Microcosm Publishing

Firebrands: Activists You Didn't Learn About in School

This illustrated history celebrates American changemakers and revolutionaries that are often left out of public narratives about our shared past. These firebrands hail from Canada, Chile, and everywhere in between, from the 1500s to today. Instead of focusing on the powerful, rich white folks so often featured in textbooks, these gorgeous portraits with accompanying biographies recognize the work of grassroots organizers, revolutionaries, visionaries, anarchists, workers, and artists. These heroes put their bodies and souls into fighting injustice and making their communities better, and they often gave their lives for the causes they believed in. Each story is vividly illustrated by a member of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative and offers a radical glimpse into how individuals can work to change the world. A new introduction by editor Shaun Slifer launches the third edition of this beloved collection, which 15 years later remains a powerful resource for anyone of any age seeking the role models they missed out on in school.

Firebrands include Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Sitting Bull, Gloria Anzaldúa, Pablo Neruda, Nina Simone, Emma Goldman, Fred Hampton, Buckminster Fuller, Paulo Freire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Chico Mendes, Tupac Shakur, Grace Lee Boggs, Muhammad Ali, Yuri Kochiyama, and many more. 

Unfuck Your Kink: Using Science to Enjoy Mind-Blowing BDSM, Fetishes, Fantasy, Porn, and Whatever Your Pervy Heart Desires

What turns you on? Maybe it's something vanilla, but chances are good that there's more to it than that. Dr. Faith G. Harper, sexologist, therapist, and author of bestselling titles like Unfuck Your Intimacy and Unfuck Your Blow Jobs, tackles the whys, whats, and how-tos of the very wide range of human erotic experience—much of which doesn't involve actual touching. She debunks myths, explains the science behind why we like what we like, and discusses how to engage safely, shamelessly, and satisfyingly in BDSM, pornography, fantasies, role-play, and fetishes both common and rare. Whatever gets you off, there's a way for you to feel good while feeling good about yourself. Leave shame behind and let the sex positivity resound!

Now Kickstarting: The Intimacy Conversation Deck by Dr. Faith Harper!

The Bicyclist's Guide to the Galaxy: Feminist, Fantastical Tales of Books and Bikes

The power of the pedal and the page shine through in these ten joyfully feminist science fiction and fantasy stories. Two strangers and their bike fall through a plot hole and into a fantasy novel, an author attempts to chronicle the solar cycling trend, a sixth grader's beloved novel is stolen by a horde of bicycling fae, an interstellar book preservationist takes a bike to fit in and gets a wilder ride than she bargained for, and more adventures are set in imagined realities not so different from our own futures, pasts, and present-day lives. Take these stories for a spin and enjoy an escape from the perils of everyday sexism and fossil fuel dependence. 

Includes stories by Kathleen Jowitt, Christopher R. Muscato, Shelby Schwieterman, Cara Brezina, Jamie Perrault, Avery Vanderlyle, Lisa Timpf, Taru Luojola, Rose Strickman, and Elly Blue.

Missed the Kickstarter? Check out our PledgeManager page for all the details on the book, rewards, and add-ons you can still get!

Our Strangers: Stories

“An overflowing treasure chest of jewel-like stories . . . A collection that you'll want to keep on your bedside table by one of America’s most original short story writers." –Kirkus Review, starred review

From one of the most accomplished writers of our time comes another brilliant collection of short fiction. Artful, deft, and inventive, Lydia Davis’ newest collection of stories delves into topics ranging from marriage to tiny insects. These stories are a celebration of language and careful observation that once again confirms Davis’ sincere love and mastery of the form.

This title is NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH AMAZON.COM. Only available at independent bookstores and libraries, by request of the author.

Promote Your Book: Spread the Word, Find Your Readers, and Build a Literary Community

So you've written a book—now what? Your next step is to find your readers and get that book into their hands.

Eleanor Whitney, author of Quit Your Day Job, offers perspective, practical advice, and checklists for shepherding your new book into the wider world. Traditionally published, self-published, and hybrid authors alike will benefit from these accessible tools and frameworks. No matter what kind of book you've written or where you are in the writing or publishing process, you can always build a community of readers, strengthen your literary support system, and have fun doing it.

Combining her deep marketing and community-building knowledge, Whitney also interviews a variety of authors and publicists writing in different genres about what worked for them and what they learned the hard way. She walks readers through creating and executing a plan to promote their book on their own terms, with whatever resources and time they have available. She provides a timeline of promotional activities to consider before and after publication, while reminding us that publicity is a long game that you can begin well before your book is finished and continue long after its release. Ultimately, promoting your book is about connecting with a reader through ideas that inspire you both. And that is something we can all do.

Unfuck Your Stress: Using Science to Cope with Distress and Embrace Excitement

Stressed? Hell yeah, you are. It's part of living in this modern world. But you don't deserve to feel like you're constantly being chased by your monstrous, growing list of responsibilities—or, worse, like you have to say no to positive opportunities because you just can't take another thing. Dr. Faith G. Harper, author of bestselling books like Unfuck Your Brain, Unfuck Your Boundaries, and Coping Skills,is here to help. Stress isn't inherently bad for us, she points out, although our stress responses can really harm us over time if they get out of hand. She offers strategies for coping with intense feelings and overwhelm in the moment and for shifting our perspective, habits, and self-talk in the longer term to transform distress into helpful motivation, excitement, and action. She also walks us through understanding our physiological stress response and what happens when it turns into chronic stress and adrenal fatigue. The book is full of practical advice for understanding and managing your own stress response so that you can find solid ground and feel excited and engaged with your life again.

How to Protect Bookstores and Why

Can bookstores save the world? As bastions of culture, anchors of local retail districts, community gathering places, and sources of new ideas, inspiration, and delight, maybe they can. But only if we protect them and the critical roles they fill in our communities.

Danny Caine, author of the bestselling sensation How to Resist Amazon and Why and co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, makes a compelling case for the power of small, local businesses in this thoughtful examination of the dynamic world of bookstores. At once an urgent call to action and a celebration of everything bookstores can do, Caine's new book features case-study profiles of a dozen of the most interesting and innovative bookstores of today, from Minneapolis to Paris. Through a well-informed analysis of these case studies, Caine offers actionable strategies to promote a sustainable future for bookselling, including policy suggestions, ideas for community-based action, and tips on what consumers can do to help. A captivating read for any lover of books, patron of bookstores, or champion of the survival of these vital institutions, How to Protect Bookstores and Why makes the strongest possible argument for the importance of a resilient, inclusive, and progressive bookstore landscape.

I Love My Queer Kid: A Workbook to Affirm and Support Your LGBTQ+ Child or Teen

Create a loving, accepting home for your queer kid

This workbook is for parents and other caretakers whose child or young adult has come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, or any other queer identity. It includes nine weeks of accessible, thoughtful exercises designed to help you gain perspective, challenge your assumptions and fears, and better understand and connect with your kid. Drawing on his experience as a licensed mental health counselor working with queer youth and their families, Marc Campbell provides resources and real help for parents. The world may not always be kind to queer kids, but your home and family can be, and that makes all the difference. Whether you're on board but confused or struggling deeply with learning about your kid's identity, these exercises can help you do right by your child. By embarking on this workbook, you'll increase your understanding of sexuality and gender, improve your connection with your kid, and learn to support them with love and acceptance as they navigate their unique path to adulthood.

Divine Deco Tarot

Glamorous, exuberant, luxurious decorative details suffuse this 78-card tarot deck. Inspired by the lushness of the early 20th-century Art Deco movement and the Balkan folk art of her native Albania, Gerta Egy's images draw you into a fantasy world, beautiful and rich with meaning and feeling. Sprite-like human figures dance, writhe, and play with swords, wands, cups, and pentacles against modernist patterned backgrounds. Use these cards, based on the Rider-Waite system, for inspiration, reflection, and divination.

Practical Witch's Almanac 2024: Grow Your Craft

A daily companion for exploring your spiritual path with weekly lessons in herbalism, divination, magic, and Witchcraft.

Enrich your spiritual and magical journey with The Practical Witch's Almanac. This almanac provides more than Moon phases, Sabbats, and astronomical and astrological information. Every week you'll explore lessons in herbalism, magic, divination, and more.

This practical guide gives you recipes, DIY projects, tips, and advice to keep you motivated and engaged as you grow your craft. You'll explore tarot cards, runes, tea leaves, and other forms of divination. The herbal studies mentor you through basic teas, tinctures, foods, ointments, incense, and lotions while emphasizing the synergistic union of science and magic. The magic lessons help you hone your spell casting, and the spiritual studies assist you in exploring your beliefs.

Weekly bonus material is available at http://PracticalWitch.com/My2024. The Practical Witch Talk podcast expands on each week's lessons.

Missed the Kickstarter? Rewards and add-ons are still available on our PledgeManager page!

If Animals Could Talk: An Adult Coloring Book for Adults

From the bestselling book that went viral for traumatizing a 6-year-old and her precious grandmother (google it) comes an equally off-color coloring book. Have a laugh and decompress while coloring your way through the untamed thoughts of your favorite animals. This coloring book features nearly 60 quotes from different animals, all of whom have zero say in how you color them. They're completely helpless and entirely at the mercy of your coloring utensil of choice (yes, even markers, you sick f*cks). Go wild!

An Interview with Gretchen Treu, owner of A Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison, WI.

Welcome to the next installment of the Bookstore Solidarity Project! Every month, we’ll be highlighting indie bookstore owners and booksellers across the country.

This month, we got to chat with Gretchen Treu, owner and manager of A Room of One's Own Bookstore in Madison. Named after the iconic Virginia Woolf essay, Room is a feminist, queer- and trans-friendly little store. (Room was also featured in Danny Caine's How to Protect Bookstores and Why!)

Your name and pronouns?
Gretchen Treu (they/them)

Tell us a little bit about the store and your community!
Room was founded in 1975 as a scrappy little feminist bookstore, and has grown over the years into Madison's biggest independent bookstore. We are an all-around indie with a strong focus on LGBTQIA, anti-racism, abolitionist, feminist, progressive voices in all genres. We're a dog-friendly shop (and sometimes shop dogs Clio and Janeway come to work with us!). We are known for our community work and activism (we initiated Bookstores Against Borders in 2019, raising over $100K with the help of other indie bookstores and readers to benefit RAICES, an immigrant rights org that does important work particularly in Texas). We have a quirky and no-holds-barred social media brand and are particularly known for our book flowcharts and other queer social media vibes. Wes Lukes and I bought the store in 2018 from longtime owners/founder Sandi Torkildson and Nancy Geary, and reinvigorated its radical commitments just before the onset of the pandemic. We have a beautiful new space (we were displaced from downtown Madison due to a gentrifying high-rise that demolished our former block). We're in the beautiful, low-key Atwood neighborhood on Madison's East side, in an old barrel-roofed building, surrounded by tons of families and progressive community members and dozens of likeminded local small businesses, which is a perfect location for us.

What got you into bookselling?
I loved books from a young age and just never let go.

What’s something about your store that you think will surprise people?
Our store's floors have a very slight slope, because over a hundred years ago when it was built, the building was home to a car repair place, (there's a pulley from the Model-T Ford system that's hanging above the original entryway near our checkout counter). The floors sloped so that oil and water and whatever other fluids would flow out the building into the street to be washed into the sewer. When we moved here and the builders retrofitted our old bookshelves into the space there was much gnashing of teeth and some very creative solutionmaking to accommodate this reality.

What are some of you favorite ways your community supports your store?
I love when customers get into a particular staff person's recommendations, or tell us about how a book we sold them was the perfect choice for what they were looking for. I think of books as an elaborate and uniquely human way to communicate expressively and asynchronously, we're all just yelling into the void. You know. More or less quietly. It's magical to feel an off-the-beaten-path real connection with a community member. I also just love hearing people come into the store and exclaim over the huge breadth of queer books and sidelines we have. Being a destination for queer people, especially trans and non-binary people who don't always feel directly welcomed in queer spaces (particularly legacy feminist/lesbian ones like Room historically was) is what we're here for. Those community-building connections are huge.

What are two books you can't wait for people to read, or your current favorite handsells?
I can't wait to sell The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo--it's the historical fiction T4T monsterfucking horror novella of my dreams. I'm also very excited about Mercury Stardust's Safe and Sound book of home repair for renters--I think it's such a kind and helpful book that serves a niche nobody else is paying attention to.

How can customers who aren’t local shop your shelves?
They can order on our website at roomofonesown.com, or email us for recommendations at room.bookstore@gmail.com

Be sure to follow room on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (where you might recognize some of their very clever book recommendation graphics).

Check out our other Bookstore Solidarity Project posts here!

Call for Submissions - Queer Halloween!

We’re seeking your queer Halloween feminist bicycle science fiction and fantasy stories for the 13th anthology in the Bikes in Space series of books, guest edited by Summer Jewel Keown!

Please submit your original queer Halloween short fiction (in written or comics form) about bicycling from a feminist perspective. We’re looking for stories that give us a shiver or make us leave the hallway light on at night. Raise our hair and make our spines tingle. We’ll also consider Halloween-themed stories that aren’t as frightful, but they should still be infused with all things spooky season.

Stories should be written by authors who consider yourself queer (in whatever way you identify), and should feature Halloween and/or otherworldly elements, and queer characters/themes, as well as feminism. All four elements should be intrinsic to the narrative:

1. Halloween (or stories sufficiently scary or thematic enough to be read around Halloween)
2. Queer
3. Feminism (it is sufficient to simply not include sexist themes or tropes)
4. Bicycles

The genre can be anything fantastical—ghost stories, horror, hard sci-fi, comedic fantasy, slipstream, or anything in that constellation—despite the series title, stories need not be be set in space. No fanfic, poetry, nonfiction, or erotica for this series, please. Stories should not include extreme body horror or graphic violence.

For this volume of the anthology, we ask that all authors be queer/part of the queer/LGBTQIA+ community, in some way, shape or form. We aren't the queer police (which sounds both fabulous and like a bad idea) and if you identify as queer/LGBTQIA+, that's good enough for us.

We welcome submissions from marginalized authors and first-time authors.

Stories are submitted in consideration for inclusion in the anthology. Submission is not a guarantee that any given story will be accepted or included. All stories are selected by the editors. 

Word count: 500 – 6,000 words

Format: MS Word or PDF. Comics submissions of up to 6 pages can be submitted in thumbnails. Contact us if you are unable to submit in one of these formats.

Payment: A portion of profits after expenses from the Kickstarter project used to fund this book is split between contributors, with a guaranteed minimum of $50 each, plus copies of the book.

Deadline: April 15, 2024

Submit via Google Form here: https://forms.gle/41PxyvJUtiLR1kqb7 

Questions? Email summer@microcosmpublishing.com. Please do not email your submissions. We don’t want any getting lost in spam!

Haven't checked out the other Bikes in Space books yet? Take a look at them here!

Events! 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!

Upcoming Author Events

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Upcoming Tabling Events

• • None coming up, check back for more later!

[caption id="attachment_4567" align="alignnone" width="640"] Microcosm at Rollercon 2023[/caption]

Upcoming Trade Shows and Industry Events

Usually not open to the public, these industry events are a chance for store buyers to peruse our books, write orders, and chat about terms. We plan to either attend or exhibit at the following events. If you'll be there too, drop us a line—we'd love to meet you.

 None currently, but keep an eye on the space!

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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Summoning All Witches

Since 1996, Microcosm has published and distributed books, zines, and other goods that put your power in your hands. Including, lately, an increasing number of pagan, mystical, and othersuch witchy books, zines, and decks.

We've recently updated our submission guidelines to make it extra clear: We're looking to publish and distribute more works of magic, witchcraft, and pagan spirituality. Send us your anarcha-feminist oracle deck, your spellbook for finding queer platonic relationships, your comics journalism about the history of witchcraft, a guide to the magic your grandparents taught you, agricultural tips for witches, adorable drawings of animals on broomsticks, or whatever creative way you've found to help people see beyond the pale of normalcy to change their lives and the world.

We are always, especially, looking for submissions from authors and artists who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, mixed race, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, transgender, nonbinary, or who don't see themselves well represented in mainstream publishing.

What we publish

We're proud to publish Friday Gladheart's annual The Practical Witch's Almanac — an incredible resource and weekly planner.

Francesca Black's Year of the Witch: A Planner and Spellbook for the Novice Witch is a great resource for beginners, and also serves as a weekly planner.

Our first tarot deck, The Gold Lyre Tarot, was funded on Kickstarter in early 2021.

And we have many more books, zines, and stickers in print and on the way, like these:

To submit your work to our publishing program, check out our submission guidelines to assess if we might be a good fit. We aim to work with authors and creators who can work within our processes, so following our guidelines exactly is an important first step when submitting a project.

What we distribute

Microcosm is also a specialty wholesaler, selling thousands of books, zines, and decks from other publishers, big and small primarily to non-book-focused gift stores. We work with Big 5 publishing houses, zinesters cutting and pasting in their closets, and everyone in between. And these folks are putting out more and more books celebrating paganism, crystals, astrology, tarot, the occult, the moon, and more.

If you already have your own publishing program and want to see if our wholesale program is a good fit, check out our distribution info.

WorkingLit: Publishing Software from Microcosm

WorkingLit launches in beta on October 30th!

WorkingLit is cloud-based software developed by Microcosm Publishing that gives independent publishers tools to thrive and grow at their own pace. Our industry is run by billionaires and conglomerates, and we want to give our fellow publishers the freedom to market and sell your books, understand your business, and painlessly pay royalties.

Microcosm built our own software from scratch starting in 2002, and we owe it our survival, success, and continued independence. Now we want to share it with you. 

WorkingLit is currently in beta and open to any publisher who would like to use it in exchange for letting us know about bugs and giving us feedback on how to make it better.

On October 30, 2023, we launch in beta! Sign up for our email list to get notified when we go live.

Features

• Manage your product and author metadata
• Track your sales and expenses
• Manage your customer account data
• Calculate royalties and track payments to authors
• Understand the health of your business and what you need to do to grow
• See our spec sheet for all current and planned features.

Pricing

The first month is free so you can kick the tires. Beta users who sign up before February 1, 2024 will get 25% off their first year.

Plan	Features	Price per month
Free plan	Up to 10 products	FREE
Basic Plan	11-25 products	$25
Basic Plus Plan	26-100 products	$69
Premium Plan	101-500 products	$299
Premium Plus Plan	501-1000	$599
All Access Plan	Unlimited products!	$1299

Get stuck or have questions? Check out our site documentation and instructions or email workinglit at microcosmpublishing dot com for help.

Get involved and stay in touch!

• Join our email list
• Are you a programmer? We're looking to grow our team. Email apply at microcosmpublishing dot com with your skillset and why you're interested in being part of WorkingLit
• Take the tour:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/uRj8l2paG2Y

Call for Submissions for Neurodiversity zine series

BFF Book Subscription

Be our Book Friend Forever (BFF)! For 6 months you'll receive every new title we publish. The subscription is sliding scale price $15-30/month—check it out here!  Thanks for your support!