# Andrew Najberg + The Working Publisher News Digest

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest.md
Podcast: [The Difficulty](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248)
Published: 2026-05-28T10:45:00+00:00
Episode link: https://chadprevost.substack.com/p/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/198956984/03bc2c30494268016aba6ccca8d78c16.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-difficulty-1194248/episodes/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest
Duration seconds: 3264

## Resource

This week, two things in one episode. 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 fourtee…

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## Transcript

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