It’s been said more and more frequently that reviews from trade publications don’t sell books the way they used to. Why is that, and what DOES sell books?
This week on the pod, Jane Friedman of the Bottom Line is back to talk with Joe and Elly about the movement away from book critique to book content, what book reviews are good for, and what, if anything, they can do to help sell books.
For more valuable insights about the book industry from Jane, check out The Bottom Line.
When you’re young, broke, and in search of a life of adventure, Making Stuff and Doing Things is the most useful book on the planet. It’s been called “more important than the Bible.” It’s an indispensable handbook full of basic life skills for the young punk or activist, or for anyone who’s trying to get by, get stuff done, and live life to the fullest without a lot of money.
The book started as a series of zines, with dozens of contributors setting down the most important skills they knew in concise, often hand-written pages. If you want to do it yourself or do it together, this book has it all, from making your own tooth paste to making your own art and media, feeding, clothing, cleaning, and entertaining yourself, surviving on little, living on less, and staying healthy on all your life’s adventures. You’ll never be bored again.
Keep reading for an excerpt of this latest edition of Making stuff and Doing Things, the enduring bestseller edited by Kyle Bravo—shipping now from the Microcosm site or available at an indie retailer near you!
From Ginsberg’s Howl to libraries, from prisons to Palestine
You’re invited to the book revolution!
Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.
In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.
From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco’s City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who’ve stood up against them. Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance. Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller. He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.
Perimenopause is a time when our souls long for change.
The mood swings and physical discomfort as our reproductive system winds down can make it feel like our bodies and brains are betraying and victimizing us. Our Sacred Cycleauthor Mary McDonald, a therapist who works with people with PMS, PMDD, trauma, and other reproductive health issues, reframes that betrayal as an intervention and opportunity. With inclusive language and compassionate, practical understanding, she brings affirmation, insight, and science to help us navigate our out-of-control emotions, let go of what no longer serves us, and step fully into our power and wisdom.
McDonald invites us to examine what the huge moods of midlife are really telling us. She offers an explanation of what is actually going on with our hormones, offering the facts behind our feelings from the internalized patriarchal messages that lead us to mistrust and mistreat our bodies and minds. The map she draws for our journey is one of shadow work and soul retrieval, a hero’s journey in which we stop trying to “fix” ourselves and rediscover the person we were supposed to be. The greatest prize is to finally get to meet the wise, experienced, and unapologetically authentic soul we were always meant to become.
Keep going to read an excerpt of Mary McDonald’s The Perimenopause Journey! Available now through our site, or via your favorite independent Microcosm peddler 🙂
This week on the podcast, join Danny, Elly, and Joe as they talk about the interplay of book bans and freedom movements the world over, how you can defend books, and the work and the conversations and interviews that shaped “How to Defend Books.”
Get Danny’s books on the Microcosm website, or your local indie bookstore!
To find out more about book bans and challenges, click here.
At this point, most of us are familiar with checking the air quality when we go outside during certain times of the year, or ventilating when using chemicals or it’s the flu season. But how familiar are you with the air in your home on a day to day basis? From radon, ozone, particulate matter, and more, there’s a lot you can do to keep breathing easy, and we’ve got a book to help!
This week on the podcast, “Air Self-Care Handbook” author Melissa Wrolstad joins Joe & Elly to talk about development of the book and how to take care of your air.
Drawing on 30 years of experience operating an independent publishing company, Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel has written the most accessible and comprehensive guide to running a successful publishing business. You’ll learn all the skills of the trade, including how to:
Develop your individual books to connect with readers on a practical and emotional level
Choose between offset printed, digitally printed, and ebook formats and work effectively with printers
Build an authentic niche so you can reach your audience and sell books directly
Understand if and when you’re ready to work with a distributor or large online retailer
Create a budget and predict the cost and income of each book so your company stays in the black
Decide what work you need to do yourself and what can be done by others
Plan for sustainable growth
Featuring interviews with other upstart independent publishers and funny anecdotes from publishing’s long history as well as detailed charts and visuals, this book is intended both for beginners looking for a realistic overview of the publishing or self-publishing process and for experienced publishers seeking a deeper understanding of accounting principles, ways to bring their books to new audiences, and how to advance their mission in a changing industry. All readers will come away with the confidence to move forward wisely and a strong sense of why publishing matters today more than ever.
Keep going to read an excerpt of Joe Biel’s A People’s Guide to Publishing! Available now through our site, or via your favorite independent Microcosm peddler 🙂
Whether you are overwhelmed by the bounty of your home garden or you want to get smarter about using what’s in your fridge, this friendly and informative guide will walk you through the steps to preserving and storing your own (delicious!) food. In her trademark welcoming style with charming illustrations, Raleigh Briggs offers up her knowledge on canning, brining, fermentation, drying, and storing everything from fresh vegetables to fish. With step by step instructions, recipes, and helpful tips, this guide will allow you to embrace a more sustainable, low-waste, and cost-saving relationship to food while empowering you with new skills. Eat healthy and cheap all year round!
Keep going to read an excerpt of Raleigh Briggs’s Save Your Food! Printing came through early, so it’s available NOW through our site, well in advance of the technical October 2026 pub date!
For over 10 years, Elly has been publishing a series called “Bikes in Space,” full of joyfully feminist (and often queer) genre short stories ON BIKES. One of our longest term contributors is Summer Jewel Keown, who also edited the most recent edition, “What Rides at Night” This week on the pod, Elly and Summer have a chat about bikes, the Bikes in Space selection process, and queer Halloween.
The world is on fire. Has been on fire. Some of us have always known that the institutions that purport to protect us do no such thing. For others, this is a new experience. Masks are off. Depravity is running rampant in its out-loud voice. The veneer of civility is just … gone.
Traditional forms of therapy aren’t created for this. There is no use in challenging inaccurate negative thoughts. Because they aren’t inaccurate. Trauma therapy? Doesn’t do much when the trauma is immediate, continuous, and ongoing. Breathwork, meditation, journaling, etc? All great techniques for calming, grounding, and self-soothing. But not nearly enough.
What is really going on, psychologically, in the face of all this? What theories of care would help? I’m working on a book on the topic, Unfuck Your Doom, to be published by Microcosm Publishing this Fall. One of the techniques I share in the book is a series of action items. Things that help us fight back in any of the ways we have available, while keeping us tethered to the full experience of our humanity.
Doing stuff is important. For ourselves and for our community. Being frozen with fear leads to acquiescing to inhumanity. And we are NOT letting that happen, right?
This technique is a self-coaching strategy, which means this is the exact kind of emotional wellness technique that you can walk yourself through. And you can design the actions you decide to take in ways that are specifically helpful to your immediate experience. It’s based on two main ideas.
The first idea behind this strategy is action in the face of fear. Extensive knowledge of a problem elicits overwhelm and a freeze response…of sorts. Not in the polyvagal kind of way, really, but a level of paralysis by analysis.
Clinician and environmental activist Mary Pipher wrote about this paralysis in her book The Green Boat. She noted that getting people to act means giving them enough information to know a problem needs to be solved.
But when we shoot a firehose of horrifying data into people’s faces, we feel the problem is too big to solve. And the problem right now is that the horrifying data is coming through our devices constantly.
Which is all to say, if you are feeling paralyzed? It’s a very human response to inhumane times. Those who benefit from all this fear and pain are delighted to see it occur. And fuck them.
The second idea in this strategy is that a full life is also a form of protest. The parts that often get left behind when we go into “fight back” mode are the reasons we have chosen to fight. When we are frozen from action by fear and overwhelm, it impacts all areas of our lives and reduces our connection to all facets of our humanity. We lose connection, community, and joy….which are also of utmost importance.
To combat it, we need a combination of both support and independence. If I tell you exactly what to do, I’m just as bad as any other powerful person enforcing their will on you. And it won’t work as well, because the only person who really knows what you need is you.
So what I am going to provide is support for your independence. The things you can do that will help. Things that help others while helping you live to fight another day. All you need to do is fill in the details. Take a deep breath, connect to your own internal moral authority, and get to work.
Nothing we do needs to be big and time consuming. Small, quick actions matter, too. Small and quick makes this a process you can engage in regularly. Because the need will be there for some time.
But we can win this. As long as we act. With hope. And a motherfucking plan.
Do one thing for the cause
Maybe you can’t do anything about the particular thing that is really resting on your heart right now. You are watching something terrible going on in another state or country. You can’t go help. You are barely keeping your own head above water, so you can’t send money. And that does feel so incredibly hopeless.
But there is always something you can do about something. Probably hyperlocal mutual aid, but that matters, too. In some ways, even more so. It’s motion-building. It reinforces that action is the antidote to despair.
The government shut-down in 2025 led to many people not receiving their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding. Meaning food stamps. While I can’t go challenge Congress to a duel, I could do something in my community. I converted my little free library into a little free foodbank. I focused on supplying items that could be cooked in a microwave, for individuals who don’t have stove and oven access.
It was a hit, and continued to be once funding was unfrozen. So I kept it up and now my friends are donating items to help keep it going.
But it doesn’t have to be tied directly to the injury. Something horrible happens, and we bear witness, but there is no curbside food bank kind of action we can take on. A client of mine in Texas was overwhelmed and horrified by the violence she was witnessing in Minnesota in January, 2026 and there was nothing she could do with her despair. Until she realized we were about to experience a cold snap that many unhoused people in her community were ill prepared for.
She collected coats and blankets and brought them out to the parks in her town, near local encampments. She didn’t encroach, on their space but left items nearby for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to the shelter, or even to a local church giving out coats and blankets. She met a different direct need in a different part of the country. It didn’t resolve what she was witnessing, but she found another way to make the world a little bit better when it felt so incredibly awful.
You don’t have to give anything to do something for the cause. You can amplify messages, you can sign petitions, you can contact your representatives. You can also show gratitude and acknowledgement to others who are giving to the cause. Thanking organizers, protestors, and politicians who are out there fighting the good fight. Nothing is more of a shot of needed energy than thanks and recognition for their work.
Remember how in the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City? When everyone was stuck literally at home while medical professionals fought for the lives of our community? Remember how residents opened their windows and clapped and cheered every night at 7pm and how meaningful that was to the medical community? That was also for the cause.
What’s one thing you can do if not immediately but within the next day or so, no matter how small, that will directly make someone else’s life a little less terrible?
Do one thing for the whimsy
This is gonna seem a little silly, but it is truly just as important. Think of whimsy as the contrast to practicality and seriousness. With all this dark shit hanging over us, fun is generally the first thing to go. And it’s one of the best ways of reminding ourselves of our humanity. Nothing helps us feel more present and embodied than joyful, silly fun.
While I am fully comfortable skipping through a grocery store wearing a beanie with a propeller, you don’t have to be whimsical in a way that is perceived by others. You can be whimsical in the comfort your own private space. Maybe you set up a cocktail hour in the evening with your cat. Your cat has tuna juice and you have your favorite treat (no side-eye if it is also tuna juice).
Eat dessert first. Turn a plastic toy dump truck into a fruit bowl for your counter. Reread one of your favorite childhood books or rewatch one of your favorite childhood movies. Remind yourself that life isn’t supposed to be so serious all the time. Because that reminds you what we’re fighting for.
This isn’t toxic positivity, which is a way of hiding from reality in order to maintain optimism. Toxic positivity can only thrive when we minimize or deny reality. Choosing whimsy is when we know exactly how shitty everything is and we refuse to lose an important part of our humanity in the process.
What’s one whimsical thing you can do today?
Do one thing for the comfort
There are actually two forms of self-care and seeking comfort is one of them. The doing something that is soothing to your frazzled nervous system.
Have your favorite drink and snack. Take a hot bath or shower. Go to the gym and work shit out of your system. Go for a walk while listening to your favorite album. We have an incredibly shitty but still very ingrained cultural norm of thinking we need to earn care, rest, and comfort. Instead of recognizing that care, rest, and comfort are necessary for our emotional wellness.
Treat yourself to care. Not later, when you’ve “earned it,” but now, because you need it as much as you need anything that keeps you alive.
Do one thing for adulting
This is the other form of self-care. It’s the not-being-a-dick-to-our-own-bodies part. I refer to it as difficult self care, because there isn’t the immediate gratification of something that is pleasant and calming and soothing. But the more stressed we are the more avoidant we become of other unpleasantness. And then we feel like we are failing at those things, too. But the sense of failure makes us more avoidant. Lather, rinse, repeat…right?
Like going to the dentist. Making a budget. Setting a boundary. Cleaning out a closet. These are the tasks that are tedious, annoying, and stressful so we avoid them when we are already drowning in negative emotions. So why am I suggesting you add to that? Why on earth?
Because you want to be your healthiest, best self so you can live to fight another day.
And just like with doing something for the cause? You feel a sense of accomplishment. Comfort self-care feels nice but adulting self-care feels productive. Just like doing something to make the world a better place, difficult self-care is making our health and well-being a better place.
Do one thing for creative expression
Humans are artists, constantly creating. In fact, that is my favorite definition of culture: anything we create. Creative expression allows us a way to understand our experiences and share them with others. You don’t have to create something that represents your doom, but you will feel better if you create. There is a reason that expressive arts are a highly recommended form of trauma therapy. Humans are wired to express themselves. The act of creation is just that expression.
You sing, you dance, you paint, you write, you sculpt, you make the best cupcakes on planet earth? You especially need to be doing that now. If you don’t have a thing, here’s a great opportunity to find one. What is something you have always wanted to try? What is something you loved as a kid but you haven’t done in years?
If you find that you can’t connect to creativity in that way, either? Bring it down to something simple. Pick wildflowers and arrange them in a vase or sing along to your favorite record. Focus on process, not outcome. Enjoy the playfulness and expansiveness that comes from being creative. It is good not just for our immediate overwhelm—embracing creativity makes us better and more capable problem solvers. And that is our ultimate, societal goal, right?
Do one thing for connection
So many things, I know. This is the last one. Because all of these action items are about ensuring we maintain our humanity in all the ways it starts to slip when we become overwhelmed.
Connection is a big one, because we are far more likely to isolate when things aren’t going well. Or maybe we don’t even know how to talk about what’s bothering you because it’s such a big amorphous blob of suck. You’re afraid of not being able to be present for someone else’s blob of suck because you aren’t managing your own for shit, right?
This doesn’t have to be some deep formal community dialogue process, or even about the overwhelm. It’s about making sure we feel less alone and those around us feel the same. Connection could a text saying “Hey, was just thinking about you and wanted to say hello! I’m working hard to stay sane right now, how are you?” Make plans with people if you can. Be around people to your level of tolerance. Even if all you have the energy for is to compliment someone’s fit at the gas station … you made a connection. They feel good and you feel better because they feel good.
