Save money, save the planet, and craft a sustainable domestic life without relying on smelly, toxic, expensive consumer products. This handwritten and hand-drawn book of charming tutorials for natural housekeeping and home repair, organic gardening and food preservation, herbal first aid, and mending clothes is both fun and accessible. It’s full of simple skills that anyone can and should learn.
From creating healthy tinctures and salves to preserving excess food to fixing a leaky faucet, this book is great if you’re looking to live more simply, create a comfortable nest, and truly do it yourself. Combining the power of Raleigh Briggs’s bestselling Make Your Place and Make It Last to form a complete guide to everything you need to consume less and live more in line with your values.
Herbal remedies and wise perspectives to help make your cycle less of a rollercoaster.
Ever felt like your uterus is out to get you? Or experienced dismay at the politicians out to get your uterus? This book will speak straight to your soul. Get to know your body with this inclusive guide to herbal, holistic self-care for every womb, at every stage of life—from puberty to post-menopause and everything in between.
Herbalist and pregnancy loss doula Angelica Merritt offers a wealth of anatomical science, plant medicine, and nutritional and herbal strategies to support body literacy, a regular menstrual cycle, and your reproductive goals. If you’re dealing with irregular menstruation, PCOS, infertility, pregnancy loss or release, perimenopause, or any other reproductive health issue, look to these pages for remedies that bridge the scientific and the spiritual. Inside you’ll find guidance in holistic modalities such as castor oil packs, breath work, breast and womb massage, baths, and infused oils, along with rituals and journal prompts. You’ll learn about the connections between the womb, the moon cycle, and the archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Transform your self-care through the magick of the womb within!
You can join the community of support for this exciting project on Kickstarter.
A Workbook to Reclaim Your Period from PMS and PMDD
Your period doesn’t have to ruin your life! Sometimes our menstrual symptoms prevent us from showing up the way we want to, and there is not a lot of information about how to feel better. You may have had trouble finding resources that explain what’s happening in your body and mind. You may have even been disbelieved or blamed.
Our Sacred Cycle was created to help. Written by a therapist who specializes in premenstrual syndrome (PMS), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and other forms of hormone imbalance, this workbook offers accessible information and reflective exercises to help you understand the physiology of the menstrual cycle and how it affects you, harness your power, and live in harmony with your body. Whether you want to heal from patriarchal trauma or connect with yourself in a new way, this is the empowering, gender-neutral feminist resource you need to reclaim your cycle, take control of your symptoms, and achieve a transformative mind-body connection. You can feel better!
Imagine going for a walk with a knowledgeable friend who points out all the plants you see and the coolest facts about them. This practical field guide is that friend, providing a delightful introduction to 58 of the plants, trees, weeds, and herbs you’ll encounter walking around most US cities.
Accurate, charming line drawings accompany detailed yet accessible botanical information about each plant that helps you easily identify it in all seasons. You’ll also learn each plant’s backstory, including its relatives, origins, historical uses, and other fun facts. Getting to know the plants you meet every day will help you strengthen your sense of place, improve your foraging game, make new botanical and herbal friends, and marvel at the life that is all around us.
Magic mushrooms offer so many marvels, from transformative healing to excitement. One thing they are not known for is flavor. David Connell’s quest to make psilocybin palatable led him to develop recipes that integrate small, measured quantities of shrooms into tasty food and drink.
Stop gnawing on bitter, fibrous stalks and begin your journey with a calming, pleasant snack or sip. These healthy, delicious recipes are lactose-free, with gluten-free substitutions throughout, and have no added sugars. Photographs and illustrations will inspire your explorations of food, fungi, and consciousness.
The essential core of witchcraft is wisdom and change. We’ve always been rebellious and defiant, and our own traditions are not exempt from challenge. Delve into iconic witchcraft traditions like the utterance of “blessed be” and the influential Wiccan Rede, exploring their origins and relevance today. This introspective journey isn’t just about history; it’s an empowering quest. It challenges you to assess these traditions’ place in your craft. Embrace, adapt, or boldly defy these customs—this edition empowers you to shape your craft’s evolution on your terms as you travel your unique spiritual path.
Make It Last: Sustainably and Affordably Preserving What We Love is an illustrated guide to clothes and food and home. Raleigh Briggs bridges the gap between life in a disposable culture and the basic skills needed to save money and live more sustainably.
This book teaches you how to extend the lives of the things you love by repairing clothing, preserving home-grown food, and even repairing your kitchen sink and making your own soap. Briggs takes her longtime commitment to community building through the DIY movement and shares her valuable experience with the reader through a conversational tone in her hand-drawn and -illustrated guide.
The Utne Reader described Raleigh’s work as “A forceful antidote to the cheapening of thrift culture: a meticulously hand-lettered, pint-size volume. When you raise your fist against the values that derailed our economy, lift this book in it.” Now you can save money and save the planet while saving your prized possessions!
Magick is all around us and should be for everyone. But the practices in many witchcraft books can be difficult for many of us to perform due to chronic illnesses, sensory issues, allergies, or other disabilities—and the financial limitations that often go hand in hand with them.
In this guide, disabled witch Kandi Zeller sets out to change that. Through 90 inclusive (and sometimes spicy) magickal rituals designed for witches with disabilities of all kinds—especially the invisible ones—Disabled Witchcraft lays out a truly accessible magickal practice with a solid dose of humor and heart. If your spoons (aka available energy and executive function) are limited on any given day, that doesn’t need to be a hindrance to following your spiritual path. From guidance on using crystals for nervous-system regulation to tarot readings for spoonies to laying a curse upon unjust health systems, you’ll find practical tools to harness the magick of your disabilities, fight both ableism and capitalism, and embrace a more expansive version of the path.
Since the mid-1990s, the secretive cell organization calling itself the Earth Liberation Front (ELF, or Elves) has waged a brazen campaign of property damage and arson attacks against entities they hold responsible for environmental destruction, including timber companies, ski resorts, slaughterhouses, and car dealerships.
In Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. the Earth Liberation Front, former ELF spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh charts the history and ideology of the ELF, as well as the repression strategies the government uses to destroy activist movements—including tactics we continue to see wielded against global liberation movements today. Rosenbraugh himself was the subject of a shocking New York Times article last year detailing the efforts of an informant connected to the FBI and the CIA to draw him into a book contract designed never to reach publication, but which provided authorities the opportunity to comb his drafts for clues that might help them apprehend ELF conspirators. Rosenbraugh, though, only ever transmitted anonymous communiques, and when he made a discovery about the man posing as his “book packager” that he writes “made my heart race, made my breath vanish, and sent me off to gather every weapon I had in my house,” the project came to an uneasy end.
Luckily, Rosenbraugh was still determined to let his story see the light of day after this harrowing ordeal, and the book was originally published in 2004. Twenty years later, Microcosm is proud to release this revised and updated edition, featuring a new foreword from Extinction Rebellion co-founder Tamsin Osmond. Burning Rage remains a valuable and illuminating insider account of the ongoing battle between radical environmentalist movements and the powers of the state; one that offers frank insight into the great personal cost of political action, but also the urgency of collective resistance to capitalist violence.
Publishing a book is both the end, and the start, of a long process of bringing your writing into the world and getting your book into the hands of readers. Promoting your book starts long before publication day, or even before the manuscript is finished, and continues long after your book comes out. As a writer, marketer, and community builder, I know that promoting your book can feel intimidating, burdensome, overwhelming, nerve-wracking, and exhilarating all at once. The exercises in this workbook break down the process into manageable, understandable pieces and make it fun along the way.
The fact of the matter is that whether your book is self-published, published by an independent press, or put out by a major publisher, you as the author are the one who needs to work the hardest to get it out into the world. Whether you are still in the process of writing your book or eagerly waiting for its publication day, working through these exercises will enable you to confidently create a sustainable promotion plan that makes sense for your book, audience, and life.
No one is born knowing how to promote themselves or their work. Marketing and promotion are skills that are learned. As you practice, you will feel more comfortable putting yourself and your work out into the world and will learn what works for you, your writing, and your community of readers. The exercises in this workbook are ones I’ve used myself to promote my books and honed for over a decade through helping creative people develop the business side of their practice and build support for their projects. I’m excited to share them with you so that you can use them to take concrete steps to create a supportive environment for your book to thrive and succeed.
How to use this workbook
This workbook is intended to complement my book Promote Your Book. For deeper context, insight, and advice from a wide variety of authors as well as literary, marketing, and community-building professionals, I suggest you read the book alongside this workbook and do the exercises in order. For those doing these exercises in conjunction with reading the book, I’ve noted the chapter that each exercise corresponds to. But whether you are using this workbook as a companion to the book or as a standalone, it is designed to take you step-by-step through the book promotion process so that you gain a holistic understanding of how to reach your readers. If possible, I recommend working through these exercises before your book comes out and using them to create a full book promotion plan, which is outlined in the last section of this workbook.
While there is no one pathway to success for a book and no proven formula to make your book a smash hit, there are concrete actions you can take to support your book and its trajectory in the world. Consider this workbook your starting place.
Chapter One: Building literary community
While the act of writing is often an isolating one, publishing a book means connecting with the wider world. Being a writer of any kind, whether you are writing in a specific genre or about a specific subject, connects you with a community. The sooner you can start building and deepening connections with communities who can support you as a writer or who would be interested in the subject of your book, the broader the basis of support you will have during and after publication. Community is not a one-way street, but rather an exchange between people with shared interests and values. This is important to keep in mind as you complete the exercises in this section, which will enable you to make a plan to connect with and engage your community.
Reflect and brainstorm. Write down three communities you are already part of:
1.
2.
3.
Now, write down three specific communities your book might speak to:
1.
2.
3.
Reflect: Where is there overlap? If there isn’t overlap, why?
If there’s no overlap between the communities that you are a part of and the communities that your book speaks to, that indicates space to grow and a potential place to prioritize. You may find that you need to focus your energies on building community in places that are interested in what you are writing about. The next set of exercises can help you focus on how to engage, and as you do so, you may find more overlap.
