Free, diverse, sci-fi and fantasy stories for teens
It’s hard to be a teen. Young adult fiction helped a lot of us get through it.
But not everyone is equally represented in the fiction that’s already out there. Awards for YA fiction disproportionately go to novels about male characters (x); fewer than two percent of published novels have LGBT main characters (x); and we need more stories featuring strong characters of color, characters with disabilities, and characters from diverse religious, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds.
We want to make sure every young reader can find themselves in their fiction, to see themselves as the heroes of their own lives -- and we want them to enter worlds full of all the kinds of people they know, and all sorts of people they’ve never met. And we want to make it available for free, online, accessible to everyone.
But we need your help.
We want to pay our authors – and illustrators, and web builders, and logo designers – professional rates. $5,000 dollars will let us do that, publishing one story every month for a year, free and accessible to all readers.
$5,000 is enough to get us started. But the more we get, the more we can give – more stories, more content, more contact with the authors: more of everything it takes to build a strong community of engaged readers.
- If we get 10,000 dollars, we’ll be able to start out publishing twice as many stories every month. That means twice as many chances for readers to find characters they connect with. And with more updates, readers will return to the site more often, so we can build a tighter community.
- If we get 20,000 dollars, not only can we publish two stories every month, but at the end of the year, we’ll be able to produce a print anthology of the year’s fiction. Being online is free and accessible, but we want to to get our stories out there to everyone we can, and a print book gives us even more chances to spread the word.
- If we get 30,000 dollars, we can afford more opportunities to connect directly with our readers. We’d love to help our editors (or even some of our authors) attend more signings and conferences, so they can meet our readers face-to-face.
- Over $30,000, every dollar goes toward making the magazine more awesome. Fancier e-books, story illustrations, contests and giveaways, more contact with the creators, more of everything that makes this a welcoming, fun, and significant space for young adults. It also helps make us sustainable! The more you donate now, the less we have to make during the coming year if we want to break even. And if we get enough money, we could even start paying the editor-in-chief, who is currently doing this as a labor of love.
And what do you get if you donate? Besides helping to make Inscription a reality, your donation could win you anything from fancy Inscription Magazine swag to a year’s e-book subscription to a critique from the editor-in-chief. And however much you donate, you have our eternal gratitude.
How else can you help?
Want to get us started, but don’t have the money yet? Love this idea and want to do even more? Help us spread the word! Tell your friends, link to this campaign on Facebook (or Twitter, or Tumblr), make a blog post – whatever you can do, we appreciate your support!
Haven’t used Indiegogo before?
Indiegogo is a crowdfunding site that lets you donate as much or as little as you want to help make someone’s project a reality. We only get the money, though, if we achieve our goal of $5,000. If you choose to contribute, you’re only committing to donate once we reach our goal. If we don’t, you don’t pay a cent. If we do, then your donation will go through when the campaign ends, and we’ll start sending out the various prizes as soon after that as we can!
Video Credits
Filming and editing by Kevin Norton
Location pictured: Anderson's Bookshop
Website design by Jeremy Tolbert at Clockpunk Studios
Tree logo by Madeline Stevens
Inscription text logo by Ian Corse
What was that teen writing workshop I mentioned in the video? It's the Alpha Writer's Workshop, it's amazing, and I'll be on staff there next summer, so if you'll be between 14 and 19 next summer, and you write science fiction and fantasy, check it out and consider applying!
