by Joe Biel and Elly Blue
Microcosm Publishing
12/8/2025, booklet
SKU: 9781648416682
How do you start a movement that can flourish for decades alongside the mainstream? How do you get out of bed every day to pursue your meaning and purpose when the world is falling apart around you? Microcosm Publishing's Joe Biel and Elly Blue tell the story of how an attempt borne of desperation to find meaning and purpose ended up sticking, growing, and catching on with others who were on the same quest for tools to make life worth living. In this jam-packed zine celebrating Microcosm's 30th anniversary, we share tips and lore about how to publish books and zines, organize events and tours, find your passion, prevent suicide, do mutual aid, and more ways you can take the scrappy spirit of punk rock and other underground movements to build something better than the mainstream and live according to your values every day.
About the Author:
Joe Biel is a self-made life-long-learner and autistic publisher who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock to sell millions of books. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Publishers Weekly's #1 fastest-growing publisher of 2022 and #3 in 2023/2024, and WorkingLit, the software responsible for Microcosm's aforementioned success--now available for other publishers. Biel has been featured in Time, Esquire, Forbes, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), as well as NPR and PBS. Biel is the author of A People's Guide to Publishing, Autism Relationships Handbook, Unfuck Your Business, Enduring Legacy of Portland's Black Panthers, and dozens more. Biel is the director of five feature films, including Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland, $100 & a T-Shirt, and hundreds of short films. Biel lives in Portland, OR.
Elly Blue is a co-owner and the vice president of Microcosm Publishing, and the co-host of the People's Guide to Publishing podcast. Her books include Everyday Bicycling and Bikenomics, and she is the editor of the annual Bikes in Space anthology of feminist bicycle science fiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, their dog, and a small fleet of cargo bicycles.