You've written a body of work — essays, columns, drafts, reflections. We turn it into a book that ships. Real ISBN, real distribution, your prose intact.
One pre-engagement diagnostic, three core tiers. Pick what fits. The discovery call is free; the pricing on this page is the pricing.
Framing brief, structural draft, full tracked-changes editorial pass in Word. You leave with a finished, edited manuscript.
Everything in Editorial, plus full production: layout, cover, ISBN, metadata, distribution. A real printed book in your hands.
Custom rather than templated, two revision passes, pre-launch playbook. For writers who want a partner, not just a pipeline.
You are not trying to become a writer. You already are one. You are trying to do the thing every writer with a body of work eventually wants: hold your work in your hand as a finished book.
Three lanes of nonfiction, two of fiction, and yes — poetry too, with the right caveats. Recognize yourself below before you read the pricing.
Books that teach a system or argue a thesis. Often built from years of newsletter content, talks, blog posts, or workshop materials that already articulate a coherent worldview.
A coherent story drawn from a slice of life — a year, a relationship, an obsession, a crisis, a return. Sometimes a single sustained narrative; sometimes an essay collection with a memoir spine.
Reflective, exploratory work between essay and inquiry — personal experience and older traditions thinking out loud about what it means to live well. Literary, philosophical, contemplative variants.
Long-form fiction, whether a fully polished manuscript needing a publishing home, or drafts and fragments that need shape. The structural challenge depends on where the work is.
Multiple stories with a unifying thread — not always obvious to the writer until someone reads the whole archive. The work is finding the through-line and sequencing the stories so they speak to each other.
A book of poems organized into something larger than the sum of its parts. Poetry is typographically fastidious in ways prose isn't — the editorial conversation is different, the production stage more involved. Twenty-five-plus poetry books in the catalog.
Every book moves through the same four stages. The tier you choose determines where you stop, not which stages you experience.
We read your existing material and produce an Editorial Framing Brief: two to three concept directions, proposed structures, comparable titles, gap analysis. You choose a direction. We assemble the structural draft — your essays placed into the chosen architecture, with clearly-labeled placeholders for every gap.
This stage is yours. You fill in the placeholders. Stuck on a piece? Request a scaffolding prompt — questions and sub-prompts that help you think it through. We do not generate finished prose for your book.
A real editorial pass in Microsoft Word with tracked changes — light copyedit, suggestion edits with margin comments explaining each suggestion, and structural edits flagged with full rationale. You accept, reject, modify, or ignore.
Your final manuscript flowed into a Crossroads house interior template. A cover from the Crossroads families. ISBN through our Bowker block. Copyright registration. BISAC codes. Metadata for Amazon and Ingram. IngramSpark submission. A finished printed copy in your hands.
Most writers learn this the hard way — the actual work isn't the writing; it's everything around the writing. Three paths exist, each with its own version of the difficulty.
You need an agent before anyone will read you. Six to eighteen months of querying, mostly silence. Land a deal and wait one to three years. The advance is small, the royalty smaller, the publisher controls cover and title. They can drop you before launch and still expect you to do the marketing.
The technical bottleneck is now in your lap. Evenings learning Vellum, Atticus, KDP, Reedsy, IngramSpark — each its own platform, each with its own bleeds, gutters, PDF specs. You decide ISBN strategy alone. The book that ships often reads, to anyone who looks, "self-published."
Five to twenty-five thousand dollars up front for "production support." Quality wildly variable — some are real publishers in indie clothing; others are vanity presses with better branding. Royalty splits often unfavorable. Rights tied up in contracts that take a lawyer to read.
The first deliverable any Editorial engagement produces — written against my own Substack archive so you can see exactly what a paying customer receives. About 8 pages, three concept directions, comp titles, gap analysis, recommendation. Read it before you buy anything.
Eight pages. Two to three concept directions for what your material could become. Proposed structures. Comparable titles, with a paragraph each on why they comp. Gap analysis — what's missing to make the book whole. A recommendation, with reasoning.
Every Editorial engagement starts here. The brief is the document you and I work from for the rest of the project.
Download sample (PDF) ↓For writers who want a partial engagement, or to extend a tier with additional services. Each is fully self-contained and can attach to any tier above (or stand alone).
For writers with a finished, professionally-edited manuscript who want only the production work: interior layout, ISBN, metadata, IngramSpark and Amazon. Cover not included.
For writers who edited elsewhere and want only the Crossroads cover work. Design brief, three concepts in your chosen family, one revision round, and print-ready cover PDFs sized for KDP and IngramSpark.
Big-picture editorial critique of a complete or near-complete draft — not line-by-line, but a structural read that surfaces what's working, what's not, where the voice wavers.
Each editing tier includes one revision pass. If your manuscript needs more iteration after your accept/reject, an additional pass produces a new tracked-changes round on the revised text.
Convert your finished print interior to EPUB and Kindle KPF formats, set up the KDP listing with your existing metadata, and link it to your Amazon author page.
Said up front so the engagement starts honestly. Where we draw the lines, and why.
The shortest, most direct version of the conversations I have on every discovery call. If your question isn't here, ask.
Yes — and we'll tell you exactly where, how, and what it never touches. What we do not do: AI does not generate prose for your book. The words in your book are words you wrote.
What we do, transparently: AI assists with the structural reading, placeholder mapping, and editorial pass — proposing tracked changes you accept or reject one by one. Each step is reviewed by me before it reaches you.
Every editorial change arrives as a visible tracked change in a real Word document, with a margin comment explaining the reasoning. You accept the changes that help, reject the ones that don't, and modify the ones that are almost-right.
The author is doing the editing — using AI-proposed suggestions, the same posture as working with a human editor.
I'm not asking you to trust the AI. I'm asking you to trust the process. Every artifact — framing brief, structural draft, tracked-changes manuscript, cover, metadata — is reviewed and signed off by me before delivery.
Traditional publishing for an unknown author with a body of online writing is mostly not on offer. What we offer is a third path: real production, real distribution, real imprint, real ISBN.
Active windows: 8 weeks for Editorial. 12 weeks for Published. 24 weeks (cap of 32) for Architected. Plus the Diagnostic at 2 weeks.
"Active weeks" means weeks when work is in progress on my side. Weeks where I'm waiting for you to write bridging material or review a draft pause the clock.
Whatever format it's in. Substack export, Medium archive, Google Docs, Word, plain text, PDFs. I handle the format conversion before any production starts.
You'll receive a private Google Drive folder for your project after signing the LoA — that's where you drop everything you want considered. No need to organize it; that's part of what I do.
You do. The copyright in your prose remains entirely yours. Nothing in our agreement transfers any ownership of your writing to Crossroads Press.
If your book is published under the Crossroads imprint with an ISBN from our Bowker block, Crossroads is the publisher of record. The ISBN belongs to us, but you retain all royalties, paid through your own IngramSpark and Amazon accounts.
You can, with seven days' written notice. Before the Framing Brief, 50% is refundable. After the Brief but before the Structural Draft, 25% is refundable. After the Structural Draft, the fee is non-refundable but everything completed is delivered to you.
20 minutes, free, by video. The first ten minutes are you describing the work and what you want from a book; the next five are me walking you through the Editorial Readiness rubric; the last five are tier discussion if it's a fit.
Most calls end with "I'll think about it" rather than yes-or-no in the moment, which is expected. This isn't high-pressure sales.
Twenty years in the indie publishing world. Forty-plus titles. An editor before anything else.
I'm Chad Prevost. I've spent twenty years in the indie publishing world — I founded C&R Press in the mid-2000s, published forty-plus titles, sold the press in 2015, and have continued to make books since (most recently the IF/THEN Books interactive fiction line).
I'm an ICF-certified coach, an Enneagram-certified practitioner, and an editor before I'm anything else.
Crossroads Press is what happens when you take twenty years of book-making and turn it into a system that can serve writers who already have a body of work. Crossroads Press is part of Crossroads Publishing Group, which also publishes IF/THEN Books and (soon) Ouroboros Editions.