Flickering in the deep of night: Why I tweeted about Fireside’s survival

I wanted to explain this tweet from late last night a little further:

Year 4 has been spectacular. We’ve had so many fantastic stories, a few great books, a ton of great art from Galen Dara, and of course, the #BlackSpecFic report. And amid all of that, we’ve been continuing to support writers with our rate of 12.5 cents a word, among the highest in the genre fiction community.

We’ve also seen our Patreon slowly backslide. It’s our main source of support, the reason we can pay such high rates. At the same time, some of our costs have been rising. We’re running month to month on our Patreon funds, and we barely have enough money to run a bit over 6,000 words a month.

Fireside was founded on the principle of fair pay for writers, and we are never going to reduce our rates. So we’re in a squeeze.

We are planning a more formal fund-raiser in the months to come, but I was going over some numbers last night and tweeted in a moment of mild despair. This is a tough business. We’ve never turned a profit, and have always struggled to break even. We want to keep bringing you great stories, but we can’t do that if we can’t keep the servers on.

If you love Fireside and the work we do, please consider joining us on Patreon. It starts at just $2 a month, an believe me, those pledges add up fast. We need to reverse this slide, and if we can get some momentum going now before we kick off our fund-raiser, it might truly make the difference between keeping the fire burning and letting it gutter out.

Thank you. All your support over the years means the world to us. We love you all.