Semiannual plea for cash
Hi, folks. It's Strange Horizons fund drive time; twice a year we ask readers to send a donation to help cover the costs of running the magazine. Since the staff are all volunteers, the costs in question are mostly paying for the fine fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art that we publish.
People are always surprised to hear about the size of our staff (insert size joke here), so I'll mention that we've got about thirty dedicated volunteers who keep the magazine running. We publish new material every week; we haven't missed a week (except for our vacation week at the end of each year) since we launched four years ago.
We have a great staff, great contributors, and great readers, but what keeps the magazine going financially is donations. Our content (some of which gets nominated for awards and reprinted in Year's Best anthologies) is free, and we pay professional rates to fiction authors, and it's all funded by the donations of readers like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you; we seem to have a pretty broad range of readers.
If you'd like to help keep us going, you don't have to donate a lot. I say this every time, but I think it bears repeating: I'd much rather have 500 people give us $5 each than have 5 people give us $500 each. And even if you give us $5 (not much more than the cost of a single issue of one of major print sf magazines), you'll be entered in a drawing for our fund drive prizes. But if you can give us more, there are other benefits; give $25, for example, which is less than the cost of a subscription to one of the major print sf magazines, and you become a member, entitled to a lovely membership card; this fund drive's card features artwork by Janet Chui.
For more information, or to donate, see our fund drive page.
If you can't afford to donate, or don't want to for whatever reason, there are other things you can do to help out. You can post in your journals, mailing lists, forums, and other places about the magazine; you can submit art, articles, fiction, poetry, or reviews; you can even join our staff, or tell others about our open positions.
So go forth and spread the word! Or just donate. We take PayPal as always, and (new for this fund drive) we can now accept credit card donations via Network for Good.
