Crossroads Publishing Group
About
A real press for writers who deserve one.
Crossroads Publishing Group is an independent boutique press for serious nonfiction. We exist for the writers the Big Five doesn't have room for and self-publishing can't dignify: ambitious, serious, ready, and underserved by an industry that consolidated around scale.
Why this press exists
Five conglomerates publish most of the books you can find on a shelf in an American airport. Most of what they buy is celebrity, brand, franchise, or a finished proposal from an agent. The serious nonfiction writer without an agent or a platform — the writer with a real book in them and no obvious doorway — is sent to small literary presses with reading windows that close as quickly as they open, or sent to self-publishing, or sent home.
Self-publishing solves access and solves nothing else. It hands you a toolkit, a metadata form, and a print-on-demand template, then calls the result a book. The work of shaping the book — the framing, the architecture, the editorial register, the design language, the imprint signal — is missing. The writer is back where they started, only with a paperback this time.
Crossroads is structured as a boutique press that does that shaping. We work an editorial methodology across every project. We design our books in a recognizable house language. We put them into real distribution under a real imprint with a real ISBN we own. The book that comes out the other side is a Crossroads book, not a manuscript with a cover on it.
What kind of book Crossroads publishes
Serious nonfiction for thinking adults. The kind of book that argues. The kind that sits with its subject and refuses the easy answer. Memoir that doesn't redeem too quickly. Social analysis with prose craft. Cultural criticism that takes its subject seriously. Practical books that argue rather than instruct.
We work in the tradition of James Hollis and David Whyte, Ezra Klein and Adam Tooze, Rebecca Solnit and Patrick Radden Keefe, Parker Palmer and Anand Giridharadas. Not every book by every one of those writers, but books that work in their register. The form of the book matches the seriousness of the work.
If your book belongs in that register and you're tired of being told the only way to publish it is to find an agent willing to take a year of unanswered submissions, or to spin up a Kindle account and call it done, we want to read it.
What a Crossroads book looks like
Crossroads books share a typography, a cover system built around three families (Quiet Authority, Bold Voice, Cult Object), an editorial register specific to the imprint, and a posture toward the reader. Your prose stays your prose. The imprint frames it.
Every engagement starts with an Editorial Framing Brief: eight pages naming what your book is, what it wants to be, what it comps to, what is missing, and what the next move is. That brief is the document the author and the editor work from for the rest of the project. It is not a sales document. It is the editorial spine of the book.
What follows the brief depends on the engagement, but the shape is always the same: framing, then architecture, then compile-to-print, then (in Architected engagements) distribution. Each stage produces a specific deliverable. The methodology is the same methodology that produced the founding list. Reference points: Archipelago, Fitzcarraldo, Verso, Haymarket, Two Dollar Radio, Coffee House, Graywolf, Belt. Small literary presses with their own form. When you see one of their books, you know.
A note from the founder
Chad Prevost
I'm Chad Prevost. I founded Crossroads in 2025 after roughly twenty years of making books on the indie side of the industry. In the mid-2000s I co-founded C&R Press and led it through 2014, publishing more than forty titles in that span — including books by Anis Shivani, Terence Hawkins, Michelle Bitting, Alexander Long, and Caleb Ludwick. That list is still a reference point for what I want this press to make possible, only this time with full editorial control across framing, design, architecture, and production.
I hold a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Georgia State University and an M.Div., Magna Cum Laude, from Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary. I'm a coach credentialed by the International Coach Federation (Associate Certified Coach) and a Certified Enneagram Coach through the CP Enneagram Academy. My own writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Southern Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Mid-American Review, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals, and I've been recognized with two Pushcart Prize nominations and inclusion in several anthologies. But the title that matters most to me on this page is editor. The work I want to be doing for the rest of my working life is shaping serious books with the writers who are serious enough to make them.
If that sounds like you, we should talk.
Chad's authorial work lives elsewhere.
Crossroads is Chad's editorial project. His authorial work — including the IF/THEN Books interactive-fiction series for young readers and his Substack The Descent — lives at chadprevost.com. The Difficulty podcast, hosted by Chad, is published by Crossroads and lives at crossroadspublishing.group/the-difficulty.
Where to reach us
Email: chad@crossroadspublishing.group
Discovery call: 15 minutes by video, no cost
Inquire in writing: /inquire