How to Love Your Queer Kid, an interview with Marc Campbell (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

Marc Campbell, a Black, gay therapist, works with queer kids and parents to create loving and accepting homes where people can safely be themselves and parents can understand their children. This week on the pod, we welcome him as a special guest to talk about his brand new book, I Love My Queer Kid!

Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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Bookstore Solidarity Project: Copper Dog Books of MA

Copper Dog Books didn’t set out to be controversial; just a lovable weird bird next door to spooky Salem. However, some of their customers don’t understand the curatorial powers of the bookstore and attempted to overwrite values. This week, in the latest installment of our monthly Bookstore Solidarity Project, we feature another store who carefully selects how to tell their own story.

To see Meg’s other interview for the Bookstore Solidarity Project, click here!

Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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How do you manage book inventory and reprints? (A People’s Guide to Publishing)


Too much or too little inventory is almost always a publisher’s biggest problem. These are the two biggest problems facing the industry. So this week on the pod, we cast some ideas for how to wrap your head around these issues, how to manage your inventory, and how to start small and grow incrementally.


Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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An Interview with Meg Wasmer, co-owner of Copper Dog Books in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Welcome to the next installment of the Bookstore Solidarity Project! Every month, we’ll be highlighting indie bookstore owners and booksellers across the country.

For October, we got to chat with Meg Wasmer, one of the co-owners of Copper Dog Books in Beverly, Massachusetts. It’s a great little store, with a strong focus on genre fiction. Horror and sci-fi fans would love their selection! (Plus, they have a slew of MIcrocosm titles.)

Your Name and Pronouns
Meg Wasmer, she/they

Tell us a little bit about the store and your community!
Beverly is the best. It’s right by Salem, but doesn’t suffer under the crush of spooky tourism in October. Our customers let me hurl tons of SFF and horror and witchy books at them but also, there are three colleges within five miles of us, so also lots of neat nonfiction.

What got you into bookselling?
The video store I worked at was closing and Borders was hiring and I knew I was good at alphabetically shelving rectangular entertainment media

What’s something about your store that you think will surprise people?
There is both a secret plushie collection and a very nice whiskey selection in the back office.

What are some of you favorite ways your community supports your store?
My favorite way that our customers support us is when they bring their friends who are visiting from out of town to see the store like they’re showing off the Crown Jewels.

What’s your current favorite book to sell customers?
The Navigating Fox by Christopher Rowe is stupidly good!

How can customers who aren’t local shop your shelves?
At Copperdogbooks.com!

Be sure to follow Copper Dog Books on Instagram and Facebook! (And check out their Bonfire store for sweet merch, including this shirt with the “best” review they got last year)

Check out Meg’s podcast interview with Joe and Elly here!

What Does It Mean to Have Distributed Client Publishers? (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

Once upon a time, we were a client publisher of Independent Publisher’s Group (IPG). Then, as we continued to grow, we embarked out on our own and now handle our own distribution in the U.S. Today, after that quintupled our sales, we began taking on our own client publishers that we distribute alongside our books. We take a look at what that means this week on the pod.

Get the People’s Guide to Publishing here, and the workbook here!
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Who is your reader? (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

The first step of writing a book is figuring out who will read it. What else are they interested in? What attracts them to those things? What implicit assumptions are operating in how you think about people that will read your book? How are they harming you? How will they serve to determine the demographics of your reader? This week, we tackle all of this and more.

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!

Bookstore Solidarity Project: The Raven of Lawrence Kansas (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

Each month we’re featuring a new indie bookstore that we operate in solidarity with. This month it’s the Raven, a classical bookstore of many reboots, owners, and iterations. The Raven is now worker-owned and specializes in supporting its local community, while providing a safe space for people in risk and a series of local and national marketing initiatives. We talk to co-owner Chris this week on the pod!

Visit The Raven Book Store’s website here!

For more from the Bookstore Solidarity Project, check out our interview about The Raven with co-owner Danny Caine here, and our podcast interview with Danny here! And snag a copy of How to Protect Bookstores and Why while you’re at it.

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!

An Interview with Danny Caine, of The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas

Welcome to the next installment of the Bookstore Solidarity Project! Every month, we’ll be highlighting indie bookstore owners and booksellers across the country.

This month we’re pleased to continue chatting with Danny Caine, who you may know as the author of such awesome books and zines as How to Protect Bookstores and Why, and How to Resist Amazon and Why. We also recently had Danny as a guest on the podcast, which you can check out here.

The storefront of The Raven Book Store

Your Name and Pronouns:
Danny Caine, he/him

Your title at the store:
Part Owner / Buyer

Tell us a little bit about the store and your community:
The Raven Book Store has been serving Lawrence, Kansas since 1987. It opened as an all-mystery store but has since expanded into a general interest indie with a strong focus on local books to serve the needs of this midwestern college town. We have one store cat, Dashiell, whose personality is as big as his belly. We love being in Lawrence, a community that knows the value of independently-owned small businesses.

What got you into bookselling?

I got a part-time job as a Raven bookseller when I was at the University of Kansas working on my MFA. I fell in love with bookselling and the rest was history!

Danny with his new book


What’s something about your store that you think will surprise people?
20-30% of our sales are online, and much of that support comes from people who aren’t in Kansas. We’re honored and grateful to have found so many supporters across the country and around the world.

What are some of you favorite ways your community supports your store?

There’s the usual and essential stuff like attending events, preordering books, posting pictures of the store online, and stopping into the store. But we love just as much the surprises, like people bringing us newspaper clippings or customers telling us jokes.

What are some books you can’t wait for people to read?
There are too many to count! Our monthly staff picks are on our website, and they’re a great way to take the temperature of what the staff is reading.

How can customers who aren’t local shop your shelves?
We’re open 24/7 at ravenbookstore.com!

Be sure to follow The Raven Book Store online on Instagram and Twitter @ravenbookstore.

Danny also has a slew of events coming up to promote How to Protect Bookstores and Why, so be sure to take a look at our events page to see if he’s coming to your town!

Check back next month for our next feature store.

How Do You Get A Job in Book Publishing? (A People’s Guide to Publishing)

This is the question that just about everyone actually wants the answer to, beneath all of their qualifying questions: where are the jobs in publishing? Where is my job in publishing? So this week on the pod, we unpack the leverage of jobs, how to prepare yourself with job skills, and making yourself attractive in the workforce.

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!

The Wild Ride – a Bikes in Space Excerpt

If you love queer, feminist science fiction and fantasy, bicycling, and books about books, The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy, published by Microcosm in fall, 2023, will check all your boxes. Get a taste of what’s inside with this excerpt is from the story “The Wild Ride” by Shelby Schwietermanand then get a copy of the book!

You can also read an interview with Shelby on our Kickstarter page.


Carly wasn’t upset, and she didn’t care what the other girls thought of her. She simply wanted to read her book more than she wanted to participate in some stupid sleepover, and if that made enemies for her, then so be it. What could a group of sixth grade girls do to her anyway? Gossip about her at school? Ha, like that could harm her. Carly was tough. Carly was a freaking Crystal Warrior, just like Annabeth the Quick, hero of the Shining Realm, protector of the Great Egg of Wisdom.

Carly paused under a street lamp to adjust the straps of her backpack. She had perfected the art of reading while walking back in, like, fourth grade, but doing it at night really upped the difficulty level. Her right hand ached from holding the book open and turning pages with her thumb; her left hand was slippery with sweat where it gripped the cell phone she used as a reading light. She longed for the return of her actual reading light, which had been taken away after she’d been caught too many times reading under her covers while she should have been sleeping. 

The night was hot and humid for this time of year. Crickets chirped happily while toads croaked and sang, trying to outdo the little insects. Carly had been a sixth grader for almost two months now—the very least the weather could do would be to reward her with a cool, breezy night in which to walk home. It was the time of year for ghost stories and black cats and strange whispers on the wind, not for sweating through your pajamas and daydreaming about snow. 

“Ugh,” Carly said to the undesirable weather. She balanced the phone on the book, wiped her sweaty palm, shook out her other hand, and then continued on.

Most people walking home from an abandoned sleepover at sometime after midnight would stick to the sidewalk. Not Carly. The empty street provided a wider, clearer path for her feet to follow while her eyes were busy finishing chapter twelve so she could get to chapter thirteen in which Annabeth breaks the other Crystal Warriors out of the dungeon so they can help her find the Great Egg, which has been stolen by the evil emperor’s dark forces. 

Some people would be worried about being hit by cars, but this scene was one of Carly’s favorites, and she hadn’t seen or heard any cars since she started her walk home ten minutes ago. Some people, in Carly’s opinion, were just too cautious. How could anyone enjoy the book they were reading if they were constantly worrying about what was going on around them while they read?

Except for the occasional runaway or missing person, Carly’s town was quiet and boring. Just like Carly, according to the girls at the sleepover. Carly didn’t take it to heart. Those girls simply could not stand that they were less interesting than a book she had read a dozen times already. Her copy of The Crystal Warriors was beginning to look like it had been through as many battles as the Crystal Warriors themselves. The paperback cover was chipped and bent from being shoved into and ripped out of a backpack, a bookshelf, a desk, and a hiding place behind a different book so her teachers wouldn’t know she was reading it again instead of “expanding her horizons.” The pages were soft and feathery from dirt and oils they’d collected with each turn. Pages thirteen, eighty-six, and one hundred eighty-four were marked with fingerprints of cheese dust from Carly’s careless snacking while reading. An unfortunate blotch of spaghetti sauce graced page ninety-two, not to be confused with the actual bloodstain on page ninety-three, the result of a sudden but minor nosebleed. It was as if she had left almost as much of herself in the book as the book had left in her. Almost.

As Carly’s feet slapped the pavement, she turned the page. Chapter thirteen. Yes! Carly’s pace quickened as she followed Annabeth sneaking into Fort Marion’s hidden underground prison, subduing guards before they even realize they’re not alone. She was called Annabeth the Quick not because of her fast feet, but because of her fast thinking. She could talk her way out of trouble and talk others into trouble with fluid reasoning and endless charm. Of any character in the book, Annabeth had the best insults and the best comebacks. She was about to deliver one of her wittiest to a prison guard when—

The phone light flickered, then died, plunging Carly and her book into the thick dark of the night. Carly wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm. After a few misses, she managed to tuck her phone into a pocket of her backpack. Something about the night felt wrong. Carly turned slowly in the street, searching for whatever felt so off about the darkness. She squinted, but couldn’t see the streetlight she’d passed just moments before. The only light came from the moon and stars above. Definitely too little to read by.

“Ugh,” she said to the darkness. She’d have to walk the rest of the way without reading. Doable, but not preferable. Even the toads and crickets were mad about it. She could tell because they were unusually silent, except for a strange whirring whine from somewhere back the way she came.

As Carly stood there, perplexed, the darkness at the end of the street transitioned to a milky green glow that moved quickly toward her. The long, whining sound grew louder. Sudden wind whipped her hair around her face, obscuring her vision, making her doubt that what she was seeing was real: Within the pale green light were cyclists. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred. They moved as a unit as they sped closer. Heads down, feet pumping, wheels spinning, frames rattling, they headed right for her. Carly couldn’t tell where the riders ended and their bikes began. One figure led the pack, with the rest following in a swarm. She blinked, and they were yards away. She blinked again and they were upon her.

Cyclists zipped past, grazing her elbows and knocking her left and right. She caught a flash of yellow eyes, a glint of white teeth, an otherworldly grin. The din of at least a hundred wheels flying past was accented with manic, frenzied laughter and the smell of hot rubber. 

Carly dropped to the ground in a crouch, her arms curling over her head for protection. She expected to be run over. She was faced with the entirely new reality that she might die at any time. And that time might be after midnight, in the dark, as strange glowing cyclists ran her over in the middle of the road.

This is not, she thought, how a Crystal Warrior would get killed! Her scream vibrated in her throat, more like a growl of frustration than an expression of terror. But before her growl ended, space opened up around her. The sound of bikes whizzed away down the road. She jumped to her feet and watched the herd of cyclists move farther and farther down the street, taking their glowing light with them.

For a moment, Carly was frozen with awe. Just for a moment. Soon, though, she realized something very important was missing. It wasn’t in her hands, and it wasn’t on the ground. Not even a scrap of paper or a chunk of cover remained. She checked her backpack, just to be sure. But no, it was gone.

Carly turned back toward the direction in which the herd had disappeared and shouted, “Give me back my book, you bicycle freaks!”


Want to find out what happens next? Get the book!