{"podcast":{"title":"The Difficulty","slug":"the-difficulty-1194248","podcast_index_feed_id":1194248,"rss_url":"https://feeds.captivate.fm/leading-human/","website_url":"https://chadprevost.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/7987388/484968f857d3780a5b1b04e704c35b33.jpg","author":"Dr. Chad Prevost","episode_count":275,"summary":"Exploring descent and return through psychology, literature, and lived experience. Essays, poetry, stories for those navigating transformation.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-13T16:17:58.066153+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248"},"episode":{"title":"Andrew Najberg + The Working Publisher News Digest","slug":"andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest","published_at":"2026-05-28T10:45:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248","url":"https://chadprevost.substack.com/p/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/198956984/03bc2c30494268016aba6ccca8d78c16.mp3","summary":"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…","meta_description":"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 Aet…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3264,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-difficulty-1194248/episodes/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-difficulty-1194248/andrew-najberg-the-working-publisher-news-digest.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}