On today’s episode of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joestradamus makes some predictions about the lasting changes that we’ll see in the publishing industry as a result of the global pandemic of 2020.
Watch or listen to this and 98 other episodes about the art, science, and business of publishing books!
Coming up next week: our 100th episode!
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly answer a listener question: What is a fair royalty for a publisher to offer to authors for the rights to publish their books? There are a lot of different royalty agreements out there, each one more confusing than the last. Should you pay based on a percent of the cover price? Based on gross sales (ie, the amount the publisher actually gets paid per book sold)? Based on net sales after printing costs? Profit sharing?
Find out how these various options work, the costs and benefits of each, and how certain so-called indie publishing platforms use large numbers to trick you into agreeing to unfair royalty agreements. Listen or watch! And don’t forget to subscribe to hear our newest episode every Thursday.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing Podcast, Joe and Elly talk about the continuing effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the book publishing industry. Come for the hot takes, stay for Joe’s impression of a printer, and boldly join us as we scrutinize global supply chains and consumer behavior.
Like what you hear? You can watch or listen to new episodes weekly!
These days, it seems like every piece of software you use, and every entity that sells your books offer you some kind of metrics. Unit sales, revenue growth, top sheets, bottom lines… it’s possible to tell a lot of stories with numbers. But how do you actually know how your publishing company is doing? How do you measure financial health, growth, sustainability… and how true you are staying to your mission?
In this episode of the A People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly tackle the question of metrics and how to ignore the wrong ones and focus on the right ones so you can build the book publishing company of your dreams.
Find other vlogcasts, podcasts, and blog posts about publishing at microcosm.pub/podcast.
Independent bookstore owner Danny Caine penned this love letter to buying local, which is also a scathing critique of big business, consolidation, and the havoc giant retailers are wreaking on the US (and world) economy, labor force, privacy, politics, and the business of writing, buying, and selling books.
In the middle of a Cleveland winter in 1996, Joe Biel sat at a punk show with a milk crate full of zines and decided that he would turn it into something bigger—creating a publishing resource founded on punk and DIY values that would run parallel to the mainstream.
Twenty-five years and many ups and downs later, Microcosm is a fast-growing independent book publisher and distributor. We’re bigger than we used to be—by the end of 2021 we’ll have a staff of over 20 and warehouses in two cities—but we still hold to the values Joe started out with, of making books and publishing reflect the experiences of the real world rather than a narrow elite.
Joe and Elly sat down to reminisce about our favorite Microcosm memories over the years and decades. You can watch the video, or listen on our podcast.
Thank you, readers, for making it all worthwhile!
Microcosm intern Molly Simas wrote this review of our new book, How to Be Accountable by Joe Biel & Dr. Faith Harper.
In January of 2018, Saturday Night Live released a comedy sketch titled “Dinner Discussion.” Three straight couples sit around a restaurant table (remember restaurants?), exclaiming over the food’s deliciousness. “Everything here is good,” says one man. “The New York Times restaurant review raved about this place.”
“You know, speaking of the Times,” a woman at the table says. “Did any of you guys read that op-ed piece about…”
“Honey, no,” her husband says, suddenly alarmed.
“What article are you talking about?” their friend inquires.
“The one about… Aziz Ansari?”
The music surges, and the six are thrown into dramatic lighting as the camera close pans across their distressed, panicking faces. One woman raises her wine glass to her lips with a trembling hand. The shushing husband pulls his turtleneck up to hide his face.
A quick refresher on the cultural climate of January 2018: news coverage was full steam ahead on all things #MeToo. A waterfall of sexual misconduct revelations was steadily cascading from the upper echelons of Hollywood. Then, an anonymous exposé of Aziz Ansari’s alleged misdeeds made a splash and muddied the waters. The article described a hookup in which the woman who Ansari brought home felt unheard and violated. It was clear that harm had been caused and that power dynamics were involved. Yet enough gray area around the details threw the discourse into a purgatory where no one knew how to talk about it or have the “right” opinion.
The SNL skit continues with the dinner guests haltingly offering their thoughts on the subject. “I…think…” one woman says, while her husband admonishes, “Careful…”
“I think that some…women…” she continues, and her friend interjects, “Careful…”
“While I applaud the movement,” another dinnergoer offers. “Watch it…” cautions his friend.
They continue to hem and haw their way through the conversation. “Powerful men almost always abuse…NOPE!” one tries. “Consent…PASS! Damn it!” says another.
If you were an alive and thinking person at the time, you might have an opinion on the matter–perhaps a very strongly held one–and I’m not here to convince you any which way about it. But that SNL skit stuck with me because it felt so accurate to the grappling conversations I’d had with my own friends that week, and it came to mind again as I worked my way through How to Be Accountable, Microcosm’s latest contribution to the cultural toolkit of thinking about repairing harm in our relationships and our lives.
Authors Joe Biel and Dr. Faith G. Harper establish early and often that a new paradigm is needed for conversations about accountability. They explicitly state their hope that people “cultivating personal development rather than sweeping cancelation” are the ones “who will change perception around this issue and shift the conversation about accountability from one of punishment and ostracism to an understanding that accountability is personal and that everyone makes mistakes from which they can learn and grow.”
It’s a difficult, tricky subject, and I appreciate this book’s willingness to wade into the thick of it. Talking about accountability, just like talking about privilege and other systems of power, requires stark honesty and the resilience to push through making mistakes. While these vulnerabilities are necessary for progress, too often they are swiftly punished within the very conversations that require them. This can feel inescapable and exhausting.
With How to Be Accountable, I was ready to watch someone else step into that arena, and the book did not let me down. I was uncomfortable and questioning my own notions of accountability almost immediately, which I think is the point. When it comes to perpetrators of harm, considering forgiveness can feel like a trap—even the phrase “everyone makes mistakes” can feel a little too “boys will be boys” in the context of sexual assault—yet blanket cancelation of human beings is clearly not a sustainable or healthy option. How, then, are we to proceed?
To their credit, Harper and Biel ultimately never boil anything down to a simple takeaway. They frequently acknowledge that every situation is unique, with its own context and nuance, and thus every situation will require unique engagement from all parties. “In a world of memes and fake news, separating the behavior from the person is more vital than ever,” the authors write. “In the quest for quick sound bytes we simplify, misconstrue, misinterpret, and vilify people because we are human and sometimes our filters fail us. …If we are going to create something better than the criminal justice system for righting wrongs, our system has to truly be better.”
But wait. Isn’t this supposed to be a book about personal accountability? About fixing our own shitty habits? Ostensibly, yes. The book begins with a baseline acknowledgement that our own toxic patterns are often born of coping behaviors we learned in childhood, and that these patterns can be interrogated and shifted.
Accountability doesn’t only exist outside of us, in the court of public opinion. It is a quality we all are responsible for crafting an awareness of and practice around in our own lives. How To Be Accountable does a great job of striking this note early on: “…there is remarkably little written about how to recognize and change patterns in our own behavior, which seems to suggest that change is only needed for people whose behavior is unfathomably worse than our own. But the reality is that everyone sees maladaptive behaviors in themselves that they’d like to change.”
Yet for a lay reader, that note might seem to waver as the chapters proceed to wander through the weeds of cognitive biases, propaganda, trauma histories, and shadow work, with occasional guest appearances by members of the zeitgeist such as Pizzagate, Jordan Peterson, and racist Facebook relatives. At times, it can be hard to see how a given section relates to our own accountability struggles, which might be as mundane as avoiding difficult conversations with loved ones, or continuing to engage in self-sabotaging behavior.
Truthfully, it is all related and relevant—it’s just that this shit is complicated and this work is hard. “If you are still feeling like you haven’t connected all of the dots, don’t beat yourself up,” write Harper and Biel in the book’s conclusion. “We’d say that doesn’t signal failure, it signals the fact that you are recognizing that this is a complex and long-term process.”
I didn’t have access to the forthcoming companion title How to Be Accountable Workbook during the writing of this review, but I’m going to go out on a limb and recommend that, if you’re serious about getting into your own shit, that you obtain both and work through the two in tandem. Microcosm has a fun trend of publishing workbooks alongside self help titles, and managing editor/co-owner Elly Blue has said on Microcosm’s podcast that most book/workbook combinations can be treated as “one or the other” situations, not necessarily a requisite package deal. However, while How to Be Accountable does contain several reflective questions and journaling exercises in-text, I think the companion structure of a workbook would be extremely helpful in keeping a reader grounded in the deep understanding of self (values, needs, patterns, history) that is required of their own accountability work, as they consider larger concepts that may or may not affect their own situations to varying degrees.
The truth is, no book will give a reader a hard-and-fast answer when it comes to tough questions of justice, forgiveness, and healing from harm, because the idea of such a solution is a myth. For most situations, there isn’t a peel-and-stick universally “correct” answer, which is what leaves so many of us stammering at the edge of a conversational precipice, cutting people out of our lives for lack of a better option, or staring at ourselves in the mirror with a sick feeling in the pit of our stomach that we will never be freed of our own pain.
However, in lieu of this magical sticker, there are people seriously engaging with the difficult work of growth and accountability, in numerous formats, from storytelling to social work. It is increasingly recognized that our institutional systems of accountability are deeply flawed, that their harmful notions of punishment have trickled down into our most precious relationships, and that a new way forward is needed to make us all safer and more whole. Ultimately, How to be Accountable is a valuable contribution to the ever-growing library on this subject.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing Podcast, Joe and Elly follow up last week’s episode about what data publishers collect with some words about what we actually do with it once we have it.
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.
Microcosm Publishing & Distribution is thrilled to announce that we are opening a second distribution warehouse—in Cleveland, Ohio, the city where our company was founded 25 years ago next week.
Though we’ve been based in Portland, Oregon since the end of 1998, most of our first three years of operations were based out of founder Joe Biel’s hometown of Cleveland. Biel says, “Cleveland remains Microcosm’s biggest influence. So it only seems like the appropriate thing to bring it back, support the city, and create jobs. Cleveland is the center of the universe, after all.”
Microcosm is maintaining its Portland headquarters and staff, which will continue to be home to our publishing offices and ship to the western U.S.
The Cleveland warehouse will provide much needed room for expansion after a year of 56% growth in 2020 and 64% growth in 2019. The new warehouse will make faster shipping times possible, not least because it is located just a few hours from where Microcosm’s books are printed.
We got the keys to the new warehouse over the past weekend, and the next steps are to train our first staff member there, build a lot of shelves, stock up on things like tape and boxes, make sure our software can differentiate between inventory locations, and start shipping pallets of books there. We expect to begin operations at the new warehouse in the beginning of March, 2021.
While we are not planning a retail storefront for the building, it’s probable that Cleveland-area customers will be able to arrange local pickups once we are up and running. Publishing is lonely work, after all.