This conversation is about what he did next.

Justin runs a firm called Work Meaningful, and his new book is Stop Chasing, Start Creating. It’s a fable. The tortoise and the hare, retold inside a modern company, with a tortoise named Tano who keeps a notebook called Almost Said for everything he swallowed in meetings. I’d argue the notebook alone is worth the price.

We talk about:

• why he put the truest story of his life inside a tortoise instead of a memoir

• what it looks like to step off a race you’re winning

• the difference between working for impact and working for applause

• how you tell quitting from being finished

• whether meaning is found or made

And you gotta hear the part about the research he did leading up to the publication of this book, and how he convinced his publisher to push it to the top of the list.

One more thing: we’re reading

A lot of the people who listen to this show have a book they’ve been carrying around. Maybe it’s finished and sitting in a drawer. Maybe it’s half a manuscript and a pile of notes. So we’re opening a door.

From October 13 through December 15, Crossroads is holding the Soundings Reading Period. We’re reading books of the inner life, from any tradition or none. If your manuscript is finished, send the whole thing. If it isn’t, send a simple proposal: a one-page overview, an outline, a sample chapter or two.

It costs $25, and I’ll tell you what that buys. I read it myself, and within 21 days you get a one-page letter from me that says where your book stands: Ready, Nearly, or Not Yet. If I’m late, you get your $25 back. It’s not a deposit on anything, and nobody’s going to call you afterward to sell you something.

It’s all on one page: crossroadspublishing.group/submit. And if it’s not you, I’d guess you know the person it is.

The book: Stop Chasing, Start Creating by Justin Jones-Fosu, wherever books are sold or just click the link. Don’t forget to leave him a review!

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 crossroadspublishing.group and chadprevost.com.

Two fears keep a good book unpublished: that it’s hard, and that you’ll put it out there and no one will come. Chad takes both apart, with a reality check on what the traditional path actually costs in years, what’s changed, why promotion is the part everyone fears and how it builds on itself (one relationship, one event, one printing of 500 at a time), the honest case for the “calling card” book, and James Hollis’s three-word cure.

And announcing the Soundings Reading Period, October 13 to December 15, 2026. Nonfiction of the inner life, any tradition. $25, and a one-page letter from the publisher within 21 days: Ready, Nearly, or Not Yet. Late, and the $25 comes back. crossroadspublishing.group/submit

Mentioned: James Nestor, Breath; David Whyte; James Hollis; IF/THEN Books. Next episode: Justin Jones-Fosu on Stop Chasing, Start Creating.

Timestamps: 0:00 Why publishing feels scary · 3:30 The traditional path, honestly · 7:30 It’s all available now · 10:30 The real fear is the marketing · 12:30 What I learned doing it myself · 16:30 Promotion builds its own momentum · 20:30 The calling-card book · 27:30 The new challenge is visibility · 31:30 The Soundings Reading Period · 35:30 Next time

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.

Everything’s on one page: crossroadspublishing.group/submit. If you know someone with a book they’ve resigned themselves to never putting out there, send them that.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 chad@crossroadspublishing.group, 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:

Crossroads Publishing Group

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

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

Show page: https://crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty/

Personal site: https://chadprevost.com

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.

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.

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

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know what it is. You knew what it was the moment you read that first sentence, it surfaced on its own, without any effort from you. That’s how you can tell it’s the one. And you know exactly why you haven’t made it.

Here’s what I want to put forth this week: the interesting question is not what the decision is. You already know that. The interesting question is what the avoidance is costing you because it is costing you, every day, in a currency you probably haven’t audited. Either way, something is going to be hard. It’s hard to do the uncomfortable thing now, or it’s hard to live in the regret later. The difference is that regret only gets expensive once it’s too late to spend anything else.

The show is named for a George Moore line: “The difficulty in life is the choice.” Not the outcome. Not the talent. The choice. The difficulty was never that you don’t know what the decision is. It’s exactly that you do.

If the decision you keep not making is about a book whether it’s done, whether it’s worth publishing, whether you need a publisher who’ll actually think alongside you about it, that’s a conversation I have every week. Crossroadspublishing.group is a press built for exactly this kind of decision. Discovery call is on the site. Twenty minutes, free. And I promise you’ll leave with the decision at least named.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

—Chad

The manuscript had frameworks. It had seven tidy maps. It had the warm, encouraging, here-are-your-steps voice I’d spent years building. And every time I read it start to finish, something was wrong and I couldn’t name it. That’s not writer’s block. It’s quieter and worse: the slow realization that a pile of genuinely good material is not a book. In Vivian Gornick’s terms, I had a situation. I didn’t have a story.

The way out came from Hemingway, broke and young in a cold Paris garret, who when he couldn’t get started would tell himself, “Write the truest sentence that you know.” Just one. But here’s the part everyone skips: he also cut to it. Whenever he caught himself writing elaborately, presenting something, he’d throw that ornament away, what he called the scrollwork, and start from the first true simple sentence. The truest sentence isn’t something you add. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off.

So I went hunting through my thirty-seven thousand words for the one place I’d stopped performing and actually said the thing. Then I found the sentence. Everything that served it stayed. All seven maps, the whole coaching voice blog posts, went over the side as ballast, and the book finally floated—well, it’s floating.

You’re allowed to not know your true sentence yet. You almost never do going in. You write the messy draft precisely to find the one true thing hiding in it. You’re allowed to have a pile that isn’t a book yet, that’s just the middle, everyone’s middle looks like a pile. And you’re allowed to cut what you love. In fact you have to.

Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me the one true sentence your project is really about, or the one you suspect you’ve been avoiding.

“The truest sentence isn’t something you add to your draft. It’s what’s left when you cut the performance off.”

The Difficulty lands Mondays, Thursdays (the working writer), and sometimes Fridays and sometimes Saturdays (from the workshop). If this named something you’ve been circling, subscribe, and forward it to someone with a pile that’s trying to become a book. More at chadprevost.com.

We start with the poem you think you know. “The Road Not Taken” gets read as an anthem for bold nonconformists, but read the middle again: the two roads “equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” There was no road less traveled, not really. Frost isn’t describing a choice. He’s describing the story he already knows he’ll tell about it, “with a sigh,” years from now. The difficulty is the choice. But underneath it is a harder thing: knowing where you’re actually standing when you make it.

From there we get lost on purpose. The way some languages orient by north and south instead of left and right, and how our ancestors located their very identity in place. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and the terror of losing your self coordinates entirely. And the strange argument between Walt Whitman, who blessed the multitudes we contain, and Gurdjieff, who sat with a more accusatory tone toward those same sleepwalking multitudes.

What I carried out of the woods were three questions: What are we actually, consciously choosing? Why do we spend so much energy distracting ourselves from ourselves? And why is it so hard to know who we are?

And one small piece of permission, which is what we do here on Mondays. You don’t have to travel both roads, catch every fleeting thought, or unify the crowd inside you into one tidy self. You only have to remember yourself among them. Be the quiet one who watches the parade without climbing aboard every float. That’s the fixed point. That’s what it means to locate yourself.

Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me your one fixed point, the thing you orient by when everything else is just trees.

The Difficulty lands Mondays (the long walk), Thursdays, and Saturdays. If this located something in you, subscribe and forward it to one person who’s feeling turned around. More at chadprevost.com.