What happened to Portland’s bike scene? Maybe first it would help to envision what it used to be. There was this booming, diverse, vibrant DIY bike activist and bike fun scene that transformed this city, from Critical Mass to Shift to any number of wild initiatives popping up. Any night of the week, there was […]
Upper class cycling culture and the demise of Portland’s bike movement
The Vulva Bike: A true tale of shock, gl...
Posted onWhen I first saw the ShockTwat on its inaugural journey, I marveled at it for two minutes straight and then snapped a photo with my phone at the last moment before it rolled away. When the time came to launch the Kickstarter campaign for Our Bodies, Our Bikes, I looked through my photos for a […]
Now Kickstarting Our Bodies, Our Bikes (...
Posted onIt’s official: Our Bodies, Our Bikes the book is in the works. And it’s funding on Kickstarter right now. The image above is one of Katura Reynolds‘ preliminary sketches for the book cover. You might remember Katura from the space sharks on the cover of the first Bikes in Space, or from her compelling stories […]
Taking the Lane grows up: From zine to j...
Posted onUpdate: Now funding this project (it’s been renamed the Journal of Bicycle Feminism) on Kickstarter! Check it out! Well, it had to happen one day: Taking the Lane is growing up. After nearly four years of putting out a more-or-less quarterly zine, we’re graduating to something bigger. It’s called: Taking the Lane: A journal of […]
Giant Robots on Bikes (with illustration...
Posted onI got home from tour to find a big box of the new promotional postcard for Elly Blue Publishing (joining its popular colleague the Bike Tour Packing List postcard): The mama robot cargo bike image was drawn by Ellie Poley. She sent it in response to my call for “sloppy drawings of robots on bicycles.” […]
Vehicular Cyclists weigh in on women
Posted on@deisum @ellyblue https://t.co/LGFbmSakxZ pic.twitter.com/hoEuEOdLoN — Sam Ollinger (@ollingers) July 10, 2014 After clicking through to the original forum thread to confirm that John Forester’s comments about gender screencapped here were made in earnest, I have nothing to add. Thanks to the strong-stomached Sam Ollinger, director of San Diego advocacy group BikeSD, for going boldy into […]
My cost of bicycling (what's yours?)
Posted onA while back I wrote a fact-check of the $308 figure that gets bandied about as the annual cost of bicycling in the US. As I discovered, the number is entirely false; it’s based on an old data entry error that quietly persisted until it became taken for granted as a fact. I found (as […]
Dinner and Bikes 2014 - The tour begins
Posted onIt’s that time of year again. We’re on a train, headed all the way east to begin our fourth annual Dinner and Bikes tour. In New York, we’re meeting up with Joshua Ploeg, who makes extravagantly delicious food (that happens to be vegan and gluten free) and Aaron Cynic, friendly roadie and documentarian. This year […]
The Business of Publishing: Working with...
Posted onThis is the third post in a series of articles for aspiring publishers, written by Joe Biel, the founder and owner of Microcosm Publishing and author of A People’s Guide to Publishing. Once you’ve decided how you want to release your work, your next publishing decisions are going to be technical. If you use a […]
Kickstarter and the Praxis of Everyday L...
Posted onBack in 2010, I published my very first zine, which was funded with my very first Kickstarter project, and coincided with the process of booking my very first tour. I couldn’t have done any of these things without a lot of help from a lot of people. One of these people, pictured here, is Sarah […]
The Business of Publishing: The Distribu...
Posted onThis is the second post in a series on the business side of publishing by Joe Biel, the founder and owner of Microcosm Publishing and author of A People’s Guide to Publishing. In the previous post in this series, I discussed the economies of various publishing formats—eBooks, print-on-demand, and traditional format offset printing—and the reasons […]
Traveling again—Coastal book events
Posted onTour booking logistics are well underway; we’re headed out to take our Dinner and Bikes roadshow out east at the end of May. We’ll be driving a Waste Vegetable Oil burning van, serving up delicious vegan, gluten-free food, showing movies, selling books, and talking about Bikenomics of course. If we’re coming through your town, please […]
Elly Blue Publishing goes digital!
Posted onHere at EBP HQ, we are big believers in the printed word (check out our post from earlier this week about the economics of publishing for one of the biggest reasons why). At the same time, we’re hardly luddites or purists or anything like that—this business is built on tech, through and through. It may […]
The Business of Publishing: The economic...
Posted onThis post was written by Joe Biel, founder and owner of Portland-based independent press Microcosm Publishing (and not incidentally, the publisher of my books Bikenomics and Everyday Bicycling). A couple of years ago, I posted a short guide to how I fund and sell zines; quite a few people since have said that they used […]