Hello, friends!
It’s been a little over two months since our Kickstarter ended, and we have some exciting updates for you!
First, in case you missed it, our Kickstarter back in April didn’t succeed BUT we are not giving up! We’re still as passionate about this project as ever, and we feel so grateful for those of you who have reached out to us to tell us that you’re still excited about it, too. Knowing there’s a bigger community outside the editorial board who want this anthology to exist gives us all the more motivation to keep at it until it’s a done deal.
We’ve spent the last couple of months resting, reflecting, and regrouping. In addition, our first general submission period closed on July 15th, and we are SO EXCITED about the quality and diversity of submissions and cannot wait to share some of them with you! (More about how that’s going to happen later on in this post.)
What’s next for Inclusive Future Magazine
After seeing how our Kickstarter campaign went and comparing it to similar Kickstarter projects that funded successfully (some within only a day or two!), we are convinced that we need to spend some time building an audience before we take another crack at fundraising for the anthology. To that end, we’ve decided to spend the rest of this year publishing some anthology-appropriate work on our website. One of the editors has put another $300 of their money into this project so that we can still pay SFWA professional rates. We anticipate that we can buy four pieces with that $300, and we will strive to publish one a month between August and December 2021.
Of course, we’d love to be able to buy more and/or longer pieces to publish online, so we’ve set up a Ko-fi account with that purpose in mind. While we could charge a subscription fee to read the work we publish, it’s important to us that the online content be free for readers, as that aligns best with our goal of using the work to generate more interest in the anthology. We’re confident that once people get a taste of what this anthology is about, they’ll be ravenous for more. Hence, donations to our Ko-fi will be gratefully received, and contributors will be acknowledged on our site (unless the contributor requests anonymity). 100% of the donations made to our Ko.fi (minus PayPal fees, which we unfortunately can’t avoid) will go to publishing more work by trans, non-binary, and genderqueer creators on our website. When we’ve successfully fundraised for the anthology, the pieces we’ve published online will be included there, alongside many more.
In addition, we (the editorial team) will work on building our social media presence on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr and on building our email list so that next time we launch a fundraising campaign, there are a few hundred people waiting in the wings to jump on the opportunity to bring this project to life.
How you can help
Some of you have reached out to us to ask how you can best support the project at this time, so here are a few ideas.
1) Sign up for our free newsletter! Newsletter subscribers will receive notifications when new work is published on the website and will be the first to know when submissions reopen and when we have exciting news to share about the anthology. It’s also through our newsletter that we’ll be soliciting ideas for future issues, including your ideas about themes and editors appropriate to those themes. We will never sell or share your information, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
3) Donate to our Ko-fi to help us bring you more amazing work this year by trans, non-binary, and genderqueer folx.
4) Check in regularly with our website and blog, and leave comments when you like what you read. Site visits and comments help us rise in the search results.
5) Keep spreading the word! Share our website, social media, and newsletter sign-up with friends, family, and social groups you think would be excited about what we’re doing.
Once again we extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who backed us on Kickstarter, to everyone who shared our project with others, and to everyone who reached out to us via comment, email, or message to communicate their support and enthusiasm for the anthology. We are super excited to start publishing some fantastic work online this year. And since it’s still our dream to publish Inclusive Future Magazine as an anthology in digital, print, and audiobook formats, we’ll see where we stand in early 2022 and decide from there how we want to approach fundraising for the anthology.
We hope you’re having a good summer if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere or winter if you’re in the Southern and that we’ll see you in our newsletter and social media feeds soon!
Warmest regards,
The Editorial Team at Inclusive Future Magazine