Tagged deals

The Great T-Shirt Reckoning

May 11, 2016 — by Elly Blue

We have a lot of fun with the t-shirts that we design and sell. Folks love them, and it’s always a thrill to spot one in the wild. But Jeff, our warehouse manager, has reported an increasing number of headaches in finding specific t-shirt sizes to fill orders, we finally took the plunge and embarked on a long-needed t-shirt inventory. If you’ve ever worked in a retail or sales environment involving t-shirts, you can probably feel our feels right now. Depicted here: Dane and Sidnee, doing the damage like champs.

This literal stock-taking has caused us to do some figurative reckoning as well, and we’ve made the decision to cut way back on t-shirts. Waaaaay back… to just our 3 (or maybe 4) most popular designs: Evolution, Put the Fun Between Your Legs, and our logo, the Chainring Heart (and we’re on the fence about Ask Me About My Bikenomics… it’ll depend on how many of those find new homes in the next couple months).

As for our other 17 (!) designs, browse them here (or come into our store), and pick up your size before they’re all gone. Every shirt that finds a new home gives our Jeff another piece of his life back!

Ebooks and Bundles… Microcosm steps up to the 20th Century in style

May 09, 2016 — by Elly Blue

Years ago, we ran a post-holiday campaign urging readers to trade in their unwanted Kindle ebook readers for their same market value in zines. A couple folks went it, and everyone won. Times have changed, though. We caved and made everything we put out available as an ebook for a few years. It had seemed like we were really missing out, but then it turned out that only a very few of our books could even break even on the ebook conversion fees in three years. Starting in 2017, we’re going for a happy medium, where we convert only ebooks that we project will not lose money, and figuring our losses for each book are still smaller than most publishing houses’ marketing budgets. We’re not totally sure that it’s still a good idea, but we’ll keep trying ’til we know for sure that it isn’t.

In the meantime, if you are one of our rare ebook-buyers, and you want us to keep making them, we strongly encourage you to buy our ebooks directly from us! Ebook is now an option on checkout for almost all of our published titles. And in brand-new news, we just added an option where you can buy the ebook along with the paperback for just $3. When you buy an ebook on our site, you’ll get an email with download links to (usually) all three major formats within 24 hours.

And now we’ve also joined the race to the lowest price … at least, temporarily, with our new Super Bundle program. Every month for just one week we’ll run some kind of screaming deal with a theme. The first one (which runs through the end of our day on Tuesday, May 10, 2016) contains 8 books for $20 + shipping (or $10 if you want ebooks only), all on the theme of DIY summer projects. We’re still figuring out June’s theme and dates, but we’ll let you know.

Thanks for sticking with us through big changes in our world and yours! And as always, get in touch if you have questions or ideas or just want to say hi.