During these fund drive, we (of course) want you to donate. But we also want you to help us out with publicity! We're more likely to succeed if more people know what we're doing.
We would really appreciate it if people (like you!) helped us promote this fund drive by mentioning it in blogs or discussion boards or whatnot. Tell people why you like Strange Horizons, and why it's worth supporting. Talk about a favorite story or article, maybe, or about how great it is that we manage to keep publishing all this great content with an all-volunteer staff. And don't forget to link to the fund drive pages!
In order to thank you for your help, we're offering special weekly prizes. Each week, everyone who helped us publicize by blogging about the fund drive will be entered in a drawing. (We'll check for incoming links, but you should also comment on this post to let us know you're eligible for this week's prize.)
For this first week of the fund drive, the blogger incentive prize will be an advance copy of Cory Doctorow's new novel Makers. The book is currently being serialized at Tor.com, but if you're interested in a paper copy, the book isn't scheduled to be released until late October. Tor Books has given us an advance copy, though, and if you blog about the fund drive between now and Sunday (August 8th), it might be yours!
Cory Doctorow describes Makers this way: "Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries." Strange Horizons is especially pleased to be offering one of Cory's books as a prize, since we've always felt that our mission (providing excellent content to readers without charging them to read it) was right in line with the Creative Commons publishing model that Cory has been such a vocal proponent of.
Help us publicize the fund drive! We'll get more attention (and hopefully more money), you'll get the satisfaction of knowing you've done a favor for a magazine you like, and you might get to read a great novel a couple of months before it hits bookstores.