Last year 4.2 million books were published in the United States with an ISBN. Three and a half million of them were self-published. Traditional publishers put out 642,000. So for every book that came through the old machine, more than five came through the side door, and this year almost a third of new titles on Amazon’s platform arrive with a disclosure that a machine wrote some of it.

I’m not here to tell you the sky is falling. I run a press and I’m betting my working life on people wanting books. But if you’re sitting on a manuscript and wondering what it costs to put it into the world, you’re asking in a year when the shelf got very crowded very fast. So this episode is the arithmetic, line by line: editing, cover, typesetting, audio, ISBNs, the roughly eighteen thousand dollars you can spend before anyone knows your book exists. And then the question underneath the numbers, which is what you’re actually buying when you work with a publisher, and whether you need one at all.

The difficulty in life is the choice. In this episode:

* Why 4.2 million ISBNs in a year is not the end of the world, and what it does change

* The printer-and-ink problem: what “free to publish” leaves out

* The three-year Amazon picture: catalog, sellers, and revenue growing at very different speeds

* The line-by-line cost of a sixty-thousand-word nonfiction book, from developmental edit to ISBNs

* Why print-on-demand hardcovers cost a self-publisher more than they cost a big house, and what to do about it

* Audio: what it takes to record, edit, and upload your own audiobook, and why Crossroads is baking it in for the founding cohort

* What a publisher is actually selling: representation, selection, and a partner in the room

* The nonprofit-press volume play, the vanity-press TV commercial, and the difference between a book and a zine

* Three questions before you decide: do you already have readers, could you hire every service separately, and do you want to run the account yourself

* Why I’m in this at all

If you’re an author with a fine nonfiction book and you’re wondering where to take it, send a submission inquiry through the press site and let’s have a conversation about whether this is a fit, for you and for us. Deciding against it is a real answer, and I’d rather you decide clearly than sign up for something you didn’t want.

If you know a writer who’s sitting on a manuscript and doing this arithmetic right now, forward them this episode. That helps more than anything I can do on my own.

Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press. Show page: crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty. More at chadprevost.com.

Last week I mentioned an agent who read 6,152 queries and signed two writers.

This week I want to talk about the other 6,150. Every one of them got a letter—or possibly just a long and unreturned response—but one way or another the message said some version of: thank you, but this isn’t the right fit for our list. That sentence contains no information. It doesn’t tell you whether your book was almost there or nowhere close, whether to revise for a year or send it out again Tuesday.

I read every manuscript that comes to my press myself, and everyone who sends pages gets one of three answers in writing, with the reasons. Ready. Nearly. Not yet.

This episode is what those three words actually mean, why nobody upstream in the industry is checking readiness at all, and then the question I get at dinner parties: can’t I just edit my own book? The honest answer has a wall in it that has nothing to do with how good a writer you are.

Follow The Difficulty: Subscribe at chadprevost.substack.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Difficulty is produced by Crossroads Publishing Group, a message-and-meaning press.

More also at chadprevost.com.

In 1983 the screenwriter William Goldman wrote three words that people in Hollywood have been quoting ever since. Nobody knows anything. About twenty years later a psychologist spent two decades testing whether that's true about everything, collecting somewhere near twenty-eight thousand predictions from the experts we put on television. It did not go well for the experts. There's a second finding buried in that study that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, take a look at crossroadspublishing.group. And if you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a good one.

The difficulty in life is the choice.