The little magazine that did
It's time once again for the annual Strange Horizons fund drive.
We launched Strange Horizons a little over eleven years ago. For eleven years, we've published new material every single week, except for a vacation week at the end of each year.
When we launched, a lot of people wrote us off as yet another fly-by-night online magazine. We're now the longest-running continuously publishing online prozine. We'll be publishing our five hundredth original story sometime around the beginning of January.
Of course, quantity is nothing without quality. Our fund drive page lists some of the multitude of excellent writers we've published, many of whom have gone on to become well-known in the field, and many more of whom are, I suspect, likely to do so. As that page notes, six of the stories we published last year have been reprinted in Year's Best volumes, and work we've published has been nominated for a wide variety of awards over the years; last year, our then editor-in-chief Susan Marie Groppi won a World Fantasy Award for editing the magazine.
And if you want to find out for yourself how good the work we publish is, you can; almost everything we've ever published is still available, for free, in our archives.
The magazine is run by an intrepid staff of nearly forty volunteers. We donate our time so that the magazine's entire budget (aside from small amounts for web hosting and publicity) can go toward paying our authors.
In 2010, we raised our pay rate for original fiction to 7¢/word; we're not the best-paying magazine in sf, but we're in the top five (for most short story lengths). We also pay the authors of our articles, columns, poetry, and reviews.
And the only way we can afford to pay all those authors is that readers donate money to us in our fund drives.
We do have a few other sources of income. But donations from individuals cover the majority of our budget.
And that's where you come in. To donate, stop by our fund drive page and click one of the donate buttons. You can donate via Network for Good ($10 USD minimum) or PayPal. Even if you can't donate much, we welcome small donations; even $5 via PayPal would help us out.
Anyone who donates becomes eligible to win one of our fund drive prizes, donated by various members of our community. Novels and anthologies, notecards, artwork, a Tuckerization, poems, a magazine, and more. Lots of good stuff.
And for Americans, donations are tax-deductible, because SH is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Even if you can't donate, please spread the word! One of the things I've been really pleased by this year is that various people have been posting cool stuff about the magazine. For example, see Matt Denault's post at Lingua Fantastika, and Sarah Kanning's post in her blog. (I'm especially pleased by Sarah's post 'cause I don't think I've ever been called “gimlet-eyed” before.) The SH blog has been linking to a bunch of other people's posts, and it's immensely heartening to me to see that public support from the community.
Below is a copy of our fund-drive progress indicator, a nicely updated version of our traditional progress rocket. You can get a copy to display on your pages, if you so desire, by following the instructions in the right-hand sidebar of the fund drive page. Because of the way it's coded, I'm not sure whether the rocket will appear in the Facebook and LJ and Dreamwidth versions of this entry; if it doesn't, then stop by our site to see how we're doing. As I write this, we're at 32% of our goal for this fund drive.
Thanks, as always, for your support!