Good morning, munchkins….

Good morning, munchkins. I hope you haven't spent all your holiday funds yet, because I'm about to make a pitch to you. Yes, it's that time of year again -- time for the Strange Horizons fund drive!

Most of the details are in the link above, including the ways to donate. I just wanted to talk a little about what we're doing this year.

If you've donated before, you may have noticed that we've raised the amount we're looking to raise this time, to $1500 (from $1000 for each of last year's two fund drives). That's maybe a little ambitious, given the economy and all, but it's an important move for us. We started SH with the help of some very generous sponsors, who agreed to put up a chunk of money for our starting years, with the understanding that we'd try to shift as much of the burden over to small donations as we could, year by year. Our overall budget averages around $12,000 annually. Last year we raised a little over $2000 in our two fund drives; this year we're hoping to raise $3000 (half now, half next June). Next year, if all goes well, we'll probably try to raise $4000. And so on. Eventually, I'd be very happy if we were getting enough from small donations to run the magazine entirely on those. I'd be ecstatic, in fact.

It sounds like a lot, $12,000. But we have at least 3000 readers (by very conservative estimate) at this point. If each one donated, that's only $4 each. Obviously, not everyone will donate. But a typical magazine subscription is only $30 -- and we'd only need 400 readers willing to donate that much in order to make our entire budget. I bet we can do that, someday.

For this month, the goal is only $1500. So we only need 50 people to donate $30. Of course, more or less is perfectly acceptable -- we'll take whatever you want to send us, gratefully. (So far, we've received donations for $15, $25, and $125, just to give you a sense of the range.) If you've enjoyed the magazine over the last year, if you want to support the field of science fiction and fantasy, if you want to help create viable on-line publications, if you want to support me and my projects :-) -- if any of these cases apply to you, please consider donating. We're entirely a non-profit, and anything you donate will go directly to the costs of producing the magazine; buying material from writers and artists, hosting costs, PR costs. The staff is entirely volunteer. We do Strange Horizons because we love it, and we hope you love it too.

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