I’ve read a lot of Enneagram books. I’ve taught with the system for years, developed an online course (The Slow Enneagram), written one (Shock Point), and ran a nonprofit press for nearly a decade. This year, I’ve started an independent press in Chattanooga that publishes nonfiction with a message. So I say this with affection: most Enneagram books are nine descriptions. Nine chapters, nine types, a chapter on wings and arrows, maybe a thematic focus or a section on the instincts—and you close the book knowing what you are but little to nothing about what to do about it (not to mention seeing the same things again and again).

That book served its purpose. The introductions and theories from the 1980s and ’90s got the system into millions of hands, and I’m grateful for them. But the conversation has moved, and the books, for the most part, haven’t moved with it. The people I know who’ve been teaching with the Enneagram for years aren’t talking about type descriptions anymore. They’re talking about where the system came from and what that means. About what a person actually does once they know. About the point where type stops being an identity and starts being a practice. About what the Enneagram looks like when it meets grief, or leadership, or a marriage, or a body, for real, over years, with real people.

Those are arguments. They’re theses. And almost nobody is publishing them because the houses that used to publish the slow book of the inner life have mostly turned to platform and promise—the book a famous person can sell or the book with seven steps in it. A teacher with a decade of case notes and one idea the introductions don’t have is, in my experience, sitting on it. Partly because the process sounds daunting. Partly because of the fear every writer has: that you put it out there and no one comes.

So we’re opening a door. From October 13 through December 15, Crossroads is reading. We’re calling it the Soundings Reading Period, after the lane in our list for books of the inner life, from any tradition or none, East and West. Anyone can send a book. If the manuscript is finished, send the whole thing. If it isn’t, send an ordinary proposal: a one-page overview, a chapter outline, a sample chapter or two. No query letter. It’s less about the pitch and more
about the concepts and style.

It costs twenty-five dollars. As Publisher, I’ll say what that buys because it is a good rule to be wary of anyone who charges to read your work. It buys me reading it, and a one-page letter back within twenty-one days that tells you where the book stands: Ready, Nearly, or Not Yet. If I’m late, the twenty-five comes back. It doesn’t buy a yes. It isn’t a deposit on anything. Nobody calls you afterward to sell you something. If it’s a yes we clearly describe the proposal engagement opportunity.

Crossroads Press hopes to unleash Enneagram books that argue something. Not mere nine behavioral descriptions. A thesis, from someone who’s been in the room with this system long enough to have one. If that’s you, or if you know the teacher it is, the whole thing is on one page: crossroadspublishing.group/submit

Chad Prevost is the founder and publisher of Crossroads Publishing Group, and host of the podcast The Difficulty. In 2020 he helped found and shape Big Self School, and he works as a writing coach and workshop leader. He is the author of Shock Point: The Enneagram in Burnout and Stress and the editor of Who Do You Think You Are? 365 Meditations and the Books They Came From, as well as several collections of poetry, most recently Mirage and Tar. He is a member of the International Enneagram Association.