Writer, publisher, and podcaster Elly Blue on following a nontraditional path

Between Microcosm, Working Lit, the podcast, your own writing and editing, and presumably a smidge of life outside of publishing, you do so much. Can we start by talking about how you make time for it all?

A few years ago I went down this rabbit hole of reading interviews with women about how they make time for it all. And all these highly successful women (with the exception of Marie Kondo, who refuses to be rushed)—all of them were just frantic. One of them literally said she would microwave everything for 2 minutes and 22 seconds, or 3 minutes and 33 seconds, so she could save time by not having to press multiple buttons. So anyway, I’ve dedicated myself to never living that way.

My strategy used to be what many busy people do: they just pile on more things until you have no flexibility, so your time winds up managing itself. That was me for a while: I was just saying yes to everything. And I did get a lot done! But then I would just crash and burn. I refuse to live that way any longer. My philosophy now is about focusing on priorities rather than deadlines. If something does have a hard deadline, I will try to make that, but I’m never going to be doing it, I hope, the night before in a panic. There’s no worse feeling to me than that kind of pressure. Instead I’m like, What are the most important things that I need to do? I’m going to do those first, deadlines be darned.

Do you include self-care, or some time for protecting your creative heart in there, or not so much?

I do try to do that. I succeed sometimes. I mean, I do protect my time off work very fiercely. I prioritize that over everything else because I’ve burnt out so many times. But as far as my own creative work, that can very easily fall to the bottom of the pile if I’m not careful.

It seems like everything about your life, your creative practice, and your career have been geared toward leading a nontraditional life. How did you figure out how to create those paths outside of established systems?

I’m not sure that’s something I’ve ever done intentionally. Those established systems just never seemed available to me. I was a weird kid. I dropped out of high school, and I’ve kind of continued to say no thank you to systems that don’t seem like they have a purpose or have my best interests or goals at heart. Me and my partner Joe Biel, who founded Microcosm—we’re both business and life partners—we’re on the same page about this. We look at things that we see most people doing and we’re like, Would that work for us? Sometimes really traditional things do work for us—owning a house seems kind of magical to be able to do. But other things, like getting married or having kids or owning a car… for us, what’s the point? Other people might find great joy in all these things, but we don’t.

As Microcosm has matured and does begin in some ways to look a bit traditional, how did that ethos serve you and the press?

Back in 2011, Joe and I went to New York where Joe was interviewed by Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly. Calvin asked Joe, “Why have I never heard of you?” Which is basically what everybody said at the time. Microcosm was already selling hundreds of thousands of books a year, had a staff of eight or nine, and was kind of too big to be flying under the radar, but nobody in publishing knew who we were.

Now it seems like that was our greatest superpower because we weren’t selling books to bookstores very much. We were selling books to places where other publishers weren’t trying to sell books at all. As we’ve grown, it has become easier to go into more mainstream channels, and the challenge is doing that only intentionally, only in ways that serve us. Because every time we do too much of what we’re “supposed” to do, our business goes down, and when we start having fun again, it goes back up. Our readers recognize that, and our stores recognize that. They can see when we’re having fun and they want to be part of it. We want that, too! Books belong wherever anyone wants books.

I was reading on your blog about your experience going to a coffee conference and thinking through how you had assumed people at coffee shops would just want books about coffee, but that turns out not to be the case. Can you talk a little bit about that, and your thoughts on all the nontraditional places people buy books?

When Microcosm first started, bookstores wouldn’t give us the time of day. We love booksellers—they are the greatest, sweetest people on earth. But there is so much competition for every inch of bookstore shelf space. Every single other publisher is our competition in a bookstore. So for us, selling to bookstores was the final boss, the biggest challenge. Whereas I remember the first time Joe and I were on a trip together and had a box of books in the trunk of the car, we walked into the record store and Joe was just like “hello!” and then started laying books out on the counter. The person working there started picking them up as if hypnotized, and he ended up spending $400 or something to stock all these different titles. So that’s how we got our start, in what we now call “specialty markets”—record stores, grocery stores, apothecaries, sex toy shops, therapist’s offices, places that use our books to educate their customers and tell the story of their own values and their own brand—are still our bread and butter and the majority of our sales. We have more than 12,000 accounts that stock our books.

It’s such a unique way of coming at the book-buying marketplace. In addition to this creative approach to sales, Microcosm has an innovative structure for basically everything you do. Can you talk some about how that was all set up, and how it’s evolved?

I guess it started when we really tried to go mainstream in about 2011. We signed with Independent Publishers Group for distribution, which worked well until the person who brought us in moved to a new distributor and brought us with them. This happens all the time in publishing but it is so, so much paperwork and logistics to change distributors. We went through that two or three times, with the companies getting bought and sold and morphed, and then we decided to go on our own. One of the big things we wanted to do was stop selling to Amazon, because those were all money-losing sales. Amazon is a retailer, but they take the same discount as wholesalers, and they charge all sorts of additional fees. So we decided, let’s leave Amazon and put all that effort into independent bookstores instead. It was such a successful strategy, it blew our minds! We expected to lose business but instead our sales grew 65% that year. Then the pandemic hit, our sales quintupled over the next three years, we grew our team from 13 to 35 people, and that’s where we are now. We did all that by taking a chance on doing things in ways that fit our values rather than doing what we were “supposed” to do.

How does that Microcosm philosophy translate into the choices you make about what to publish? What’s a quintessentially Microcosm book?

We publish mostly nonfiction on a range of topics. The core of it all is self-empowerment, giving the reader tools to live the life they want, to change their life in the way they want, to change their community for the better, to change the world for the better, or to think about the world differently. And we also publish queer smut and feminist bicycle science fiction.

Which goes back to your own roots as a writer, right?

Yes! Before I was with Microcosm, I published a feminist bike zine called Taking the Lane. One of the issues was all feminist bicycle sci-fi, which was so much fun to do that I spun it off into its own series. This fall we’re going to do volume 13, which has a queer Halloween theme and is called What Rides at Night. Look for it on Kickstarter soon!

Speaking of Kickstarter—thank you for the perfect segue. You’re currently running Microcosm’s 100th campaign, a zine celebrating 30 years of Microcosm called The Underground Is Bigger than the Mainstream. You all have been on Kickstarter for 15 years—longer than any current employee. What brought you to the platform all those years ago, and what keeps you here?

Fifteen years ago, Joe and I were living in a camping trailer in a friend’s backyard. A buddy emailed me and said, “Did you hear about this new app where the world funds your project?” And I was like, “I’ve got to try that!” I had just written this big blog post about the sexism I’d encountered in the bicycle world, which got more engagement than anything else I’d ever written. So I decided to expand that post into a zine and put it up on Kickstarter and see what happened. I think I asked for $350 and raised $500, which was so exciting! It seemed like an impossibly high amount of money for me at the time—it was enough for me to pay the anarchist printshop to produce it and buy enough postage to mail it out. Microcosm’s first project was for a book called Scam, and it raised about $5k. That was probably what made the difference between Microcosm continuing to exist and not that month. Very different times! It felt so exciting, those early days on Kickstarter.

What has kept you on the platform all this time? What has Kickstarter meant for you and for Microcosm?

Well the beautiful thing for me is that now we have other brilliant people who run our campaigns so I don’t have to. Abby Rice, our Marketing Manager, does such a good job, and I do not allow myself to ever look at the page unless the project is in trouble or something, because I would spend my whole day just doing that. The feeling of seeing a new person back a project—like, this whole person with their own whole life that is totally unbeknownst to me came and found my project and chose to believe in it—it never gets old, it’s this unbelievable magic. And the folks we’ve worked with at Kickstarter over the years have been incredible supportive collaborators, and some of them have become friends. It feels like Kickstarter wants us to succeed, which is not how we feel with a lot of platforms that we do business with. And you’re also willing to hold us accountable to do better, and we feel the same way about you. It feels a little weird to say this about a business, but we do business with a lot of companies and our relationship with Kickstarter has always been really unique and special.

Your hundredth campaign seems in so many ways to be a celebration of everything that makes Microcosm so special. Tell me how that all came together.

This was all Abby’s idea. They demanded that me and Joe come up with something special for this, so we said sure, we’ll go back to our roots and write a zine. The title, “The Underground Is Bigger than the Mainstream,” is a quote of Joe’s from that 2011 PW interview that people have always quoted back to us over the years, and the whole thing really summarizes what we’re all about. Microcosm was never designed to become a mainstream company. It was started to build something parallel to the mainstream that worked for the people who didn’t fit into the mainstream, like us. The zine is going to be crammed full of a whole bunch of wild, rambunctious content that may or may not totally fit together, but we want to give people a flavor of what it’s like to do this work.

And what is it like to do this work? What are the rewards for you, for your life?

Getting to do this all the time is just really fun. I love working with a ton of different authors, I love reading all the things that we get to put out, I love our customers. The best thing about the job, honestly, is there’s something new to learn every day. It’s never, ever boring.

As a publisher, a lot of your work is in service of other people’s creativity. How do you balance that with your own creative life?

As the company has grown, my job has gotten a lot less creative. When I first started, I might spend an entire day editing a book or spend a whole afternoon looking out the window and thinking up marketing slogans, and now I hardly get to do any of that. At the end of last summer, Joe and I wrote a zine as a gift for a friend who was in the hospital, which was so much fun to do together. So we decided to do one of those every month for a year. It’s been less than six months, and I think we’ve already written fifteen! So clearly there was a creative wellspring that was ready to burst forth.

If you had nothing but time, what would you want to write or do or create or think about next?

My gosh, that’s such a fun question. There’s so many different versions of myself that I’ve imagined over the years and it can be hard to let go of them—even though I now know that I would definitely not be happy as a publicist for NASA. But if money were no object and I could choose to spend my time doing whatever I wanted, I think it would involve a lot of writing. Like maybe I’d write young adult fantasy, or marketing copy for activist movements, or more zines where I could taste all different parts of the world and write about them.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Oriana Leckert.