January Zine Blast

When we said Year of Zines we meant it!

We publish new zines each and every month (you read that right!), and we want to make sure you don’t miss any that could help you change your life and the world around you. So every month this year, we are going to share a roundup of what’s been released, and maybe a few sneak peeks at what’s ahead in the zine pipeline. So let’s dive in!

Unfuck Your Tarot: Using the Cards for Growth and Overcoming Trauma by Dr. Faith G. Harper
Starting with Carl Jung’s enthusiasm for tarot’s archetypal power up through contemporary usage as a way to explore symbols and imagery in therapeutic settings, bestselling author Dr. Faith lays out helpful basics about the tarot and its connections to therapy work, alongside activities, prompts, and questions to consider in your own journey toward personal development and healing.

Transition Diaries by Finn Animal Bro
An intimate, reflective, and charming personal account of coming out and transitioning, defying transmasc invisibility and enforced cultural norms. Through alter-ego KweerKat, the author celebrates the simple pleasures of becoming, being, and loving one’s self; the satisfaction of weight-lifting; the psycho-spiritual process of transition; and many other smart and tender thoughts depicted through sweet cat illustrations. Remember that no one else can tell you how to be yourself!  

How to Pack for a Trip by Joe Biel and Elly Blue
Packing for a trip can be overwhelming! Trying to future-cast the weather, how much you’ll walk, whether or not you’re going to dump a coffee on yourself…it’s a lot. Longtime and frequent travelers Joe and Elly have made this fun and friendly little zine to help you break down packing and trip prep into manageable chunks, full of tips and tricks to make it all easier.

Criminal or Hero?: Relatable Crimes of Modern Times by Joe Biel and Elly Blue
From political actions to mistaken thefts, unfortunate miscommunications to gleeful mischief, the most sympathetic person in these stories is usually the one on the wrong side of the law, with choice details and a little art to match. Read to be entertained and consider what we consider criminality in a new light—and you, too, can argue with your friends about your faves and foes within!

To stay on top of the latest Microcosm news, including the zines digest delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter! Also often includes cute pet pics and good puns.

Your Cozy Life: DIY Nesting Skills for a Sustainable Home

Cottagecore projects to save money and the planet

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. 

Read on for an excerpt of Your Cozy Life: DIY Nesting Skills for a Sustainable Home by Raleigh Briggs, available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller (officially hitting shelves 3/18/25)!

(more…)

How do books get into bookstores? w/Kurtis Lowe | A People’s Guide to Publishing

It’s another throwback episode! A few years ago, Joe and Elly sat down with sales rep extraordinaire Kurtis to talk about how reps get books into stores. Learn about cover appeal, sales conferences, how store buyers see the books… and that’s just the first five minutes. It’s an oldie, but an eternally useful goodie of an episode!

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!

Microcosm Declares 2025 the Year of Zines

The DIY information technology helping us build a better world

In an era of book bans, people are still finding ways to read, write, and share freely. One result we’ve noticed: a groundswell of zines. That’s why we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines.

What’s a zine? It’s a stapled, photocopied love letter to a passionate interest. People write zines about whatever they need to: to tell their story uncensored, to express themselves fearlessly in words and art, to share knowledge or resources, to celebrate something they care about deeply, to connect directly with readers. Zines can take many forms, from a handwritten manifesto distributed out of a fanny pack to a polished product sold in stores. 

We have published and sold zines since 1996, and we’ve seen many waves of interest come and go. But we haven’t seen anything like the surge of zine sales that began on November 9, 2024. Sure, there was a two-week run on reproductive rights resources, books like How to Get Your Period and zines like Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom pushing aside all other holiday bestsellers (even Slingshot Planners!) on their way to the top of the charts. But that urgency quickly died down, revealing an even stickier trend on our orders page—people were, and still are, loading up with assorted, seemingly random zines, on every topic, from every era. Zines about bees, government misdeeds, backyard building projects, mental health, abortion, abortion, abortion. Zines and books about how to make zines.

What’s behind this hunger for zines? To us, it’s not that hard to see. We are all desperate to expand our understanding, to think freely, to feel safe connections with others and with our own thoughts, to learn the skills we need to survive this era. Online media, especially social media, is compromised. Books can be slow to come out, ponderous to read, relentlessly gatekept, banned up the wazoo. Zines are none of these. They’re a fix that satisfies the urgent need for pithy commentary, bigger perspective, getting a look inside someone else’s head without needing to have your own perfectly-formed and fully-informed opinion. They provide a small, safe bubble with no mandate for response. A zine is a safe place to not know, to be wrong, to change your mind, and to entertain other perspectives.

Zines can be banned, but they’re too slippery to be stopped, too slight to be taken seriously, some too underground to even be found. They are decentralized, passed hand-to-hand, and there are no gatekeepers to corrupt or bottlenecks to plug. 

And the best thing about zines is that you can create one! You can publish it yourself, all you need is something to say and access to a printer or copier. You can give copies to your friends, leave them in the public library or at Little Free Libraries, mail them to the creators who made you fall in love with zines in the first place. This is far from the expensive corporate allure of self-publishing a book-shaped object to remain forever hidden in the algorithm. Zines are a form of energy that can’t be contained by anyone, even us, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

So we’re calling 2025 the Year of Zines, and this is what it means: read zines. Seek them out. We have a ton in our catalog, and we sell them to more and more stores. You can find a plethora of printed zines on Etsy and digital ones on itch.io. More and more cities and towns are hosting their own zine fests. You’ll find them hiding out in craft fair booths, in a bin at the library. Search for zines + your area of passionate interest. Once you start looking, you’ll see them everywhere. (And if you have a store, check out our zine about selling zines!). 

And when you aren’t finding the exact zine you want, well, you know what to do. How do you think we got started making them? 

If you’d like to submit a zine or an idea for one to Microcosm, you can read a little more about our guidelines and process here. Happy creating!

Womb Witch: Herbal Magick for Reproductive Health

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!

You can join the community of support for this exciting project on Kickstarter.

Read on for an excerpt of Womb Witch: Herbal Magick for Reproductive Health by Angelica Merritt, available for preorder from our site or your local bookseller (officially hitting shelves 3/18/25)!

(more…)

How Do I Hire Sales Reps? | A People’s Guide to Publishing

How does a small press hire a sales rep? Do you even NEED a rep? This week on the pod, Joe and Elly talk about how Microcosm decided to work with reps, and how to find the reps that will work for you.

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!

What are the 3 Biggest Misconceptions in Publishing? w/Chris Vega | A People’s Guide to Publishing

Chris Vega of Blue Cactus Press is back to talk common publishing misconceptions! Zoning issues, delusions of grandeur, printing—learn what makes us unique (and also just as boring as other publishers).

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!

What did Taylor Swift reveal about book publishing? w/Jane Friedman | A People’s Guide to Publishing

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.”)

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!

Relationships, Anxiety, and Lamps- A Q&A w/Dr. Faith G. Harper | A People’s Guide to Publishing

This week, we pretend we’re one of those “hang out and chat about whatever” podcasts, because it’s time for Dr. Faith’s long-awaited return to the pod! Join Dr. Faith, Joe, and Elly while they answer reader questions, talk about Dr. Faith’s upcoming books, surviving the holidays, and more. There are always shenanigans when Dr. Faith comes around, so we hope you have as much fun as we did.

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!

How Did You Get a New York Times Bestseller? w/ Angela Engel | A People’s Guide to Publishing

For a lot of publishers, landing a book on the New York Times bestseller list is one of their loftiest goals. How did a small press like Collective Book Studio end up with a title on the most iconic bestseller list in the U.S.? Angela Engel had a chance to hang out with Joe for a few minutes at a recent conference to tell the story.

Prefer an audio experience? Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast app.
Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
Want to stay up to date on new podcast episodes and happenings at Microcosm? Subscribe to our newsletter!