![]() ![]() This is my eighth regional guidebook, published by Portland’s wonderfully egalitarian Microcosm Publishing (and printed in the U.S.A.) I’ve been writing books, articles, and web content about Portland and the nearby Columbia River Gorge for 18 years. Stair treks range from 3 to 17 miles (bike those longer ones), and from a few hundred to over 1,200 steps. Portland Stair Walks, published in 2019, take you to each quadrant of this topographically gifted city, with food and drink along all of its 18 routes. Find an audience and publish for it.In a city of volcanic peaks, a mountain chain, two rivers and thriving old neighborhoods, the staircases of Portland, Oregon, give you a super fun way to explore some of America’s most walkable, beautiful urban spaces. “Middle-aged black women are the biggest readers,” he said, pointing to a community he believes publishers ignore. “Biking isn’t just for rich people,” Biel said.Īnd Biel believes that publishers should focus on underserved communities. At a time when cycling advocacy, Biel said, had become stagnant, Microcosm published Bicycle/Race by Adonia Lugo, which examines racism and cycling advocacy. Microcosm, for example, publishes a lot of books on bicycling and sustainability. Three years ago, Biel said, Microcosm distributed books and merchandise to 600 accounts today, Microcosm distribution has more than 2,000 accounts.Ī publishing entrepreneur, Biel writes, should view a new venture as a “passionate hobby” focused on “something you care about so much you can’t stop thinking about it.” And publishing, he said, should also be a “movement”-essentially an extension of the passionate-hobby concept that “advances and offers new angles on the category.” The house has 14 employees, a 5,000-sq.-ft. This year, it will publish 25 books and generate just over $1 million in revenue, a gain of nearly 35% over 2017. Microcosm’s program is also his book’s proof of concept. Microcosm does a better job, he said, distributing its own books to trade bookstores and to the nontraditional retailers-record shops, bike shops, grocery stores, gardening and plant nurseries, and boutiques-that are its core market. But after several years of being distributed by PGW, Biel is going back to self-distribution and will no longer sell to Amazon. Microcosm began as an underground culture operation, publishing and distributing its own zines and books until it was big enough to attract a trade distributor. His publishing credo is that the “underground is bigger than the mainstream” when it comes to books. “I got a cold reception from bookstores when I started, so I would go to a nearby record store, and our books would sell really well there,” Biel said. The book is also unconventional: Biel separates his approach to publishing from what he calls “the literary industrial complex’’-i.e., big New York trade book publishers and mainstream bookstores. It’s the eighth book Biel has written and published at Microcosm.īiel, who struggled to graduate from high school and has Asperger’s syndrome, said he wanted to write “something thorough and accessible” on publishing that would be useful to that intern. With that intern in mind, Biel wrote A People’s Guide to Publishing: Build a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful, Book Business from the Ground Up, a comprehensive guide to launching a book publishing venture, which Microcosm will release this month. ![]()
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