Good Trouble: Building a Successful Life and Business with Asperger's

In 1996, everything about Joe Biel's life seemed like a mistake. He was 18, he lived in Cleveland, he got drunk every day, and he had mystery health problems and weird social tics. All his friends' lives were as bad or worse. To escape a nihilistic, apocalyptic worldview and to bring reading and documentation into a communal punk scene, he started assembling zines and bringing them in milk crates to underground punk shows. Eventually this became Microcosm Publishing. But Biel's head for math was stronger than his ability to relate to people, and it wasn't until he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome that it all began to fall into place. This is the story of how, over 20 years, one person turned a litany of continuing mistakes and seeming wrong turns into a happy, fulfilled life and a thriving publishing business that defies all odds.

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, a Publishers Weekly's fastest-growing publisher from 2022-2024, and WorkingLit, the software responsible for Microcosm's aforementioned success--now available for other publishers. Biel serves as a board director of the Independent Book Publishers Association, and 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 (and cohost of the podcast by the same name), 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 writes a publishing substack and lives in Portland, OR. Joyce Brabner and her family are the subject of the 2004 HBO film American Splendor about her and her late-husband, Harvey Pekar, and their life spent expanding the comic book medium beyond superheroes. She is the author of numerous books, including Our Cancer Year and nonfiction comic collaborations with Alan Moore, among many others. She lives in Cleveland, OH.