Bookseller friends! Want to join the resistance? When Danny Caine’s book How to Resist Amazon and Why in March, we’re having a display contest for bookstores.
The #ResistAmazon display contest is open through 5/31/21 and the grand prize winner will receive really cool prizes from us including a free case (80 copies!) of the book, a virtual event with author Danny Caine, $150 in specially-curated Microcosm bestsellers, and more. Second and third place winners will also be named. The contest is open to independent bookstores that place an order for How to Resist Amazon (9781621067061) through their sales rep at Book Travelers West, Fujii Associates, Como Sales, and Manda Group, or direct to Microcosm Publishing.
To enter, post at least one picture of your store’s How to Resist Amazon display on Twitter tagging @microcosmmm or on Instagram tagging @microcosm_pub, and using the hashtag #ResistAmazon. It’s that simple.
Contact kalen@microcosmpublishing.com with any questions. Have fun! We’re excited to see your displays! (And keep reading below for the fine print.)
The Fine Print
Microcosm’s #ResistAmazon display contest is open to independent bookstores in the United States and Canada. Orders must be placed through a sales representative at Book Travelers West, Fujii Associates, Como Sales, Manda Group, or Microcosm Publishing directly. Orders placed through wholesalers or distributors are not eligible. Eligible edition is the first paperback edition (not the zine) of How to Resist Amazon / 9781621067061. Entries must be posted to Twitter or Instagram by 5/31/21, tagging Microcosm and using the hashtag #ResistAmazon. If a bookstore does not have access to social media, contact kalen@microcosmpublishing.com to enter. First, Second, and Third Place winners will be notified in June 2021 and announced on Twitter and Instagram. Microcosm Publishing reserves the right to use all photos on social media, in newsletters, and with the media.
Today on the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast, we’re going back to basics and answering that burning question: What is an International Standard Book Number (aka an ISBN), how does it work, and where do we get them?
Last week, we published our annual financial report for 2020. This week on the podcast, we talk a bit more about what it means and how it came to pass.
Every week, Joe and Elly sit down to record a new episode of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast. We talk about skills publishers need, our experiences, specific books (that we’ve published or otherwise), and publishing industry news.
We also answer listener questions—you can send yours to podcast at microcosmpublishing dot com.
Every week, Joe and Elly sit down to record a new episode of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast. We talk about skills publishers need, our experiences, specific books (that we’ve published or otherwise), and publishing industry news.
We also answer listener questions—you can send yours to podcast at microcosmpublishing dot com.
Yikes! 2020 was one of those years that most simply feel lucky to hobble out of. At the beginning of the pandemic this spring, we expected the worst, but calculated that even if sales slowed to a halt, we could keep the company afloat for six months without layoffs or pay cuts. But it turned out that we had the opposite concern: we are selling twice as many books out of our warehouse as we were two years ago, and our staff has grown by six additional people this year, to a total of 17. These are good problems to have, but like so many people this year, we’re emotionally exhausted by all that’s happened this year … and we still can’t keep up with shipping orders.
Unbelievably, our 2020 sales went up 64% over 2019, making 2020, again, our best year ever! In the past year we’ve also increased staff wages by an additional 33%and an average raise of 8.04% per person , with another 33% bonus in December! We are welcoming our sixth employee owner this year as well with a seventh on the way. Despite considerable personal difficulties and losses, everyone on our team has shown up with consistency and deep care for their work. It’s been a relief and a privilege to be able to provide a safe port for our workers in the storms of 2020, and for the next year we are looking at ways to create even more lasting stability while continuing to expand the team.
We’ve again long outgrown our office and warehouse and are now returning to our roots. In March we’ll be opening and operating an additional warehouse in Cleveland. Soon we will welcome Drew, who helped out at Microcosm in the 90s, to manage the new location. Now that Microcosm is a veritable adult, it seems only appropriate that it can also become a full time job.
Aside from more space, social distancing, and people power, the additional warehouse will help us to ship more efficiently to the midwest and east coast U.S. This should help us to get our work to nearby stores much faster and try to keep pace with how much things are picking up. We’ve also added additional field sales reps in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Illinois, and New Jersey. It’s truly incredible to watch our work end up in more and more stores. Returning to independent distribution at the beginning of 2019 was truly the best decision we ever made, and is a huge part of why we made it through 2020 in such good shape (though, again, exhausting).
Let’s look at the numbers.
Our total sales for the year were $1.67 million dollars. Here’s what we are selling. As you can see, zines jumped past ebooks while most of the rest held consistent with 2019 percentages, though published books began gaining on distributed in the latter portion of the year:
Here are our bestsellers, by dollars:
Note that Unf*ck Your Brain, which came out in 2016, is still outselling our other top 20 books, combined. If you disregard the curve breaker, it was a strong year. We published 25 books last year (not including half a dozen that were delayed until 2021), and not all of these new releases immediately took off—only 6 of our top 20 sellers for the year actually came out in 2020—but our backlist absolutely thrived. For instance, Making Stuff & Doing Things, clocking in at #5 for the year, first came out in 2002.
Expenses this year were $1.669M, because of the ongoing increased costs of growth and staff raises. The major shifts this year were our greatest expense went from being salaries to distributed inventory (due to increased managed levels from regular weekly sales), and we now spend more on royalties than on shipping:
One expense that is not in our budget is office snacks! Several zine authors for the last year or more have asked us to direct their royalties into taking care of our workers, and as a result we are able to keep a good supply of snacks and beverages on hand to fuel both blood sugar and morale for the folks who are still needing to work on-site. Thank you, charming benefactors!
To our readers, partners, and teammates: We always appreciate your orders, trust, and contributions, and recognize it’s been a difficult year so your support makes all the difference. Your support has helped us to support our staff, pay royalties to our authors, pay our bills on time, continue to donate books to community programs and send books to people in prison, and do our best to keep our corner of the publishing and bookselling ecosystem afloat. Let’s still hope that 2021 is a little bit easier.
And a friendly reminder: While we’re legally a “for-profit” organization, we choose to operate on a break-even basis. This means that when we have profits, they don’t go into perks for our owners; they go into staff wages and taking a chance on publishing new books we believe in. Getting to do work we care about every day and put books out there that help people change their lives is the best kind of perk.
This book is deeply important to us—and it also had the bad luck of coming back from the printer in the beginning of April, 2020, just when the libraries, schools, and comics stores we expected to be its major markets had all shut down. We talk about some of the strategies we and publishers are using to get the word out about our new books that came out during the pandemic.
Every week, Joe and Elly sit down to record a new episode of the People’s Guide to Publishing podcast. We talk about skills publishers need, our experiences, specific books (that we’ve published or otherwise), and publishing industry news.
We also answer listener questions—you can send yours to podcast at microcosmpublishing dot com.
I know that for most of us in the US (or even those just following US politics right now), our blood pressure is through the roof. (Personally, I woke up with a stress headache yesterday and it’s still hanging around today like an unwanted roommate.)
So, in honor of all of us combating election stress, here’s an exercise from our upcoming title, Unfuck Your Body by Faith G. Harper, PhD, LPC-S, ACS, ACN. This exercise should help you reconnect with your body and relieve stress (and hopefully lower your blood pressure).
This breathing exercise includes breathing from alternate nostrils. This exercise cleans nostrils, nadis, and sinus. It is also helpful in the activation left and right side of the brain simultaneously.
Get your body comfortable, sitting if possible.
Place your left hand on your left knee, and lift your right hand up to your nose.
Tuck your middle three fingers into the palm of your hand, leaving your pinky and thumb extended (the universal sign for “call me!”)
Complete an exhale, then use your right thumb to close your right nostril. Inhale through your left nostril, then use your pinky to close your left nostril while opening your right nostril and exhaling through the right nostril.
That is one complete breath cycle.
Continue for up to five minutes, completing the practice by finishing with an exhale on the left side.
This technique is great for balancing the left and right hemispheres of the brain and balancing the vagal system. Studies of pranayama have demonstrated that alternate nostril breathing was the only type of breath work that was found to have a positive effect on the cardiovascular system (heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure).
Hypertension, an active migraine, an active sinus, or an chest infection are contraindications for this technique. Also generally be aware of discomfort if you have a full stomach.
Ruby was the medical alert dog for Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel from February, 2012 to June, 2020. She was a constant presence in our office and at events.
At a reading at WhyNot Fest in Minot, North Dakota
Her service dog training meant she was skilled at making herself invisible most of the time, often sleeping curled up next to Joe’s desk or under the table at a convention or a restaurant. Even so, she made friends everywhere she went, when she ventured out at Joe’s side, or to occasionally alert someone passing by that their blood sugar was dropping (she did this by poking their leg with her nose). When she walked by one of Portland’s many brunch spots, she would often go down the line of people waiting, alerting them all. One day, a couple was fighting on the street and she ran up to alert them. She wanted to help everyone. Her intelligence and loyalty were astounding. Once she had met someone, she considered them part of her pack forever, even when meeting them again years later.
Long convention hours meant lots of napping on the job.
Along with her remarkable skill at detection, she was also trained for public access, which meant she could handle herself gracefully in situations, like a grocery store, restaurant, airplane, or train, that would challenge even a well-trained pet dog. She never learned to pedal her own bike, but we celebrated her bikeyness a couple of years ago with this fanciful enamel pin.
Just another daily commute.
Thanks to her unique assistance in managing his disability, Joe was able to lead Microcosm out of the recession, growing us from a small press to a midlist publisher and wholesaler, and more important, to begin to regain his health and safely live a full, active life.
Joe, Ruby, and Elly at the Microcosm office. Photo by Laura Stanfill
Ruby loved to travel everywhere with Joe by train, plane, and bicycle. Food was her primary motivation. And she loved people; her training taught her to be standoffish when she was wearing her service dog vest, but in her off-hours she loved nothing more than a belly rub or a scratch behind the ears. And even when working, she knew when someone was talking about her and perked up with great interest.
Ruby and Joe walking in Detroit.
She passed away on Tuesday, June 23rd, just hours before her first book, Do Not Pet, arrived from the printer. She is dearly missed by all who knew and admired her.
Ruby’s trainer told us that she was the rare dog who found her purpose. In her honor, we’re continuing to center our own meaning and purpose every day. We hope that her legacy will outlive her, educating people about the amazing work of service animals in opening up the world to people with many kinds of disabilities.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the streets are suddenly free of traffic, and a lot of folks are rediscovering bicycling—you can tell by looking out the window, or at our order queue.
And here’s short list of our recommendations for people who are just getting with riding or wondering how we can sustain relatively car-free streets post-pandemic.
The Chainbreaker Bike Book is our classic manual, now in its third edition. Learn to repair your bike (especially if it’s an older bike), and get inspired by the rich history of DIY bicycle culture.Adonia Lugo’s instant classic, Bicycle/Race, is a must-read for any aspiring or experienced bicycle advocate who wonders how we can work towards safe, inclusive transportation in a deeply unequitable system?Everyday Bicycling is your guide to getting started as a transportation cyclist, including tips on carrying everything from lumber to kids to cupcakes. Bikenomicsis the definitive economic argument for investing in bicycle transportation at a personal and civic level. This is the one to give to your city councillor or business district development group, or just hone your own arguments for why bike-friendly streets make sense for everyone.The perspectives in True Trans Bike Rebel about bicycling and walking from transgender and nonbinary authors and artists range from delightful to thought-provoking; all worthwhile reading for anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider in the cycling world.
We are shipping every day out of the Microcosm Publishing & Distribution HQ in Portland, Oregon!
All mail orders are going out within 24 hours. If you choose “pick up at store” as your shipping option, you can come ring our doorbell Mon-Sat 11am-3pm and we’ll do a no-contact handoff.
We’ve always printed our books here in the United States, and so right now we’re not seeing any significant delays in publication of our titles. Orders have slowed a bit, but we’re using the time to get caught up on a serious backlog of work that’s built up in our last year and a half of hectic growth. Far from reducing hours or laying anyone off, we’re cautiously moving forward with the hiring process we began last month. In other news: we aren’t going anywhere.
Ultimately, our strength has always resided in how we’ve built up communities around us, and so we’ve started to work on strengthening those where we can through a variety of ways:
Dr. Faith Harper is doing a live story time with her book Coping Skills on our Facebook page. She’ll be doing it nightly at 5 p.m. central until she’s done, and the videos will be archived on our page at least until this passes.
At the request of the author, we’ve made the ebook version of Teenage Rebels 99 cents. We hope we can inspire some of the millions of high school students currently sitting at home and help them continue learning. The author of Crate Digger has also requested we put both the ebook and audiobook versions of this Florida punk scene history on super sale!
If you’re bored at home and starting to struggle, we’ve got a quarantine self-care pack for you – just $20 for the physical books, $15 for the ebooks.
We’ve curated a list of relevant titles on our Quarantine Survival Guide list of project-based books for people who are feeling anxious or just need something to do.
If you’re stocked up on books and want to help others, you can do that here! We’ve set up a “give books to people in need” program where you can support sending care packages to spread the book love. As always, we are stepping up to offer ways to offer our books to people who are most vulnerable and in need. We are matching funds from donations at link.
