How do you handle negative book reviews? Should you even handle them? What kinds of criticism do you engage with, and what’s the best way to go about it? Jane Friedman of The Hot Sheet to chat with Joe and Elly about the pros and cons of critical feedback.
Over at WorkingLit, Microcosm’s cloud-based accounting and inventory management software for publishers, we’ve made a new addition to the team! Meet Sara.
Sara Balabanlilar has been a bookseller, event organizer, undercover gallerist, and co-founder of queer sci-fi bookshop Paraspace Books. Before she came on board with WorkingLit, she was the Marketing & Sales Director at Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive.
What inspired you to take this job? During the time I’ve spent in the bookselling and publishing industry, the “numbers” side has interested me greatly (my favorite part of sales conferences has always been the presentation on market trends—I know, I know). While I entered the book industry through creative event organizing and marketing, I’m a steadfast systems person. I love finding/learning systems that work, integrating them, and helping everyone else with the details. WorkingLit is investing in back-end/operations expertise, while providing a book worker-led disruption to the HUGE industries that want to rule our creative worlds. And to many hardworking publishers, the numbers side gets complicated fast. I hope to be a part of the solution. Let WorkingLit do the math.
What should publishers reach out to you about? You can contact me about marketing and sales, alongside any app support you need, from help with onboarding to day-to-day tech support. As a person with bookstore and publishing experience, I can help translate your requests to the folks working on the technical side – and answer your questions in ways that make sense to the publishing world. I’ll be your go-between as our team makes changes on the back end and introduces new features.
Got a question or request? Hit me up. No issue is too wacky. If you’re thinking about it, someone else probably is too. Let’s make WorkingLit work for us, together.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you were starting out in publishing? I’m going to go even further back. In my first bookstore job, my boss sat me down with an end-of-year P&L report and we went through each line item. I remembered many of the individual sales that went into that concise document, but didn’t know how to connect those small dollar amounts with the huge (hm… modestly-sized) year-long Profits and Losses document I was seeing. I thought of the data analysis as an occasional opportunity to peek behind a heavy curtain, which would remain closed until the end of next year’s Q4. Oooh, mysterious.
Y’all. There doesn’t have to be a curtain! We don’t have to mutter incantations to see which books are doing well, which are missing out on potential growth, and which need an extra marketing push. With the right tools, it’s all good 8). Additionally, I wish I could tell my ten-years-ago self, perky event coordinator and sci fi nerd that I was, how much I’d grow to enjoy the analysis and bookkeeping side of things anyway.
What’s your superhero origin story? Gosh, what’s the origin of any reader… I was a lonely kid who traveled a lot and always had a shelf or suitcase of books for company. That about sums it up! Plus, what’s a superhero without a little mystery around their origin story
The real superheroes were the books and the people who made them, honestly.
Can we meet your cats? I was hoping you’d ask. Meet Nickea, my queen, my familiar, my #1. And Pico, oobleck panther.
Want to learn more about WorkingLit or just welcome Sara to the team? Reach out to her at sara(at)workinglit.com!
A few days ago in a meeting, Elly went on a lovely little tangent about one of her favorite titles from the last few years. Here’s what she had to say:
Let me tell you why Unfuck Your Anger is my favorite Dr. Faith book. It’s not about getting rid of your anger, it’s about understanding it so you can use it to change your life and the world for the better. After reading it, I felt like, instead of walking around like a time bomb, I understood better how to channel that energy into action. It’s got an original framework Faith came up with for forgiveness (the seven Rs!) that’s worth the price of the book in its own right. You might look at it and think “I don’t want to lose my anger, my anger is justified” — and that’s exactly what this book is about! We should be angry, and if we use that skillfully it’ll be an unstoppable force of nature.
Want to check it out for yourself? Get the workbook here, and the original book here.
You likely pass all kinds of plants and herbs in your day to day. But do you know who they are? Where they come from? Maggie Herskovitz can help! Her new book, “An Urban Field Guide to the Plants, Trees, and Herbs in Your Path” recently released, and this week on the pod she joins Joe and Elly to talk about the book’s story, cover design, and how she got into plant identification.
Bugs are everywhere! Humans often think of insects as gross or creepy, but we couldn’t survive without them. In this love letter to bugs, biologist, linguist, and bug enthusiast Karyn Light-Gibson introduces us to an array of our notable neighbors, from bees to bedbugs, caterpillars to butterflies, ladybugs to katydids, and so, so many more. With informative glee and striking illustrations, she identifies the many bugs we encounter every day and delves into their place in science, history, art, literature, culture, cuisine, and even warfare. You’ll learn so many cool facts about flies, beetles, moths, aphids, cicadas, bedbugs, crickets, cockroaches, and the other creeping, crawling, and flying critters that make our world go round. For every human, there are 1.4 billion insects in the world, playing a vital part of our ecosystem. A small percentage of bugs can be dangerous or spread disease, but the vast majority are our allies as indicators of environmental health, pollinators of our food, and a key part of the food web we rely on. Even the most wary readers will come away with a new perspective on the tiny creatures around them and a serious appreciation of just how important—and cool—bugs are.
How do you raise your kids to be functional adults with big hearts, especially in the current timeline?
This week on the podcast, Bonnie Scott and Dr. Faith, authors of Unf*ck Your Parenting, join Joe and Elly to talk about the book’s journey and what’s new, respecting your kid, book bans, and more.
The area in front of our PDX base, complete with bus stop, phone booth, and free books.
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 scaleprices 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.
Bugs are everywhere! Humans often think of insects as gross or creepy, but we couldn’t survive without them.
In this love letter to bugs, biologist, linguist, and bug enthusiast Karyn Light-Gibson introduces us to an array of our notable neighbors, from bees to bedbugs, caterpillars to butterflies, ladybugs to katydids, and so, so many more. With informative glee and striking illustrations, she identifies the many bugs we encounter every day and delves into their place in science, history, art, literature, culture, cuisine, and even warfare.
You’ll learn so many cool facts about flies, beetles, moths, aphids, cicadas, bedbugs, crickets, cockroaches, and the other creeping, crawling, and flying critters that make our world go round. For every human, there are 1.4 billion insects in the world, playing a vital part of our ecosystem. A small percentage of bugs can be dangerous or spread disease, but the vast majority are our allies as indicators of environmental health, pollinators of our food, and a key part of the food web we rely on. Even the most wary readers will come away with a new perspective on the tiny creatures around them and a serious appreciation of just how important—and cool—bugs are.
This week on the pod, Elly, Joe, and Bernie are joined by Jelani Memory of A Kids Co, which recently became an imprint of DK. They talk about taking making your press an imprint of a larger publisher instead of just having it distributed, sticking to your mission during the process, and making your business like a cockroach (unkillable!).
New York Book Launch Party! March 22, 2025 | 5:00–7:00 p.m. | The Old Stone House—Brooklyn, NY Featuring food and drinks, plant coloring pages for kids, make your own herbal tea blend, and more!
Teresa Bergen is offering a super cool AirBnb experience for nondrinkers and sober-curious folks in the Portland area:
Trek up an urban volcano with a sober travel specialist April 2, April 9, and April 16 | 9:00–11:30 a.m. | Portland, OR $50/person | More info Get your heart rate up with fellow nondrinkers and sober-curious folks on this 2.5-hour guided trek up Mount Tabor, Portland’s magnificent (extinct) volcano. Relax and enjoy a non-alcoholic drink at the summit, and connect with other sober adventurers with a love of the outdoors. All participants will receive their own copy of Sober Travel Handbook!
Zine Release with Des Demonas / Dot Dash / Applied Knowledge April 12, 2025 | Doors 7:30 p.m. | Music 8:00 p.m. | PhilaMOCA—Philadelphia, PA General admission: $15 | General admission + zine: $25
Interested in having an author at your store or event? Reach out!!
Microcosm at Roller Con 2023
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!!
