FAQ + Contact

Our website is super easy to use! Click on the Add to cart button next to the items you want to order. The online ordering system calculates your total (including shipping costs) for the order. Or you can print and fill out our Microcosm order form. We accept credit card, PayPal, mailed-in check, money order, or well-concealed cash.

If you order online, consider signing up for a My Microcosm account! Save your login info so that you can order with it in the future. If you order something that we're out of, we can add credit onto your account—and when you order again, the credit will be automatically taken out!

If you don't want to use a credit card or PayPal, you can print your order form at checkout and mail it with a check, money order, or cash (wrapped in two sheets of paper). When mailing orders, include your name, address (inside the envelope, too!), phone #, e-mail address, your order, alternates (in case we are out of items you want), and a nice letter. People outside the US should pay with U.S. cash or Postal Money Orders in U.S. funds.

When contacting us about an order, please wait at least 2 weeks after your order is sent. If it hasn't arrived, please contact us with your name and ref. code (a combination of numbers and letters, like 926db). For international orders, please wait one month after your order is sent—generally all we can tell you is when it was shipped!

You can see the status of your orders on your My Microcosm page if you have an account. You can also check for your order on our online shipping log! Also, please provide an accurate email address in check-out.  We email you shipping emails and tracking numbers for tracking your package through the Postal Service.

Most orders are mailed out the day after they are received. However, we may hold an order when we know that new copies of an out-of-stock item will arrive within 2 weeks. While we do our best to keep the site updated, items do go out of stock quickly, so please list alternates!

Orders sometimes get lost in the mail before they get to us or after we ship them. If an order worth less than $20 is lost in the mail, we will replace it on our dime. If a lost order is over $20 and you don't purchase insurance, then we will replace it for half of the total cost plus shipping.

We fulfill wholesale orders for stores and other resellers! If you purchase wholesale from us, please sign up for a My Microcosm account—that way, we can keep track of your contact information and invoices. To find wholesale prices for items, go to any product page (or to your cart) and click on the orange "wholesale" button.

Here's a catalog of titles published by Microcosm. To set up a wholesale account, first make two orders with payment upfront. The orders must be at least $40 with a minimum of two of each item. After that, we can offer Net-30 terms (in which you pay 30 days after placing the order).  Please specify "Net-30" in online order notes. Items are generally not returnable unless they are damaged or arrangements are made ahead of time—get in touch to find out.

Our published titles are also available for wholesale through AK Distribution (510) 208-1700, Baker & Taylor (800) 775-1800, Ingram (800) 937-8200, and Last Gasp (415) 824-6636. As of January 1, we will be distributed by Turnaround (UK) and Independent Publisher's Group (Chicago). 

If you have any questions about wholesale ordering, contact our sales representative!

All of our t-shirts are made in the United States by American Apparel and AS Tees.

They are "fitted", so they fit around the contours of your body and not like a "box" shirt. If you don't want your shirt to be tight, you should buy it a size larger than normal.  

Our X-Small size is a Women's Medium shirt size and typically has the "Medium" crossed out and an XS written on the tag.

We only accept exchanges if we send the wrong item or if a t-shirt does not fit properly. If we send you the wrong item or an item is missing from your package, get in touch and we'll fix our mistake. If you are exchanging a t-shirt because you ordered the wrong size, you ship it back to us, include a $2 handling fee, and the cost of shipping you a new one over to you. Please make sure you order the right size for both of our sakes! Thanks.

Due to the costs involved, we typically don't accept returns. If you would like to make special arrangements, please email us.

Send us a sample copy so we can check it out! Please include this Submission Form to avoid any delays in staff response and send it all to:

          Microcosm Publishing
          112 S. Main St. Ste. C
          Lansing, KS 66043-1501.

If we carry your title, we'll order about 20-50 copies at a time for a zine or about 10-20 copies for a book. Please include an Order Form or write out the title, quantity, retail price, your (legal) name, and address. If your zine/book is under $6 retail, we'll send you a check within 30 days of receiving your zines; if it's $6 or more, we can only offer consignment terms. We pay out a 50/50% split not including shipping costs. We also offer payment in trade for items in our catalog with a 60/40% split.

Microcosm specializes in DIY (Do-It-Yourself) goods. Microcosm began with the goal of making available materials that are otherwise difficult to get your hands on. We enjoy hand-done and unique historical, educational, instructive, cooking-related, and bicycling-related zines, plus the occasional literary work. We like zines with information that you'd be hard-pressed to find elsewhere and to learn about things we didn't know we were interested in. Very few of our zines could be considered traditional "magazines" and few of our book titles are from major presses.

We tend not to distribute most magazines, poetry chapbooks, or music-related publications because that's not our focus and we haven't sold them well in the past. If you are unsure, take a look around our catalog and see if your work would fit in!

Because Microcosm distributes a ton of zines and they require so much staff labor, only zines that sell at least 40 copies each year remain in the catalog. Since we order 30-50 copies of a zine on average, this doesn't affect most zinesters. But if we don't reorder a zine after it's sold out, it's nothing personal—we're probably not the best place to sell it, and zines shouldn't just sit around on our dusty shelves!

We sell items mostly through retail orders but we also sell at conferences and on tour. In addition, items may be sold wholesale to stores and distributors.

In order for us to consider publishing your work, you should first have a pre-existing working relationship with us. That usually means distributing your work in our catalog. This helps us maintain our mission statement of helping zines flourish and supporting self-publishing authors.

Once we have a working relationship, you may propose a publishing project or we may suggest one to you. Bear in mind, we've distributed thousands of titles yet we've published about 130 titles, so we are selective about how we invest our space, effort, time, and money.

We usually publish a distributed title because we've sold more copies than an author can provide. We are not looking to expand the style or scope of our publishing operation. 

Our published titles are often sold to what is considered "non-trade" locations—clothing stores, newsstands, toy stores, novelty shops, and other places that aren't bookstores. 

BFF Program: Like a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share that gives farmers a guarantee before their crops are harvested, our BFF's help us by paying upfront for their zines and books! Publishing our titles means we pay the printing costs before any books are sold, so every BFF gives us peace of mind. Plus, it's awesome for people to get mailed something new every month of the subscription! Check out the BFF program here.

Sliding Scale Pricing: The standby of DIY venues, museums, and house shows—pay-what-you-can prices allow people to give within their means. We don't know of any other publisher that does this, but Microcosm offers sliding scale prices for titles we produce! We try to put stuff out for cheap, so extra dollars go a long way to keep our pricing sustainable.

Getting the Word Out: Unlike major book publishers, we don't have a large budget for promotions and we rarely pay for ads. In keeping our books cheap, we almost forgo the luxury of having a promotions department entirely! The cheapest way to help us out is telling folks about Microcosm and distributing catalogs.

Microcosm operates as a not-for-profit collectively-run organization. All money goes back into the organization and new publishing projects. We chose not to be a 501(c)3 organization because it would require outside management, which is a challenge to any radical organization. To find out more, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence edited a book challenging the non-profit industrial complex in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, and resources are available on their website.

This means that we don't write grants or push tax-free contributions, so we instead keep things at the grassroots level. We sincerely appreciate any help you all can throw down in any way! To find out more about how our money is spent, check out our 2009, 2010, and 2011 financial reports.

Thanks for wanting to help out! While it's rarely exciting, there's always work to go around. The Kansas location deals mostly with shipping and ordering for the website, while the Portland location manages a retail storefront and cuts patches or makes buttons during downtime. If you're interested in volunteering or interning, here's a form you can fill out and send to us!

Here's what we have available:

KANSAS
Volunteer: Folding/stapling zines, checking inventory and restocking shelves, & putting together sticker packs.

PORTLAND
Volunteer: Distributing promotional material around town to get the word out about the store! Doing data entry, assisting with production tasks, research, cutting canvas, making buttons, or organizing books is a huge help!

Microcosm is a collectively-run organization, so it's managed by its staff that works 28 hours or more per week! Get to know us on the About Us page if you'd like to find out more (or say hello). We're a bunch of friendly folks (and a cat) and we try to be approachable, even through this void of the Internets!

Microcosm was started by Joe Biel in 1996 and evolved into the current collective structure in 2005. As the founder of a non-hierarchical organization he helped grow, Joe has the unique position of possessing tons of experience and knowledge while having equal say in how Microcosm is run.

Decisions on distributing or publishing titles are voted on by the collective. After 3 months of employment or volunteer time (with a minimum average of 28 hours per week), a staffperson can vote on decisions and titles to publish or distribute. At that time, a staffperson can become a collective member if a consensus approval is reached by members. 

Collective members receive benefits such as vacation time and paid medical expenses. The collective meets monthly to discuss an agenda they've put together, and they get together for an annual week-long meeting to discuss long-term goals. Processes to enforce responsibility and accountability have been developed and continually undergo improvement. Collective members are hired, noted on failure to follow policy, and fired by the collective as a whole—through a process of reporting violations of repeated behaviors. A collective member may be terminated for chronic failure, or gross violation of the Microcosm policies.  For someone to be removed, 80% of all collective members must agree that this is the best course of action.

To borrow the words of Chris Landry, "Zines are the best expression of the d.i.y. ethics of the punk rock subculture. While bands can be co-opted into the mainstream and the music scene continues to be male-dominated and increasingly a-political, zines have been keeping it true. Zines take the profit and fame motive out of artistic expression and focus on communication, expression and community for their own sake. Zines are the one truly democratic art form. Zine writers are the most important writers in the world."

To borrow the words of Aaron Cometbus, "You can put out a fanzine and you can reach all kinds of fuckin' people for really cheap and you can do a novel and there's no way that you can get to as many people in the same way. Fanzines are, in a way, the perfect form. You can get your fanzine, if you hustle, to bookstores, record stores, maybe even magazine stands. I've had it on sale at toy stores. You can sell it at shows. It's not at all limited to shows and to punk culture. You can sell a book to a record store but it doesn't cross formats in the same way. So in many ways I think that the fanzine is the ultimate and better than a regular magazine too. It really can appeal to all kinds of people."

Of course! We copy some zines that are public domain, and others for zinesters that requested that we take care of that. In the past, authors got paid royalties when we owed them $100. However, royalties on econo-core zines would sometimes take forever to reach the $100 mark! Now we send everyone a royalty check at least once per year—even if it's very small. We aren't business school graduates or professionals of any kind. However, we recently learned about spreadsheets, and that has helped a lot! 

We have no desire to copy a zinester's work without permission or without giving royalties. If we've made a mistake, please get in touch with us!

Check out our press page!

Microcosm started in 1996 by contacting the projects that we liked and distributing their material. Those creators were working on a small, local scale, and understood what we were doing. We put ads in zines and newsgroups, and made flyers to mail and hang up.

Pretty soon, a small pile of mail stared appearing every week from people who wanted their stuff distributed. Back before the era of internet distros, there were not many national places to get your zine distributed. As Microcosm grew and became financially capable, we ordered from larger distributors like Mordam, Revolver, No Idea, Lumberjack, AK Press, and others. 

We found that when a publisher gets to a certain size they no longer like to do the mail-order or sell to stores themselves. They prefer to have one distributor handle that aspect of the operation. We find this to be a problem because it creates a void and a financial dependency on these distributors. When they go out of business, they normally take the publisher with them. It also drives prices up. 

We like to deal as directly as possible to avoid these problems. We have had a pleasant time dealing with No Idea and AK Press. Most of the rest have ceased to exist. Old Glory Records, RIP.

Microcosm operates as a not-for-profit collectively-run organization. All money goes back into the organization and new publishing projects. We choose not to be a 501(c)3 because such an organization requires outside management. Publishing is not the profitable industry that it once was and we feel like the most can be done by putting our ethics ahead of our finances. We pay ourselves starting at $7.50 an hour and receive a raise of 25 cents every 3 months, with a wage cap at $13/hour.

As a result, Microcosm doesn't have the ethical quandaries that for-profit companies go through to make more money to please owners or shareholders. We have no loans, backers, parent company, investors, or shadow partners. All of our money is raised the old fashioned way—by selling things.

This project was built on the hard work of everyone who has ever ordered from us, volunteered here, or stuck around for gainful employment. We wouldn't be where we are today without you. We strongly believe in local and DIY economics and try to be conscious of how our money is spent. We believe that strengthening the economies of what we believe in is an effective way of demonstrating our power as individuals over mega-corporations.

Check out our 2009 Financial Report and our 2010 Financial Report.

Our website is tested and coded for Mozilla Firefox, which we recommend for web browsing. It's faster, less buggy, safer, and more frequently updated than Internet Explorer. Our site should also work well on Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Opera.

New bugs do sometimes appear on our site and it's best to report them. Nate, our web genius, will thank you. He hates bugs and loves clean, well-functioning things.

We do! Many libraries and educators order from us already. For libraries, we're happy to set up NET-30 terms for your orders, or contact our sales representative about setting up a standing order. If you're an educator who would like to use a title as a text, contact us to arrange a desk copy!