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

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chad@crossroadspublishing.group

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What If No One Comes

October 07, 2026

There has never been an easier time to publish a book, so why are more people than ever afraid to write theirs? Are the two things related?Two fears keep a good book unpublished: that it’s hard, and that you’ll put it out there and no one will come.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), th...

Four Million Books Published Last Year: What It Actually Costs to Publish One

September 14, 2026

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...

Ready, Nearly, Not Yet

September 07, 2026

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...

Horseshoe Theory · Medium booking difficulty · 100 - 1,000 listeners