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 fourteenth year, with the indie bookstore count continuing its slow recovery.

The pattern: the platform middlemen are tightening their grip on writers, and writers are starting to push back.

Find Andrew’s books on Amazon. Reviews are how Andrew’s press depends on hitting the 25-review threshold that gets his next book in front of new readers.

* Andrew Najberg on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Najberg/e/[author-page]

* Symposium Magazine:

https://symposiummagazine.com

* Crossroads Publishing Group:

https://crossroadspublishing.group

* The Founding Voice cohort, for the first three writers signing a publishing engagement, is open through August 31, 2026.