Microcosm Publishing

The Frugal Vegan's Happy Home: Crafts, Rituals, and Recipes for Every Season

Even when you're broke, you can live a full, fun, compassionate life.

Are you plant-based, penniless, and keen on making things yourself? This cookbook and DIY compendium of vegan living starts with a focus on spring and summer, offering hot-weather tips and treats like recipes for popsicles, sorbet, and tofu burgers; budget vegan travel tips; craft ideas; yard sale delights; and guidance on environmentally friendly housecleaning. The second half of the book is focused on harvest and holiday, offering cozy activities and recipes for cool-weather treats like pumpkin bread, cookies, hot cocoa, and more. You'll find egg alternatives for baking, vegan survival tips for family occasions like Christmas, and Valentine's Day gift ideas and guidance for doing it yourself and avoiding commercial holidays altogether. Save cash and learn new skills while staying socially and environmentally conscious all year round.

Cook Your Own Fucking Life: Vegan Comfort Food Recipes to Feed Yourself and Build Community

For scrappy, can-do vegans on a budget, this essential cookbook eschews fancy ingredients and gets back to basics. It's packed with attitude and recipes anyone can cook and eat, including comfort food, healthy smoothies, holiday staples to feed your family, and dirty rice to feed the touring band sleeping on your floor.

More than just a collection of recipes, this is a DIY cultural icon. The book makes author Ashley Rowe Palafox’s long-out-of-print Barefoot and in the Kitchen zine accessible again, with spirited annotations and updated resources, so you can find plant-based, cruelty-free inspiration you need without needing to hunt through your co-op's crusty cookbook collection. Because plant-based broke folks deserve good eats, too!

Is There a Cult for That?: Facts and Activities for Fanatical Fun

As this ride called life starts to feel more like a perilously rickety rollercoaster, people are seeking any kind of stability they can grab onto, and—whoops!—suddenly they're in a cult. In this tongue-in-cheek yet refreshingly generous dive into the contemporary cult craze, Mary Beth Chapman explores what defines a cult and why Americans (and the media) are so fascinated with them. Rather than focus on the foolishness of cult members, Chapman explores the contributing factors like capitalism, isolation, and overwhelm that lead people to seek firmer spiritual footing in the first place. Served up with humor, self-awareness, and fun charts, the book also includes tips for starting your own cult, including how to choose your idol and how to hire the just the right charismatic cult leader, plus activities like word salad mad libs, red flag bingo, and your very own cult leader paper dolls. Perfect for cult questioners, kool-aid critics, and zealots for fun facts, the quest for the one true path just got a fresh dose of snarky good times.

Magickal Cats Tarot Coloring Book

Wise feline friends to color

Pouncing, prowling, and purring, stretching, sneering, and sunning, the wise felines of the Magickal Cats Tarot are presented here in patterned, colorable line art! They’ve experienced nine times as many lives as humans ever will, and their range of emotions and expressions entices you to coloring bliss. 

Drawn in aesthetic, charismatic poses, each of these cats has their own meditative point of view. When you're done stalking dark alleys for adventure, curl up by the fire with a cup of herbal tea and your colored pencils and get to know these wise, archetypal furry friends.

From Solo to Supported: A Writer's Guide to Finding Community

Our culture treats the artist toiling in solitude like a romantic idea, but that’s rarely how it happens in the real world. Writing doesn’t have to be isolating—art flourishes in community. If you know where to look, there’s a whole world of writers out there, waiting to connect. Jessie Kwak, author of From Chaos to Creativity, returns with a guide on networking and building your community, with clear and easy to follow advice. Learn how to form your own “writing constellation,” how to create an elevator pitch, tips on reaching out (without being a creep), and how to navigate things like events, classes, workshops, and more. A great read for writers new and old to shift their mindset away from the solo grind to enthusiastic collaboration and building an open, welcoming support network.

The Pittsburgh Tarot: A Gilded Age Deck

An Oracular Tour of the Steel City

Iron and stained glass, brick and stone, clouds and rain—Pittsburgh is arguably America’s most gothic city. Permeated with an old-world sensibility, this once perennially dark and smoggy metropolis that built its wealth through coke and steel is moody, atmospheric, melancholic, and beautiful.

Eschewing contemporary stereotypes that reduce the city to football or sandwiches with fries on them, The Pittsburgh Tarot expresses the complicated and conflicted period of the city’s greatest expansion and influence during the 19th century. This is the same era that inspired the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot illustrations, and each of the cards in this deck pays homage to those original designs. The Major Arcana features significant historical figures, while the Minor Arcana is divided into suits of Neighborhoods, Rivers, Nature, and Industry.

The Pittsburgh Tarot features people, events, and themes from the 19th century and through La Belle Epoque, with a special focus on the Gilded Age, the city’s period of greatest significance. With an aesthetic style that calls to mind the work of artist Edward Gorey, this is a beautiful and unique expression of a city that’s as much sentiment and disposition as it is location.

The HeART Tarot: Things The Mind Can't Explain

The heart knows what the mind can't explain.

Follow your heart's wisdom with these artfully crafted and drop-dead-gorgeous tarot cards. This unique deck features beautiful, original illustrations incorporating the shape of the human heart and elements of the natural world into each tarot archetype. Rendered in a striking block print style, with rich textures and a black and red color palette, the powerful imagery of these cards will call forth your heart's true interpretations. For readings, divination, inspiration, or as part of a creative practice, use this deck to feel into the answers you seek, with your heart as your wise guide.

Your Final Days: Conversations for Meaningful End-of-Life Planning

Plan ahead with your loved ones

How do you want to live your life? How do you want to be remembered?

We can't know the hour of our death, but we can plan for it—and benefit ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities by doing so. This gentle, collaborative game, crafted by Jennifer Kumer, creator of Cards for Couples, provides a safe container for exploring end-of-life scenarios with family, friends, and kind strangers.

There are no winners and losers—instead, the cards offer each player a deep, structured opportunity to consider topics ranging from end-of-life care to funeral arrangements to how they wish to be remembered. Players will lay out a personalized plan to enact over the course of the next year. You're never too young or old to reflect on what is important to you, and have meaningful conversations about life, love, and legacy with those close to you. 

Magickal Cats Tarot

Your wise feline guides

Meet the wise felines of the Magickal Cats Tarot! They’ve experienced nine times as many lives as humans ever will, and they’re here to guide you through happiness, heartbreak, and whatever else life has in store! 

Drawn in charismatic aesthetic poses, each of these 78 cats has their own character and advice. Prowl with them through the major and minor arcana, then curl up in a sunbeam and contemplate the most profound questions of your life. 

Mysterious and enigmatic yet also charming and sensitive, these cats offer the philosophical outlook you need to divine the future, develop your intuition, and find new perspectives on all of life's questions.

What Rides at Night: Queer, Feminist, Fantastical Bicycle Halloween Stories

When the veil thins, the bicycle revolution rises. Thirteen new, original, spooky stories for the thirteenth volume in the series! 

Gather ‘round, ghoulfriends, and peer into this enchanting collection of ghost stories, tall tales, and feminist fictions simmering with cyclist power. This monster mashup of thirteen queer and quirky stories grants us a glimpse into the world beyond this one, where community, creativity, and bike culture reign—a world where DIY zombies start a monster zine collective to fight their oppression by “normals,” time moves backwards as bones are covered again with flesh, cryptids defend fellow outcasts from bullying, and teen crushes take an otherwordly (though not unwelcome!) turn. Whether shared with your feminist book club, passed around the Halloween house show, or read alone on a dark and stormy night, each story is a spell, reanimating the land of the living with more fun, imagination, and bike rides.

Featuring original stories from Elly Bangs, Jessie Kwak, Nell Hanson, Mildred Locke, Kortney Nash, Dawn Vogel, N. Anaar, Erin Cullen, Grace Desmarais, Kay Hanifen, Siri Caldwell, Summer Jewel Keown, and Valerie Hunter.

2026 Slingshot Organizers

Any activist's necessity for over 30 years, the Slingshot organizer is a day planner that fits your radical life. Every page has unique illustration, and important dates, birthdays, and events in radical history are marked. 

More than just a calendar and date book, the Slingshot includes space to write your phone numbers, a contact list of radical leftist groups around the globe, a menstrual calendar, info on police repression, and extra note pages to record all your important revolutionary ideas. It also lists popular activist and alternative cultural holidays. As if that weren't enough, it also teaches you key phrases in multiple languages; phrases such as "freedom and mutual aid" and "where is the library?" 

Get 'em here.

Hot Pants: Do-It-Yourself Gynecology and Herbal Remedies

Hot Pants, long an underground classic, offers great basic sexual health information along with tried and true herbal treatments for common gynecological problems. “Patriarchy sucks,” the authors begin. “It’s robbed us of our autonomy and much of our history. We believe it’s integral for women to be aware and in control of our own bodies.” In that spirit, diagrams and herbal remedies teach you how to diagnose and heal many basic problems, including bladder infections, inducing your period, easing cramps and PMS, aphrodisiacs, and dealing with pregnancy. You’ll learn herbal remedies to ease every stage of your menstrual cycle. This book deserves a place next to your copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Microcosm Teams Up with We Are Stronger Than Censorship Campaign

Portland, OR— Microcosm Publishing has entered a worldwide publishing agreement for the We Are Stronger Than Censorship campaign’s merchandise. 

Founded in 2024 by the nonprofit Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and EveryLibrary Institute, We Are Stronger Than Censorship works to share inclusive books with readers in communities across the U.S., especially those impacted by efforts to restrict titles featuring Black, Queer, and other under-represented characters and themes. Microcosm will serve as distributor for the organization’s new sideline collection of stickers.

“This is a big deal, and one we’re proud to be part of,” says Microcosm founder and CEO, Joe Biel. “We Are Stronger Than Censorship won an award for innovation because they fundraised to put censored books into the hands of readers. They are ablaze with buzz and we expect stores will be excited to get behind their efforts, too.”

With each individual book “challenge”—i.e. with each ban attempt—We Are Stronger Than Censorship buys and donates two books to offset it. The campaign will purchase and donate two books to communities in need for every sixteen stickers sold through Microcosm.

Lee Wind, co-creator of We Are Stronger Than Censorship and Chief Content Officer of IBPA, explains, “The idea is to make the numbers work against the folks who are so eager to limit others’ freedom to read. Some people are challenging over 400 books at a time! If they knew that meant this program would buy and distribute over 800 books, maybe they would slow their roll. For us, this campaign is like pulling an emergency brake on a runaway censorship train.”

Since its founding, We Are Stronger Than Censorship has gained more than 75 institutional partners, including Microcosm, allowing the campaign to purchase and donate 2,800 books to offset 1,400 book challenges.

Microcosm’s sales director, Leslie Davisson, notes “This campaign pairs especially well with our upcoming re-release of Know Your Rights: Protect Yourself and Your Community from Police, ICE, the FBI, and the Justice System. We want to equip our customers and their communities with resources they need to make positive change, big and small.” 

Wind adds, “I'm thrilled about our stickers being available through Microcosm. This is how we're going to scale this thing: selling a lot of stickers, spreading the word, and coming together as a community that believes in the freedom to read.”

We Are Stronger Than Censorship items are now available for retailers and direct customers to order through Microcosm’s site and Edelweiss.

Contact: Daley Farr, daley@microcosmpublishing.com

Elly was interviewed by The Creative Independent!

Elly had a chance to sit down with one of our friends at Kickstarter, Oriana, and be interviewed for their blog, The Creative Independent.

They talked about Microcosm's background as a publisher, how we got into using Kickstarter, balancing work and life, and more.

Here's an excerpt. You can read the full interview at this link!

Between Microcosm, Working Lit, the podcast, your own writing and editing, and presumably a smidge of life outside of publishing, you do so much. Can we start by talking about how you make time for it all?

A few years ago I went down this rabbit hole of reading interviews with women about how they make time for it all. And all these highly successful women (with the exception of Marie Kondo, who refuses to be rushed)—all of them were just frantic. One of them literally said she would microwave everything for 2 minutes and 22 seconds, or 3 minutes and 33 seconds, so she could save time by not having to press multiple buttons. So anyway, I’ve dedicated myself to never living that way.

My strategy used to be what many busy people do: they just pile on more things until you have no flexibility, so your time winds up managing itself. That was me for a while: I was just saying yes to everything. And I did get a lot done! But then I would just crash and burn. I refuse to live that way any longer. My philosophy now is about focusing on priorities rather than deadlines. If something does have a hard deadline, I will try to make that, but I’m never going to be doing it, I hope, the night before in a panic. There’s no worse feeling to me than that kind of pressure. Instead I’m like, What are the most important things that I need to do? I’m going to do those first, deadlines be darned.

Do you include self-care, or some time for protecting your creative heart in there, or not so much?

I do try to do that. I succeed sometimes. I mean, I do protect my time off work very fiercely. I prioritize that over everything else because I’ve burnt out so many times. But as far as my own creative work, that can very easily fall to the bottom of the pile if I’m not careful.

It seems like everything about your life, your creative practice, and your career have been geared toward leading a nontraditional life. How did you figure out how to create those paths outside of established systems?

I’m not sure that’s something I’ve ever done intentionally. Those established systems just never seemed available to me. I was a weird kid. I dropped out of high school, and I’ve kind of continued to say no thank you to systems that don’t seem like they have a purpose or have my best interests or goals at heart. Me and my partner Joe Biel, who founded Microcosm—we’re both business and life partners—we’re on the same page about this. We look at things that we see most people doing and we’re like, Would that work for us? Sometimes really traditional things do work for us—owning a house seems kind of magical to be able to do. But other things, like getting married or having kids or owning a car… for us, what’s the point? Other people might find great joy in all these things, but we don’t.

Check out the full profile here.
And you can find our current Kickstarter project, The Underground is Bigger than the Mainstream, here!

Our Portland Warehouse is Open by Appointment for In-Person Shopping!

Yep, that's right, if you're in Portland, you can come shop in person at our Portland bookstore (located at our warehouse), by appointment! Our staffed hours are 11am-3pm Mon-Saturday.

Here are the details:

If you're shopping for items for yourself

• To help with juggling our workers' busy schedules, we're asking shoppers to purchase a digital gift card for $50 or more in order to make a shopping appointment. The gift card will be applied to your in-store purchase. Leave an order note that says "I want to make an appointment to browse at the store," when you check out. (If you forget to leave a note after purchase, email orders@microcosmpublishing.com with your order ID and someone will be in touch!)

If you're shopping for items to resell in your own store

• Email our sales department at sales@microcosmpublishing.com or call us at 360-291-7226 and we'll figure out a time for you to come by.

Face masks are required for everyone entering our building!

If you have any questions, please email orders@microcosmpublishing.com, and someone from our customer service team will help!

See you soon!
<3 Microcosm

We're in this together.

Hi friends. We’re not big on making statements—we hope our work speaks for us most of the time—but these are extra-troubling times and we were inspired by Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC to share what we’re doing to meet this moment.

There’s this idea of “locus of control” that we think about a lot at times like this when the static is overwhelming and it’s easy to feel helpless. It’s a great way of cutting through the overwhelming static so you can focus on what you actually can do. 

Maybe your locus of control is very small and encompasses only the freedom of your thoughts. Maybe you can set priorities for your personal spending or a project you manage, maybe you have an online platform, or maybe you have an artistic outlet or are good at writing letters or making a compelling argument. There are always going to be more things outside your locus, like you can’t control what others think or do (and honestly that’s probably a good thing). But we bet most of you have a lot more influence than you think.  

One of the most important factors that increases the impact of acting from your locus of control is Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism,” the idea that you can change your situation through concerted effort, focus, and perspective. You can find this idea in a few of Dr. Faith’s books, and she and Joe wrote about it extensively in How to Be Accountable. 

What's in our locus of control as a company? How do we stay optimistic? That’s a moving target, but here’s what we’ve got so far:

• Sharing our existing resources. In other words: getting you the books you need more than ever. Since the beginning, we’ve created work by and for those of us living closer to the margins than the center. We’re prepared with resources for survival, action, and care in a national crisis because crisis isn’t new to us. 
• Adding new resources. We are actively adding new titles to our catalog that provide support to those most harmed. Books and decks take a couple years or longer but we’ve been putting out a flurry of zines since November and acquiring more all the time. Let us know if you have requests. Or submit your own idea and we’ll see if it’s a fit.
• Shoring up our policies and procedures. We’ve recently improved a bunch of existing policy and procedures around privacy and security, and refreshed our team on it.
  • To protect our team: We already had a policy that was basically “don’t call the cops or let them into the building unless extreme violence is occuring.” We added more specifics about what to do if, say, ICE knocks on the door (don’t let them in or talk to them) and made sure our workers know what to do. 
  • To protect our customers and community: We won’t share your private data with anyone, ever. We’ve added some more layers of security, and we added a bit about online safety to our FAQ in response to reader questions. We are continually improving our data security practices. 

• Offering sliding scale prices on our published books.We’ve done this for a long time and everyone wins—if you can afford less, you can pay less, if you can afford more, you can pay more. 
• Sending books to people in prison. We have a mutual aid program to send books to imprisoned readers whenever they ask, which is nearly every day. The community chips in to help with the cost of the books so the authors can still get royalties. Based on the mail we get, this is changing lives.  
• Donating books to causes we care about. Requests for donated books have skyrocketed this year. Instead of pulping our overstock, we donate as much of it as we can. If your organization can use books as leverage for doing better work, hit us up on our contact page.
• Being in community. It’s sometimes harder to figure out how to do this as a business. We’re not tiny, but we’re not big enough to make a huge splash. We do some “I’m a local business owner and I care about this issue” advocacy stuff, which doesn’t usually feel very impactful. Our Portland office is at a bus stop, and one of our team members has stepped up to pick up trash every day and maintain the trash can there. We host a Futel public phone and just added a free bookshelf.
• Not being butts. We recognize that everyone’s feeling jagged and having a tough time. Us too! This is one of the harder ones, but we are trying extra to be kind and patient even in the most frustrating interactions or when we have to say no to something someone really wants. Is “trying not to ruin anyone’s day” a worthy entry into our locus of control list? We think so. 
• Always getting better at what we do. This is a choice we make every day. Being able to do the things on this list is what gets us up every morning. Publishing and distributing more books and zines that people want, selling more of them, reducing our costs, improving our systems and efficiency, improving morale, increasing our wages… being better at the business part isn’t the goal in itself, but it’s a force multiplier for the good we’re trying to do.  

A lot of the items on this list are things we’ve been doing for years. That’s not a brag: it comes out of necessity. Many of our readers and team members are certainly in more danger than before from recent and upcoming executive actions, but, unfortunately, none of these threats are entirely new.  

As our friends at Chickasaw Press said of our common ground when we started working together, “We are the voices that are being muffled.” But that is also our greatest strength, because when times get tough, we’re prepared. For better or worse, the margins are our comfort zone.

So we’re sorry to say that we’re as ready as we can be. None of us can stop the tide alone, but we can stand together against it.

Want to boost these actions? You probably have a long to-do list of your own, but if you’re struggling to find a path forward, here are a few ways to get started:

• Buy books! Read zines! If you’re getting ones by us, the best ways to support us are to get them either directly from us, from your local independent bookstore, at Bookshop.org, or check them out from the library. 
• Want to help distribute our poster catalogs to your local coffeeshops and other community flyer spots? Drop us a line.
• Send a care package to a friend who’s having a hard time.
• If you know someone who’s really struggling, talk to them about it! Talking about what’s wrong saves lives. Here’s a handy resource shared by our author Sascha Altman DuBrul.
• Pitch in to help send our books to people in prison.
• Make a list of actions in your own locus of control. Feel free to share with us if you’d like, we love to see this stuff!

Thanks for being in this with us. 

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 listed. Want us to table at your event? Reach out to daley (at) microcosmpublishing.com!

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.

Interested in having an author at your store or event? Reach out!!

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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Microcosm now on PubStock

Direct ordering for bookstores just got even easier

Hey, this is a fun little piece of news, but it's going to be most useful and interesting to our industry pals and bookselling buddies, so feel free to keep scrolling if that doesn't feel like it applies to you! The good news for everyone, though, is that this should make it even easier to find Microcosm titles on your local bookstore's shelves—and easier to order them if you don't see what you're looking for. Thanks to everyone on both sides of the bookstore counter keeping this radical publisher afloat in wild times!

In our continuing mission to shore up the independent book world ecosystem, Microcosm Publishing's in-house and distributed titles are now available on PubStock! PubStock is a Bookmanager tool that allows U.S. bookstores to get a live look at our available inventory—bookstores that use Bookmanager for their website/inventory/point of sale can now browse and purchase Microcosm titles with even greater ease, without having to look through our site and without running into availability issues. Our stock counts are updated daily, so our indie bookselling friends get a clearer picture than ever of what titles we have available, and how many.

Even better for the folks linked up with Batch, since we're there, too! Ordering, receiving, and record-keeping just got way easier, building Microcosm's inventory into the tools booksellers have at hand.

Love you, indie bookstores. Thanks for keeping it real! And as always, we'd love to hear from you about what we can do better to keep us all working, organizing, and thriving together.

Microcosm Declares 2025 the Year of Zines

The DIY information technology helping us build a better world

In an era of book bans, people are still finding ways to read, write, and share freely. One result we’ve noticed: a groundswell of zines. That’s why we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines.

What’s a zine? It’s a stapled, photocopied love letter to a passionate interest. People write zines about whatever they need to: to tell their story uncensored, to express themselves fearlessly in words and art, to share knowledge or resources, to celebrate something they care about deeply, to connect directly with readers. Zines can take many forms, from a handwritten manifesto distributed out of a fanny pack to a polished product sold in stores. 

We have published and sold zines since 1996, and we’ve seen many waves of interest come and go. But we haven’t seen anything like the surge of zine sales that began on November 9, 2024. Sure, there was a two-week run on reproductive rights resources, books like How to Get Your Period and zines like Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom pushing aside all other holiday bestsellers (even Slingshot Planners!) on their way to the top of the charts. But that urgency quickly died down, revealing an even stickier trend on our orders page—people were, and still are, loading up with assorted, seemingly random zines, on every topic, from every era. Zines about bees, government misdeeds, backyard building projects, mental health, abortion, abortion, abortion. Zines and books about how to make zines.

What’s behind this hunger for zines? To us, it’s not that hard to see. We are all desperate to expand our understanding, to think freely, to feel safe connections with others and with our own thoughts, to learn the skills we need to survive this era. Online media, especially social media, is compromised. Books can be slow to come out, ponderous to read, relentlessly gatekept, banned up the wazoo. Zines are none of these. They’re a fix that satisfies the urgent need for pithy commentary, bigger perspective, getting a look inside someone else’s head without needing to have your own perfectly-formed and fully-informed opinion. They provide a small, safe bubble with no mandate for response. A zine is a safe place to not know, to be wrong, to change your mind, and to entertain other perspectives.

Zines can be banned, but they’re too slippery to be stopped, too slight to be taken seriously, some too underground to even be found. They are decentralized, passed hand-to-hand, and there are no gatekeepers to corrupt or bottlenecks to plug. 

And the best thing about zines is that you can create one! You can publish it yourself, all you need is something to say and access to a printer or copier. You can give copies to your friends, leave them in the public library or at Little Free Libraries, mail them to the creators who made you fall in love with zines in the first place. This is far from the expensive corporate allure of self-publishing a book-shaped object to remain forever hidden in the algorithm. Zines are a form of energy that can’t be contained by anyone, even us, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

So we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines, and this is what it means: read zines. Seek them out. We have a ton in our catalog, and we sell them to more and more stores. You can find a plethora of printed zines on Etsy and digital ones on itch.io. More and more cities and towns are hosting their own zine fests. You’ll find them hiding out in craft fair booths, in a bin at the library. Search for zines + your area of passionate interest. Once you start looking, you’ll see them everywhere. (And if you have a store, check out our zine about selling zines!). 

And when you aren’t finding the exact zine you want, well, you know what to do. How do you think we got started making them? 

If you'd like to submit a zine or an idea for one to Microcosm, you can read a little more about our guidelines and process here. Happy creating!

Thornapple Press to be distributed by Microcosm Publishing

Meet our latest distributed publisher

Starting April 1, 2025, Microcosm Publishing will become the new worldwide distributor (excluding Canada) for Thornapple Press, a Canadian publisher specializing in thoughtful titles about love, sexuality, and relational ethics with integrity. Publisher Eve Rickert founded Thornapple as the successor to Thorntree Press, publisher of popular and award-winning polyamory- and relationship-based books such as Polysecure, More Than Two, and Love’s Not Color Blind.

Microcosm founder and CEO, Joe Biel, says of the new agreement, "I've found Thornapple to have an excellent point of view, good publication packaging and design, and thoughtful ideas throughout their existence, so when they approached us to become their distributor, the answer was obvious. Independent presses are stronger together and it's clear that this tide lifts all boats." 

Rickert adds, "The new arrangement offers a lot of benefits for Thornapple, our books and our authors. Microcosm has a large sales staff throughout the USA, with excellent reach into specialty shops, such as sex shops, that are well-suited for our books. Microcosm is also closely aligned with Thornapple in terms of both brand identity and company culture."

Microcosm will distribute Thornapple’s full backlist as well as all forthcoming titles, such as Transforming the Shame Triangle: From Shame to Love Using Parts Work by bestselling authors Jessica Fern and David Cooley, scheduled for release in 2025. While Microcosm has always sold Thornapple Press’s catalog, Thornapple titles will be exclusive through Microcosm starting in April 2025.

Excited? Us too! Exclusive distro rights begin in the new year, but you can still browse the Thornapple titles currently available on our site, with more to come!

Call for Submissions for Neurodiversity zine series

Farewell to Joyce Brabner: Microcosm remembers a beloved author and mentor

Microcosm Publishing founder Joe Biel recently shared a remembrance of close friend, mentor, respected comic artist and writer, and Cleveland publishing legend Joyce Brabner, who died August 2, 2024 after a long fight with cancer. She was 72 years old. 

Though Brabner is perhaps best known through her marriage to comics pioneer and American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar, she was herself an esteemed artist, activist, and writer, publishing numerous books of her own alongside collaborations with other graphic publishing luminaries such as Alan Moore, Denny O’Neil, and Stephen R. Bissette.

Brabner’s final published book was The Courage Party: Helping Our Resilient Children Understand and Survive Sexual Assault, a project of great importance to her which Microcosm published in 2020 at the very beginning of the COVID crisis. This groundbreaking YA comic book tells the story of a child who fights off a sexual attack (she prefers to be called a “crime fighter” over “survivor”) and the support she receives from her community, including an empowering “courage party” thrown for her by older women with their own stories to share. The book contains thorough and age-appropriate insights on how to navigate interactions with police, the legal system, support groups, and how to deal with teasing and inappropriate behavior from peers; it also offers extensive resources both for children and adults.

Detailed obituaries for Brabner have appeared in Cleveland Scene and Cleveland 13 News. Microcosm mourns the loss of Joyce Brabner as a friend, a Cleveland fixture, a fierce activist, and a publishing visionary.

Microcosm expands Cleveland warehousing operation

Microcosm Publishing has purchased the building adjacent to their Cleveland, OH warehouse, where construction is currently underway to connect the two buildings. This major project will double Microcosm’s warehousing capacity, as well as create an additional sales capacity of $5 million per year to serve the needs of Microcosm’s vertically-integrated publishing and distribution operation, which earned their recognition in 2022, 2023, and 2024 as a Publishers Weekly Fastest Growing Publisher.

Microcosm develops agile new systems for publishing and distribution programs

Microcosm Publishing has developed new internal buying, sales, and marketing systems for their publishing and distribution catalogs, tailoring their efforts across all departments to work more flexibly, efficiently, and more responsively to reader taste and customer demand.

With an eye toward seasonality as well as prioritizing curiosity and steady growth over quick trends, Microcosm’s new strategy will allow the press’s operations to focus on and more keenly track its strengths, such as titles on nature, the outdoors, and survival; mental health and neurodiversity; witchcraft, astrology, and metaphysics; mushrooms, gardening, wild foods, and more. Microcosm founder, publisher, and CEO Joe Biel explains, “We're adjusting our strategy to focus on subjects by month; essentially, we are treating all months like holidays to synchronize our sales, marketing, and purchasing departments, so the offerings are streamlined. This will allow us to accentuate the strength of our thematics and create a throughline from marketing to sales, and to manage the over 10,000 stores we added as customers over the past four years.”

Says Microcosm co-owner and vice president Elly Blue, “We've set aside publishing's cynical tendencies to chase bestsellers or churn out large quantities of dreck. Instead we're staying true to our values while serving the diverse needs and interests of our readers. We spent the past year running the numbers on what subject matter our customers want so we can give them more of that and evolve along with their interests, while building up our stable foundation to support our workers and mission. Want to go mushroom foraging by bicycle and then prepare a vegan feast? Start a co-operative coven consultancy? Get high, get sober, or get help turning your trauma into wisdom? We've got you."