Several years ago I agreed to join a small non-profit press, Éditions Lpb, because a friend asked me to. I knew from the beginning that there would be a risk of extraction and blurred credit, but I felt I owed that friend a solid and accepted. What followed was a long experiment in trust: my ideas were praised and mocked, borrowed and delayed, published and quietly rewritten by others. This piece is not an attack; it is my attempt to describe, as plainly as I can, why I eventually withdrew my book from Lpb and chose to return to the work of my own two hands.

I accepted the association because I cared about the people involved and because I believed small volunteer structures could still do honest work. Early on there were signs of the pattern to come: one day I was “brilliant,” the next my work was “a nursery rhyme.” I watched friends and colleagues take inspiration from my texts, sometimes openly, sometimes by quietly rephrasing them, while my own manuscripts waited in the queue. I did befriend Pierre, and some of my pieces found a home through him. But slowly the relationship shifted: he began using AI to transform essays from my blog into different words so they could be claimed as his, (another colleague reported the same pattern) and a curated book of mine was delayed three or four times at the moment it was about to become real, with the argument that it “wasn’t ready.” The carrot hung in front of me again and again, while others moved ahead.

In the end I withdrew my book, not because I dismissed the volunteer time given to it, but because the pattern of extraction, delay, and sharp swings in how my work was treated became unsustainable for my health. I am mentally disabled, and living on that rollercoaster—being dangled three or four times at the brink of publication—was more than I could carry. When I later pointed out that another book had been publicly announced before the committee’s work was respected, internal emails framed this as me “creating a difficult situation.” This piece is simply my way of setting down, for myself and my readers, what actually happened.

If other writers read this and recognize something in it, I’d be glad if you shared your own experiences in the comments. I want to learn more about how publishing venues behave toward writers.