This new edition of the classic comics love story compiles all previously published Henry & Glenn Forever comics. You’re invited behind the scenes into an epic romance between two musical heroes who are so much more than performance and public image. A multitude of talented comics and graphic novel artists have come together to bring us a multi-faceted relationship to inspire for the ages.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly answer a reader question: someone runs a small press and wants to know how they can become an imprint of a larger press. We speak about this from experience: in 2014, Elly’s very tiny press merged with Microcosm, and we talked about what worked, what didn’t, and how it’s going now.
On this week’s People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly answer a reader question! The question-asker edited an anthology, with all the authors donating their work and all proceeds going to a nonprofit cause. One author decided that the way the contract handled rights wasn’t fair, and now the publisher isn’t sure they did the right thing. We get into contracts, rights, and how to handle authors who sound off about you on social media. Whew, that’s a lot of ground in under 12 minutes.
When a company’s workers are literally dying on the job, when their business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own vendors, when their CEO is the richest person in the world while their workers make low wages with impossible quotas… wouldn’t you want to resist? Danny Caine, owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas has been an outspoken critic of the seemingly unstoppable Goliath of the bookselling world: Amazon. In this book, he lays out the case for shifting our personal money and civic investment away from global corporate behemoths and to small, local, independent businesses. Well-researched and lively, his tale covers the history of big box stores, the big political drama of delivery, and the perils of warehouse work. He shows how Amazon’s ruthless discount strategies mean authors, publishers, and even Amazon themselves can lose money on every book sold. And he spells out a clear path to resistance, in a world where consumers are struggling to get by. In-depth research is interspersed with charming personal anecdotes from bookstore life, making this a readable, fascinating, essential book for the 2020s.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly tackle a question we get asked a lot—do you need to trademark your book’s contents or title, or your pen name? Joe lays down some intellectual property and copyright lore, and the answers might surprise you.
The latest in Microcosm’s Queering Consent series is this m/m high heat erotic fantasy from S. Park!
In the distant future where hovercars flit between ruined cities, a sexy stranger comes to town. The hardworking cowboy owner of The Only Chance Inn is usually pretty hands-off with customers, but when the enticing stranger turns out to be broke, he offers him his own room. The immediate intimacy they develop is soon rocked by the stranger’s otherworldly secret—and the innkeeper’s fluid sexuality is put to the ultimate test, with supremely pleasurable results. In these five stories of erotic speculative fiction, S. Park explores themes of attraction, belonging, and identity. A lonely pair meets cute at a hotel bar, a demon hunter meets his match, a computer tech negotiates their new office’s alpha-beta-omega pecking order, and a fairy-tale prince on a hunt bites off more than he can chew. Steamy, kinky, and emotional, these stories explore masculinity, sex, submission, and dominance in ways that can only happen when very different strangers from different worlds encounter each other.
Bigger and better than ever, the bestselling Unfuck Your Brain Workbook by Dr. Faith G. Harper has been transformed from slender zine to substantial book! 8×10″ pages are perforated so you can tear them out and the perfect size to photocopy so you can do an exercise more than once and track your progress! Exercises are geared towards recovering from trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, grief, addiction, triggers, and freakouts. Grab a book and a cup of tea and maybe even a friend and get to work because unfucking is totally possible!
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly tackle a bit of viral misinformation that’s making the rounds: The myth that more than half of new books by major publishers sell less than a dozen copies a year. (The first comment on this newsletter, from someone at NPD Bookscan laying out actual stats, is our primary source.) Don’t get us wrong, the numbers for most books put out by the biggest publishers are astonishingly bleak. But not that astonishingly bleak.
When we lose someone or something close to us—a loved person or animal, a relationship, our health, our dream, our idea of who we are—it hurts. A lot. Grief is both what we experience and how we heal. Dr. Faith Harper, bestselling author of books like Unfuck Your Brain and Unfuck Your Boundaries brings us a counseling and neuroscience perspective on grieving. She explains what is actually happening in our brains and bodies and what we need in order to allow it to happen fully. She also shows us how to identify and treat traumatic grief, the variety of grieving processes we experience, what grief looks like in the long term, when to get professional support, and how to ask the people in our lives for what we need (and to give ourselves the care we need as well). You’ll also find solid advice on how (and how not!) to support a grieving person in your life. Wise, a little crass, and gently funny.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly look at some current events. Big bookstore chain Barnes & Noble recently announced that they’d be dramatically cutting back buying on new hardcovers, a cause of deep concern for many authors. We unpack what is actually changing, what it actually means for authors, publishers, and readers, and how B&N maybe could have talked about it a little more sensitively.