Next month we will mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Clarkesworld. The gap between conception and publication was a little over twelve weeks. It may sound like a ridiculous pace, but it all made sense to us at the time. We looked at the state of the market and noticed that time and money were the common reason publications closed. It’s still true today. It takes a lot of work to produce a magazine and it’s a significant challenge to fund and sustain one. Our solution–and one I still advise–was to start small. Each issue was only two stories–of less than four thousand words each–and a cover.

We never ended a year in the red, but that’s because we made the same mistake so many in this field do: we didn’t pay ourselves. We had day jobs to fall back on, so we allowed our enthusiasm for the project to push us to “reinvest” what we should have been paid back into the magazine. I think imposter syndrome takes some of the credit there as well. Being small made it feel lesser, like we needed to do more to justify people actually paying for it.

A little over three years in, the growing acceptance of ebooks changed the financial landscape for magazines, both online and print. For an online magazine like us (we didn’t have a print edition at the time), it changed everything. Our budget became a lot easier to plan and we saw a path that would allow us to grow. We still weren’t taking a salary for ourselves, but in addition to adding more stories, the staff were paid just a little bit better. Still nowhere near what they were worth, but better than what many other online magazines were doing.

It took a near-fatal heart attack in 2012 to kick some sense into me. What we were doing was a real job and we deserved to be paid. It was never reinvesting. That was a lie we had told ourselves to feel good about not getting paid. I spent part of my recovery digging into what it would take to correct that, and set a path towards making this a career.

Five years later, my editing work, which also included anthologies, had become a part-time (in terms of pay) job. Not particularly profitable–working as many hours at McDonalds would have likely been better–but a job that I loved. With my family’s support and blessing, I left my day job in 2017, knowing that to go further would require more time and energy that I had available.

This job pays for my healthcare plan. What’s offered by my wife’s employer is insufficient, so I don’t have a choice there. What I didn’t count on was just how fast those premiums would rise or that a pandemic would increase the magazine’s non-salary expenses or that Amazon would kill their digital subscription program and leave us scrambling to rebuild. Calling the last five years challenging would be an understatement, but somehow, we’ve still managed to make a little progress on pay in that window.

I try to remain positive. Many people in this community don’t believe it’s possible to complete the goal we’ve established, but the progress we’ve made suggests it’s hard, not impossible. When we started this magazine a lot of people said we wouldn’t last a year. Same thing. Hard, not impossible. I didn’t give up then and I refuse to give up now.

It’s been suggested that we hold a subscription drive to help move this forward. Our thoughts? We’ve already committed to direct all new revenue towards addressing compensation, so this would provide an opportunity to further that goal. A few hundred new subscriptions would take us through to the end of the pay increase cycle and be a great way to both thank the team and celebrate our twentieth anniversary. I normally avoid limited time drives or campaigns because they come with lingering side effects, but I think I’ll make an exception in this instance. (I’m happy to go into details about those side effects, but maybe an editorial isn’t the place.)

No special deals, just a call to action. Let’s see how many new subscribers we get between now and October 1st, the same window of time we had from conception to launch in 2006. If you can help spread the word, we’d appreciate it.

Thank you!