Holy cats! It’s a whole new look for the Microcosm website—and some exciting new features. We’ve been honing our software behind-the-scenes for decades, but this is our first public-facing website makeover since 2012! 

For 30 years, we’ve had a riotously maximalist ecommerce website. And it’s worked—pretty well. But lately, you’ve been telling us what you want it to do better and we’ve been scribbling notes and making plans. 

Our new features primarily fall into two categories: discoverability and ease. Read on for an overview of what’s changed … and how to use it.

Or watch this video…

Discoverability and Personalized Recs

You wanted to see more of what you wanted—and fewer things you would never buy. 

We pride ourselves on our curation across a broad range of topics. And we know that not all those topics are what everyone is looking for. Especially since we’ve spent the years since 2020 adding thousands and thousands of titles to our “curated website.” It’s easy to get lost in there.

Our new features help you find what you’re looking for, plus the hidden gems you didn’t know you needed.

Maybe you run a lefty home and garden shop and want to know what’s selling well for gardening season, plus some activist zines to put by your register…  but you don’t want to have to wade through a page of anarchist history and 90s punk retrospectives before you find what you need. But who are you kidding, you probably want those too! Oh, no? Okay.

Or maybe you want to buy every new issue of Cometbus and Fluke as it comes out. You don’t particularly need to see a bunch of pagan guides, children’s books, or political rhetoric—but would love to take a gander at the music scene histories that just came back into stock, and maybe queer pride stickers and patches for your newly out nibling.

Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got you. 

To get personalized recommendations: 

• Click on the “Help me find cool stuff” button on the right side of the front page at microcosm.pub and tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re looking for. 
• Create an account and save those preferences so that every time you come back, you’ll see what’s new and recommended for you, both within and near your categories. 
• Want to see even more? Use the search bar at the top and refine your results with filters.

We use math and relational databases to personalize these recs—never AI, ew. And we will never share your preferences with another company. Or load up your browser with marketing cookies. Or creepily bombard you with ads for whatever you were recently discussing with a friend with your phone turned off. 

Ease of Ordering for Stores

More and more stores are carrying books. And more and more of them are trying to get away from ordering on platforms owned by billionaires. So we’ve been hearing more and more of a question that we’re sorry you’ve had to ask: “how do I place a wholesale order?” 

Our new How to Order page is easy to find, in the top nav bar. All of our discounts and terms are spelled out with loving clarity. If you’re ever left wondering, please drop us a line and we’ll clarify for you (and probably also update our language so it’s clear to everyone).

Plus . . . stores can now order thousands more titles on our website. Our full stock in our larger Cleveland warehouse is now easily available to resellers (and soon will be to regular folks buying for themselves). 

Resellers, you can now put anything you want in one cart, and we’ll split off backorders after you check out. Add a cancel date to your order and we’ll be delighted to honor it. 

Bookstore buyers, check out our Catalogs for frontlist and forthcoming seasons. (We are making even more improvements just for you, dear booksellers, in our 2.0 release.)

More nerdy Microcosm lore

We were early adopters of Web 1.0 and had one of the first ecommerce websites. We were also one of the first (and still very few) publishers to offer online ordering for bookstores and other resellers. This experience has made us, counterintuitively, want to be extremely deliberate about changing our website—we know too well the stakes of getting it right. 

Our mission is forever to get life-saving, world-changing tools into readers’ hands. Our website has always been one of our key ways of doing that. This redesign has been a multi-layered labor of love two years in the making. We hope you love it too—and that you send us any kudos, bugs, feature requests, and wild ideas that come to you as you use it. 

Most important, go out there and do that thing you’ve always dreamed of.

Love,
Everyone at Microcosm

P.S. Still hate the internet? We sure do get that. You can always ask us for a paper catalog of all our published books. We make a new one every year with a new comic on the back, and we’d be delighted to send you one, or a stack to put in your local flyer spots!