (AI-generated spam is a real and rising operational expense). Some of it is litigation recovery (the Authors Guild clauses, the Meta lawsuit — both attempts to claw back value AI companies took at zero cost). And some of it is just the natural maturation of an industry that’s been, frankly, stranger than it should have been since indie publishing went mainstream.

The thing they have in common is this: the operating cost of being a working independent author is quietly rising. Not dramatically in any single line item. But cumulatively. And the question every working writer needs to ask, this year and next, is who absorbs it. The platform? The publisher? The distributor? Or you?

What to do this week, if any of this lands:

If you have audiobooks on ACX, read the Kindlepreneur breakdown. Don’t enroll by default; don’t pull by default. The decision deserves real attention.

If you go wide with D2D or B&N Press, do the math on whether the new fees change the unit economics for the smaller platforms in your distribution mix.

If you’re approaching contracts with editors, agents, or narrators, the Authors Guild clauses are a free public document. Read them. Know what to refuse.

And if you’re paying attention to where independent retail is going, Bookshop.org’s 55% growth is one of the more encouraging numbers I’ve seen all year.

That’s the week. Next Friday, more.

Chad

The Difficulty publishes new episodes Mondays and Thursdays. Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com.

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He was free. The whole crew. They’d done it. Incredibly, against all odds.

The cave was behind him, Polyphemus howling and blind, the boulder rolled aside. Odysseus and his remaining men had made it to the boat, pushed off from shore, were already pulling hard on the oars. The sea was open ahead of them. They had done it, the “nobody” gambit, the sharpened stake, the long sleepless night in the cave. Done. All they had to do was keep rowing.

And then Odysseus, for all his cunning, all his insight, did something he certainly wished shortly after he didn’t do. He couldn’t help himself. He had to let the Cyclops know who’d gotten the better of him. He stood up in the boat and shouted:

“Cyclops, if any man on the face of the earth should ask who blinded you, tell him it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, whose home is on Ithaca!”

His men begged him to stop. They could see what he couldn’t or wouldn’t. Polyphemus hurled a mountainside toward the voice. Then he called upon his father Poseidon, god of the sea, and cursed Odysseus by name. By name, specifically. The name Odysseus had just given him.

The curse held. The journey home, which might have ended there, stretched into ten more years of suffering and loss. All because, in the moment of escape, he could not remain Nobody.

Homer understood something precise about human nature. The monster wasn’t the real danger. The real danger was the need to be known. At least that’s a basic interpretation of Odysseus’ folly here. An essential error born out of pride, that “worm” or inner curse that takes a “hero’s journey” to transform.

According to tradition, before Lucifer became the devil, he was the most beautiful of angels.

Dante places Pride at the very foundation of Hell, not in some distant circle but at the root, the generative sin beneath all other sins. Lucifer’s fall is the paradigm: the most gifted, most radiant, most capable being in creation, so convinced of his own supreme worth that he would not bow. Would not serve. Would not accept that anything, even the divine, exceeded him.

And so he fell. And kept falling. And at the bottom of everything, frozen in ice to his waist, beating his six wings in a futile effort to escape, he is still, even now, unable to stop. The pride that made him magnificent is the same force that keeps him trapped. He cannot become humble enough to be free because humility is the one thing Pride cannot survive.

The only way out is humbly through. Pride will do almost anything to avoid that sentence.

Dante has a subtler observation too, one that tends to get overlooked. Among those damned by Pride, he includes not only the arrogant and the boastful but a quieter type, the one who refuses to participate. Who stands apart from ordinary life, not engaging, not risking, not stepping in. Everyone and everything else is the problem. The world isn’t worthy. It’s beneath you. Why bother?

This is Pride wearing introversion as a costume. And it is, in its way, the most insidious form because it never has to be tested. Or at least it seems like a way toward resignation and disconnection. Of course it might look and feel like fear, and perhaps that’s a part of it, but the connection is a fear that one will be seen as lesser than, and why would one risk that? Odysseus’ pride isn’t that kind, though. His pride it more from an arrogance. He shouts his name across the water. It’s a risk. He reveals himself, and in revealing himself, opens himself to the curse that comes back. There’s something almost admirable in the recklessness of it at least compared to the timid. It took boldness to escape the Cyclops in the first place.

But in its insidious forms, pride takes on other guises. The one who refuses to step into the life they’re meant to live never has to find out if they could have. They preserve the possibility of their own greatness by never submitting it to a reality test. And paradoxically (Dante’s insight, not mine) that refusal is its own form of arrogance. The world is not adequate to what I have to offer. So I will offer nothing.

And Dante notices something else about this type: they also, in the end, fear death. Because a life not fully lived is a haunting. The ghosts of unlived possibility follow you. Which is perhaps why Odysseus must descend into Hades before he can complete his journey, to face exactly those might-have-beens, those unchosen lives, before he can return to the one he actually has.

I don’t think all essay writing needs to be confessional, but it’s also important to share how I see myself wrestle with these given aspects of life if for nothing else than to show that I’m not above it just because I’m writing about it and reflecting on it. And I invite you to do the same with your own life’s experiences.

I had a period of adolescence where I felt quieted. Shut down. Overlooked. Not quite understood to the people around me. In high school especially, that particular crucible where social hierarchies are established with a cruelty that’s probably not even always intended, and that feels permanent even when it isn’t. The misunderstanding was also a misunderstanding of self of course, and at its core might have been sadness, but it was usually translated into resentment and anger.

And out of that, over years, with the specific energy that wounded Pride generates, came with a driving intensity to “prove my value.” I was going to show everyone. I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was going to show them, or what being shown would have meant, or who specifically needed to see it. I’m pretty sure no one was paying attention. But the engine was running. I knew I could write. I knew I could speak in front of a room. I had a band, a magazine, a series of stages on which I was, at various points, decently good. And I leaned into that knowledge with something that felt like confidence and was partly confidence and was also, if I’m honest, something more anxious underneath.

The Pride was real. So was what it was protecting.

Because here’s the mechanism, and I think it’s close to universal: the inflation of Pride is almost always a defense against the fear of inferiority. You don’t build yourself up to “extraordinary” in a vacuum. You build yourself up to extraordinary because somewhere underneath, a voice is suggesting you might be ordinary. Or worse, that those people who overlooked you might have been right. And you cannot tolerate that possibility. So you become certain of your gifts instead. You cultivate a private conviction of your own significance. You tell yourself you’re not deluded. You’re simply seeing what others have failed to see.

It’s partly necessary, begin a little delusional. The self-delusion that keeps a person believing in their work, fighting for their voice, refusing to accept the verdict of the people who didn’t see them. That’s not nothing. That’s what gets the poem written, the band on the stage, the magazine printed. You need enough Pride to have the audacity to begin, and to keep beginning, and to stand back up after the failures. And there will be failures, and they’re not the last word.

But what is the cost of proving yourself to people who’ve already passed through your life anyway? Or is that what’s it about? The need to be seen as extraordinary keeps you at a distance from the ordinary, human, connected life that is actually available to you. And the driving compulsion to show everyone, that engine, which can be so productive, is running on a fuel that has nothing to do with the work itself. It has to do with a wound. And wounds make poor long-term fuel sources.

There’s a particular irony the series has been building toward.

In the Cyclops essay, I wrote about the Nobody gambit, Odysseus making himself nameless as the power move, Dickinson celebrating Nobody as the only truly free condition, our culture’s strange inversion that treats Nobody as failure and Somebody as the goal. What I didn’t say then is that the Nobody gambit only works if you can actually sustain it.

Odysseus couldn’t. When it mattered most, when the escape was already accomplished and all it required was silence, he stood up and gave his name. He couldn’t remain Nobody. Not with the Cyclops bleeding and Polyphemus humiliated and ten years of war behind him and a self that needed perhaps, finally, to be acknowledged.

I did this. I am real. Remember my name.

I understand that. I understand it completely. The quieted self that spent years feeling overlooked doesn’t easily sustain the Nobody posture, even when the Nobody posture is what the moment requires. Is it a moment, or is it a life lesson for whatever our souls are trying to figure out in this life? The need to be known is not a character flaw. It is a human longing. Maybe it just has terrible timing sometimes.

The curse that follows, the prolonged journey, the suffering, the loss, is not punishment in the Old Testament sense. It’s consequence. When Pride speaks at the wrong moment, it hands the power to curse you over to the very forces you were trying to escape. The wound generates the wound. The fear of being nobody, expressed as the need to shout your name across the water, ensures that the journey home takes longer than it had to.

Dante says Pride is the root sin. The one beneath all the others. And looking back across the essays in this series, I think he could be right, not in a moralistic sense but in a structural one. Underneath the Lotus Eater’s numbing sloth is a self that doesn’t believe the journey is worth it. Underneath the Cyclops’s consuming desire is a self that takes what it wants because it has never learned to reckon with limits. Underneath the Aeolian’s restless seeking is a self that won’t sit still long enough to be ordinary. Underneath the Witch’s False Abundance is a self that hoards because it fears what giving would reveal. Underneath the Envious person’s comparing gaze is a self that can’t accept its own originality as sufficient.

And underneath all of those: Pride. The original refusal. The insistence that the self is exempt from the conditions everyone else must navigate. That the rules of humility, of limitation, of ordinary human belonging, those are for other people. Or what comes first, Pride or Vanity?

The only way out, as I said, is humbly through. Not through performance. Not through shouting your name. Not through the inflation that temporarily soothes the wound of feeling overlooked.

Through. Quietly. With your hands on the oars and the shore somewhere ahead and the wisdom, finally, to let the water carry you without announcing yourself to everything that can hurt you.

Ithaca is still there. You don’t have to earn it by being extraordinary.

You just have to keep rowing.

Next: “The Skeleton at the Feast: On Anger, the River Styx, and What You're Actually Consuming”

— Chad