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.

In the summer of 2022 the federal government sued to stop the biggest publisher in the world from buying the fourth biggest, and for two weeks the people who run American publishing had to explain their business under oath.

Asked how publishing decides what succeeds, the CEO of Penguin Random House said this: “Everything is random in publishing. Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that is why we are the Random House.”

That isn’t a critic. It isn’t a bitter writer with a drawer full of rejections. That’s the man running the largest publishing company on earth, telling you the system doesn’t know.

This is the first of a series of weeks on what’s actually happening in publishing right now, and what I think a publisher is for. Today: the real numbers, including the viral one that’s false. Why an indie musician gets romance and an indie author still gets an asterisk. And what the word hybrid actually means, which turns out to be a story about Mendel’s peas.

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 at chadprevost.com.

Forty-six and twenty-three. Then forty-eight and eight. Those four numbers come from an experiment where college students had to wear a Barry Manilow t-shirt into a room full of strangers, and I think the second pair might be the most freeing finding in social psychology. Especially if you have something finished sitting on your desk that you haven't published yet.

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.