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!
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.
Updated and revised second edition with new interviews and photographs. Through hundreds of exclusive and original interviews, Punk USA documents the empire that was built overnight as Lookout launched a teenaged Green Day, sold millions of records, and rode the wave of the second coming of punk rock until it all came crashing down.
When dinosaurs fight, should the small mammals worry about it, or just continue scurrying along on our merry business? This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly offer some commentary on the current trial as the US Justice Department tries to prevent publishing giants PRH and S&S from merging into a single mega-publisher. How big of a deal is this merger in the publishing world and in the economy as a whole? Who does it actually affect? Should smaller publishers be taking any lessons or warnings, or just make some popcorn and enjoy the show? In under 10 minutes, we break down what’s interesting, why it matters, and to whom.
For this week’s edition of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Elly and Joe decided to pick a (friendly) fight . . . with each other. Watch or listen on as we try with only middling success to find publishing issues we disagree about and hash them out. In the first half we discuss our acquisitions process, an area where we often disagree about the merits of book proposals (and Joe elucidates how we ultimately make those calls), and in the second half of the episode we talk about the line between fiction and nonfiction.
We’re seeking your feminist science fiction and fantasy stories for the 12th anthology in the Bikes in Space series of books!
Please submit your original short fiction (in written or comics form) about bicycling from a feminist perspective. Stories should feature gardens, plants, or other products of photosynthesis. All three of these elements (bicycles, feminism, greenery) should be intrinsic to the narrative. Send your most creative imaginings of organic bicycle design materials, green witches delivering remedies by bike, time traveling wheels embedded in trees, hydroponics experiences in a carbon-neutral future, horticulturists going for a new pedal-powered land speed record, or whatever green and growing scenarios your brain can produce.
The genre can be anything fantastical—from hard sci fi to comedic fantasy to horror to slipstream or anything in that constellation—despite the series title, stories need not be be set in space. No fanfic, poetry, or erotica for this series, please.
I welcome submissions from marginalized authors and first-time authors.
Word count: 500 – 6,000 words
Format: Google doc, MS word, Pages, text document, or PDF. Comics submissions of up to 6 pages can be submitted in thumbnails.
Payment: A portion of profits after expenses from the Kickstarter project used to fund this book is split between contributors, with a guaranteed minimum of $50 each, plus copies of the book.
This week on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, Joe and Elly tackle the seemingly thorny question of how publishers can stay true to our decidedly un-capitalistic values while attempting to, you know, successfully participate in capitalism. Come for the ethical considerations, stay for the practical advice and decided lack of hand-wringing. Yes you can create the world you want to see and sustain your operations financially.
Back in 1996, Microcosm was born in Cleveland, and the ’20s so far have been all about getting back to our roots. First with opening a new warehouse back in Cleveland, managed and partially staffed by people who helped out back when we were brand new. And now we’re thrilled to announce the publication of a pair of new books that honor our roots.
And the books really shine for themselves (there’ve been more reviews of each than I’m linking to here, but this one in the Akron Beacon Journal is pretty representative):
