A People's Guide to Publishing

Today on the People's Guide to Publishing, #vlogcast, Joe Biel and Elly Blue talk about #booksales, with a focus on Quimby's Bookstore as our muse. When you start, you're happy to sell to anyone but we're going to learn our Ps & Qs today.

This week, we explore author events: what is their purpose? How do they work? What are best practices? What is involved?

This week on the People's Guide to Publishing vlogcast, Elly and I compare fiction to nonfiction and see if the claim that marketing fiction is different from marketing nonfiction holds up! ************ Get the book: https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/3663

During 2019 Snow Panic Portland, Dr. Faith Harper appeared at Powell's City of Books to promote her #1 book Unf*ck Your Brain as well as her brand new Unf*ck Your Intimacy and Coping Skills.

This week on the podcast we discuss everyone's favorite and least favorite topic, the demographics of publishing—specifically race and racism. Why are things the way that they are? How is this holding back the industry and sales?

Based on frequently asked questions from our audience and a workshop at PNBA, publishers Joe Biel and Elly Blue teach the value of not trying to be all things to all people or nonfat plain yogurt.

A longtime relic keeping New York's history alive and worth visiting, Ayun Halliday talks self-confidence, looking to yourself, chasing your passions, and creating the plays, books, and zines of your dreams.

After "toiling in obscurity for fifteen years," Mari Naomi published Kiss & Tell with Harper Perennial in 2009. She talks candidly about her career, the internal feelings of never knowing if someone is successful in publishing or not, and some of the wildly inappropriate reactions that she received throughout her career.

Overcup Press publishes formidable coffee table art books, children books, and Portland drinking guides. Today on the podcast Rachel discusses their formative story, how they reach audiences and readers, and the trouble of having five gatefolds in your first book.

Microcosm owners Joe Biel and Elly Blue bring you a workshop they presented at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional trade show about the importance of connecting your work to an audience and the vitality of putting books in boxes (and all of the various dangers and how to avoid them).

Our brains are doing our best to help us out, but they can be real assholes sometimes. Sometimes it seems like your own brain is out to get you—melting down in the middle of the grocery store, picking fights with your date, getting you addicted to something, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. You already told your brain firmly that it isn't good to do these things. But your...

TURN IT AROUND excavates 30 years of the California Bay Area’s prolific punk past, highlighting Berkeley's landmark 924 Gilman Street music collective and its community of bands. Corbett (Bobby Joe Ebola Songbook, Meal Deal with the Devil) has been an entrenched part of this scene for decades and was chosen by Green Day (the executive producers) as the unique individual who could make all of the p...

Kate's journey of sixteen years to become a children's illustrator and author. We talk about racism, her time working for Trump, her current resistance to Trump, what she went through to get published, and share many tips for combating depression, writer's block, and hard days in general.

Laura Stanfill has built a movement of authors and publishers in Portland into a coherent force. Whether that's a product of her own publishing efforts or working to demystify the reality of publishing and setting proper expectations, she's smiling, shaking hands, and introducing new allies!

Co-founder of the Why Not? Fest in Minot, North Dakota, Jazmine is a shining beacon that you can change your community by getting involved and rocking and rolling. She loves to be organized. People that don't do what they agreed to get under her skin. She shows us how even tragedies like suicide can inspire communities to create the greatest memorial music festival.

Founder of Top Shelf Comix's Brett Warnock, has seen quite a bit. From the rise of indie comics to saturation of web and self-publishing, he turned to his second career as a nature and food writer and photographer.

The premiere episode of Microcosm Publishing’s brand new podcast, featuring Johnny “Jughead” Pierson of Screeching Weasel and the Neofuturists about growing up as a musician and an actor in a chaotic household and how it directed his adult life when these hobbies turned professional.