This year’s edition of the Practical Witch’s Almanac will help you deepen your connection with the earth through reflections, recipes, rituals, and celebrations tailored to the energies of each season as the wheel of the year turns. Inside, you’ll follow the cycles of the moon to support your plans and goals, and you’ll discover how plants can be our sacred allies in magic and medicine making. Important U.S. dates as well as traditional witchcraft holidays are noted, along with fun and less familiar ones like Appreciate a Dragon Day. Every week, you’ll enjoy new, empowering practices that brighten the living world around you and connect you to the magic within.
The 2026 Almanac includes:
Lunar Planner Pages
Weekly & Monthly Schedules
Moon Phases & Signs
Sabbats
Meteor Showers
Eclipses
Spells
Recipes
Rituals
Meditations
A master list of over 200 botanicals (including vegetables and houseplants) marked with symbols for quick reference to magical properties and research-supported medicinal uses
We need to make some space in the warehouses for new stock, and figured, hell, let’s make it a party. We’ve got some great things lined up for it, including some limited-stock titles, and a bunch of Microcosm-published things! The sale will run from Thursday the 20th through the 30th, and newsletter subscribers will get access to the coupon code on Tuesday!
Not subscribed to the newsletter? It’s a great way to keep up on some of our latest news and updates and shenanigans. Sign up at microcosm.pub/newsletter
Save money, save the planet, and craft a sustainable domestic life without relying on smelly, toxic, expensive consumer products. This handwritten and hand-drawn book of charming tutorials for natural housekeeping and home repair, organic gardening and food preservation, herbal first aid, and mending clothes is both fun and accessible. It’s full of simple skills that anyone can and should learn. From creating healthy tinctures and salves to preserving excess food to fixing a leaky faucet, this book is great if you’re looking to live more simply, create a comfortable nest, and truly do it yourself. Combining the power of Raleigh Briggs’s bestselling Make Your Place and Make It Last to form a complete guide to everything you need to consume less and live more in line with your values.
Herbal remedies and wise perspectives to help make your cycle less of a rollercoaster.
Ever felt like your uterus is out to get you? Or experienced dismay at the politicians out to get your uterus? This book will speak straight to your soul. Get to know your body with this inclusive guide to herbal, holistic self-care for every womb, at every stage of life—from puberty to post-menopause and everything in between. Herbalist and pregnancy loss doula Angelica Merritt offers a wealth of anatomical science, plant medicine, and nutritional and herbal strategies to support body literacy, a regular menstrual cycle, and your reproductive goals. If you’re dealing with irregular menstruation, PCOS, infertility, pregnancy loss or release, perimenopause, or any other reproductive health issue, look to these pages for remedies that bridge the scientific and the spiritual. Inside you’ll find guidance in holistic modalities such as castor oil packs, breath work, breast and womb massage, baths, and infused oils, along with rituals and journal prompts. You’ll learn about the connections between the womb, the moon cycle, and the archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Transform your self-care through the magick of the womb within!
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!
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.
On Black Friday of 2024, Taylor Swift released “The Eras Tour Book” exclusively through Target. But is it a book? What’s the appeal? Who is the audience? Was it unfair to cut out indie bookstores from one of the biggest releases of the year? Jane Friedman of “The Hot Sheet” is back with Joe and Elly to give her thoughts on book-shaped objects.
(Note: This episode was recorded before the book actually released. Joe’s post-release comment— “Since even diehard fans were unhappy with the quality of the book, it’s hard to Bielieve the thinkpieces claiming that celebrities don’t need publishers anymore.”)
Sometimes our menstrual symptoms prevent us from showing up the way we want to, and there is not a lot of information about how to feel better. You may have had trouble finding resources that explain what’s happening in your body and mind. You may have even been disbelieved or blamed.
Our Sacred Cycle was created to help. Written by a therapist who specializes in premenstrual syndrome (PMS), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and other forms of hormone imbalance, this workbook offers accessible information and reflective exercises to help you understand the physiology of the menstrual cycle and how it affects you, harness your power, and live in harmony with your body. Whether you want to heal from patriarchal trauma or connect with yourself in a new way, this is the empowering, feminist resource you need to reclaim your cycle, take control of your symptoms, and achieve a transformative mind-body connection. You can feel better!
This past week one of the platforms we sell on generously offered to “optimize” some of our product listings, unasked, and gave us the examples below of what they would do.
Our text is on the left, theirs is on the right.
It uh, didn’t go well.
Positive changes! Thought-provoking! Terrible SEO buzzwords!
