Microcosm Publishing

Unf*ck Your Life with Microcosm + Humble Bundle

We are excited to present our latest collaboration with Humble Bundle: a sliding-scale, pay-what-you-want selection of our most popular ebooks about mental health, personal growth, and self-care.

You can choose for part of your purchase to benefit the Portland organization Street Books, which brings a mobile library to our houseless population.

This bundle runs through March 17th, and is a fantastic way to

Now Kickstarting: Bang!

How to Resist Amazon and Why

Independent bookstore owner Danny Caine penned this love letter to buying local, which is also a scathing critique of big business, consolidation, and the havoc giant retailers are wreaking on the US (and world) economy, labor force, privacy, politics, and the business of writing, buying, and selling books.

How to Be Accountable

Want to change your behavior, transform your relationships, and live your best life? Dr. Faith Harper and Joe Biel walk you through the benefits and difficulties of being accountable to the only person who can truly be responsible for how you live your life: yourself.

Practical Witch's Almanac 2021

Magic is a universal force but how we access and use it is deeply personal. The 24th annual edition of Friday Gladheart's beloved almanac is focused on crafting your magic. Special planner pages, worksheets, and articles are included to help you achieve your goals, discover your hidden talents, and explore the awe-inspiring beauty of nature, no matter what kind of magic you practice. The projects, articles, and ideas will motivate you to hone your witchy skills no matter your current level of expertise, including divination (tarot, runes, pendulum), herbalism & wortcunning, and using nature's gifts of stones, crystals, and minerals. It can also be used as a companion study guide to the traditional "year and a day" of study prior to initiation or solitary dedication. And as always, it contains astrological and astronomical information, moon phases, trivia, recipes, Sabbats, historical tidbits, and everything you need to get you in touch with the Practical Witch within you. 

Quit Your Day Job Workbook

A practical guide and comprehensive workbook for starting a creative business. As an artist, dreamer, or thinker, you may be looking for extra support with the practical aspects of entrepreneurship. This workbook helps you create structures to support your vision, clarify what success looks like for you, find the resources you need, and take your next steps. Includes chapters on topics like branding, publicity, fundraising, pricing your goods and services, forming a legal entity, taking on a partner, making the transition to working for yourself full-time, and knowing when to close or change your business. Use it on its own, or as a companion to Quit Your Day Job.

Deschinga Tu Cerebro

A Spanish translation of Dr. Faith Harper's bestselling book Unfuck Your Brain. Nuestros cerebros están haciendo todo lo posible para ayudarnos, pero a veces pueden ser verdaderos imbéciles. A veces parece que tu propio cerebro está tratando de atraparte, alterándose en frente de todo el público, buscando pleito con tu pareja, volviéndote adicto a algo o congelándose por completo en los peores momentos posibles. Ya le dijiste a tu cerebro que en serio no es bueno hacer este tipo de cosas. Pero tu cerebro tiene una mente propia. Ahí es donde este libro llega a ser útil. Con humor, paciencia y muchas palabrotas, Dr. Faith te muestra la ciencia detrás de lo que está sucediendo en tu cráneo y te explica a través del proceso cómo reentrenar tu cerebro para responder adecuadamente a las cosas que no son de emergencia en la vida cotidiana. Si estás trabajando para lidiar con viejos traumas, depresión, ansiedad, enojo, dolor o adicción, o si solo quieres tener una respuesta más calmada y relajada a las situaciones que enfrentas todo el tiempo, este libro puede ayudarte a poner las piezas del rompecabezas juntas y recuperar tu vida y tu cerebro.

Boundaries Conversation Deck

What are your values, needs, and desires? What are your deal breakers? What is your personal definition of consent? What would you do if someone stole your place in line? What if a friend says you've hurt them? These 52 cards prompt reflection and conversation about your and others’ boundaries, needs, consent, and relationships. Consider your past history, current strategies for recognizing and relating boundaries, and ideas to communicate more effectively in the future. There are no right or wrong answers, only your answers in Dr. Faith's first non-sweary deck!

Trans-Galactic Bike Ride

Take a ride with us as we explore a future where trans and nonbinary people are the heroes! In worlds where bicycle rides bring luck, a minotaur needs a bicycle, and werewolves stalk the post-apocalyptic landscape, nobody has time to question gender. Whatever your identity you'll enjoy these stories that are both thought-provoking and fun adventures. Find out what the future could look like if we stopped putting people into boxes and instead empowered each other to reach for the stars.

Rock and Roll Terrorist

Born Jesus Christ Allin and raised in rural isolation by a violently abusive religious fanatic, GG Allin grew up to be one of punk's most controversial figures. His music was overshadowed by his on-stage antics, including throwing blood and feces at the audience and hurting himself and audience members. In this first substantial biography of the man who wanted to make rock "dangerous" again, Hardcore Anxiety author and illustrator Reid Chancellor portrays Allin's life and early death with sensitivity, asking us to look beyond the shocking spectacle to understand the troubled human behind the scenes, and the societal forces that pushed him to the edge of creative expression.

GG Allin: Rock and Roll Terrorist Activity and Coloring Book

Shock rocker GG Allin lived life on his own terms, often to the detriment of everyone around him—and he always created a NSFW spectacle. This activity and coloring book delves into the gore and guts beneath the surface, telling his story like never before—interactively. Channel your rage to color these pages outside the lines, then use them as toilet paper.

Unf*ck Your Worth Workbook

Get your finances in order, work through your values and baggage around money, plan your next career move, negotiate arguments about spending with your partner, and so much more in this jam-packed workbook created by Dr. Faith Harper to go with her instant hit Unf*ck Your Worth.

Books for the New Bicycle Revolution

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the streets are suddenly free of traffic, and a lot of folks are rediscovering bicycling—you can tell by looking out the window, or at our order queue.

Books and zines about bicycling (and stickers... oh, the bike stickers!) have long been Microcosm's bread and butter. The interest never goes away, but it's been way up lately. Here's a list of (almost) all of the bike books and zines we publish, and you can find everything bikey in our catalog here.

And here's short list of our recommendations for people who are just getting with riding or wondering how we can sustain relatively car-free streets post-pandemic.

In issue #4 of the Bicycle Culture Rising zine, read about how Kittie Knox, a teenage cyclist in the late 1800s, changed bike culture forever.

—We are currently Kickstarting our newest volume of feminist bicycle science fiction: Trans-Galactic Bike Ride!—

Unf*cking Our Pandemic, Apart but Together

We are shipping every day out of the Microcosm Publishing & Distribution HQ in Portland, Oregon!

All mail orders are going out within 24 hours. If you choose "pick up at store" as your shipping option, you can come ring our doorbell Mon-Sat 11am-3pm and we'll do a no-contact handoff.

We've always printed our books here in the United States, and so right now we're not seeing any significant delays in publication of our titles. Orders have slowed a bit, but we're using the time to get caught up on a serious backlog of work that's built up in our last year and a half of hectic growth. Far from reducing hours or laying anyone off, we're cautiously moving forward with the hiring process we began last month. In other news: we aren't going anywhere.

Ultimately, our strength has always resided in how we've built up communities around us, and so we've started to work on strengthening those where we can through a variety of ways:

• Dr. Faith Harper is doing a live story time with her book Coping Skills on our Facebook page. She'll be doing it nightly at 5 p.m. central until she's done, and the videos will be archived on our page at least until this passes.

• At the request of the author, we've made the ebook version of Teenage Rebels 99 cents. We hope we can inspire some of the millions of high school students currently sitting at home and help them continue learning. The author of Crate Digger has also requested we put both the ebook and audiobook versions of this Florida punk scene history on super sale!

• If you're bored at home and starting to struggle, we've got a quarantine self-care pack for you - just $20 for the physical books, $15 for the ebooks.

• For retailers who are offering support, ideas, and solace to freaked out customers, we've created a Community Support display pack with quarantine-friendly bestsellers like This Is Your Brain on Anxiety and Making Stuff and Doing Things

• We've curated a list of relevant titles on our Quarantine Survival Guide list of project-based books for people who are feeling anxious or just need something to do.

• If you're stocked up on books and want to help others, you can do that here! We've set up a "give books to people in need" program where you can support sending care packages to spread the book love. As always, we are stepping up to offer ways to offer our books to people who are most vulnerable and in need. We are matching funds from donations at link.

• To further help folks, you can also donate a gift certificate to Street Books, send books to prisoners, or send a gift of books (we can choose for you if you aren't sure) with a note directly to a friend.

• We're going to net-90 terms for independent bookstores who place orders placed before April 30th.

We'd love to hear from you, our customers and peers, about how you're surviving these weird, weird times and what we can do to support you.

Call for Submissions: Queering Consent

To start Queering Consent off I’m looking for nonbinary pairings. Nonbinary folks with each other, nonbinary folks with men, nonbinary folks with women, nonbinary folks in polycules… So long as at least one of the characters is explicitly nonbinary, I’m not too fussed about who they’re with or what pronouns they use.

A really successful erotica anthology also needs a theme to go with the pairing. For that, I started asking what we needed more of, but in reality, I didn’t have to look any further than my own passion and knowledge of popular erotica and romance: historical romance, pre-1950s.

Why? My first two books were both anthologies, and I found myself enjoying working with multiple authors considerably. When my publisher (and now employer), Microcosm Publishing, announced they’d start doing queer erotica, I knew I had to start doing anthologies for that too. I pitched them three (!) and they eagerly accepted all of them, which I was not expecting.

To get a better feel for the market, we’re doing them as a zine series, entitled Queering Consent.

Submissions are due by August 1, 2020 DEADLINE EXTENDED now due August 28, 2020

The nitty gritty:

Word count: 1,000 to 3,000 words (longer stories are welcome, but may be published separately or considered for a later book version) or 2-6 pages of black and white comics

Format: Word, .ODT, PDF or Google document emailed to lydia(at)microcosmpublishing(dot)com

(If submitting comics, please ask for specs before submitting artwork.)

Works must be original fiction (no fanfic, sorry!) though reprints are allowed. 

More about the theme:  There simply aren’t enough nonbinary people represented in historical fiction, even though nonbinary folks have always been here. So… why not make it sexy?

Also, if it’s not consensual it’s not sex and not welcome in this series!

Payment: $25 flat fee; if we include your contribution in a book edition, there will be additional payment

I am encouraging marginalized authors who do not see themselves in most mainstream fiction to submit, including (but not limited to) BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, queer and trans folks. Write the stories you wish had been published and submit them to us. #OwnVoices work is encouraged, but not strictly required.

If this pairing or theme isn’t up your alley, the next two themes and pairings are:

• woman/woman in science fiction or fantasy settings
• man/man’s tender first times (with each other, or first time at all)

You can submit those whenever (or if you have an idea for future themes, let me know!) or you can sign up for my newsletter to find out when the submission period officially opens for future volumes. 

Reposted from LydiaRogue.com

Call for Submissions for Neurodiversity zine series

A People's Guide to Publishing Podcast

In 2012, Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel started writing blog posts. Biel wanted to share 25 years of experience and how Microcosm sold millions of books to leave a trail of bread crumbs for others to have similar success. Biel has also written a book about the topic, A People's Guide to Publishing.

Joe and Microcosm's marketing director Elly now make the weekly People's Guide to Publishing People's Guide to Publishing podcast. You can listen to it on your preferred app, or watch the video version as a vlogcast.

Got questions about the publishing industry or need help troubleshooting your own process? Submit your question for us, and we'll try to address it on an upcoming episode.

Find the series of blog posts that started it all here:

An overview

What a Publisher Does

Paralleling the Dinosaurs

Title Development

For authors: How to Pitch Your Book to a Publisher

Data About Your Book's Details (MetaData)

Profit & Loss Statement

Am I Stealing Your Art?

The Economic Case for Traditional Format Offset Printing

Distribution Question (with infographic)

The Print Run

Working with The Printer

Formatting for Print

How to Pack Books for Shipping

Social Media for Authors

Self-Promotion for Authors

Organizing a book tour

Microcosm In Your Town!

Want to meet us in person, check out our books, or see an author speak? We've got author events and convention events coming up! There's a full calendar at the bottom of the page.

2021 Author Events

Virtual author events!

• Thursday, January 28th, 7pm central time: Unf#ck Your Boundaries with Dr. Faith G. Harper — Virtual Zoom author event. Free event, registration required.

Interested in having an author at your store or event after this is all over? Reach out!!

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2021 Tabling Events

Where we'll be selling books, zines, and merch!

• TBD

Planning an event and want us to be part of it (speaking, author readings, movie screenings, setting up a book and zine pop-up shop, etc.)? Let us know!!

In the Portland area? We can set up a book fair at your workplace like the ones your school used to have.

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Calling for submissions for the Scene History series!

Are you stoked about the history of your town? Do you find out interesting nuggets by talking to those who came before you or by scouting out details on Google and Wikipedia? Do you want a reason to hunt out some people you respect and fill in the gaps? Well, the Scene History series is an opportunity to do just that. Like our Simple History Series, we will publish a new volume each year of the Scene History series that tell the story of a particular city's scene. (the series does not profile individuals, albums, or bands, and must be framed around a real scene, no fiction!) Suggested length is 15,000-30,000 words. Get as creative as you find gratifying. Learn about your favorite places and how things developed. Check out the existing Scene Histories here! To pitch, just send a general summary of the scene that you are profiling, the years profiled, and your qualifications/interest to profile it! Will it be prose or comics? Do you have access to photos and images? Why are you excited to do this? Submit or ask questions to joe at microcosmpublishing daht com

BFF Book Subscription

Be our Best Friend Forever (BFF)! For 6 months you'll receive every new title we publish. The subscription is sliding scale price $10-30/month, and you can either pay in one sum upfront here or pay-as-you-go here. Thanks for your support!  Google+