About Us

Anathema is an Ignyte Award-nominated online tri-annual magazine of speculative fiction (SF/F/H, the weird, slipstream, fabulism, and more). We exclusively publish the work of people of colour (POC)/Indigenous/Aboriginal creators on every range of the LGBTQIA spectrum.

Our mission has always been to expand the field to include more from the exceptionally talented creatives who have traditionally been marginalized by straight, white, and patriarchal power structures.

It’s been an amazing five years. A little over 75 original works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry published. The immense privilege of being the home of first publications for multiple authors. Watching with absolute joy as several of our authors have had their stories with us picked up for pro-rate reprints and Year’s Best anthologies. And, you know, the absolute elation of that aforementioned Ignyte nomination coming at a time when our team are all exhausted with the ongoing pandemic and personal and professional demands. It was a lovely way to cap our first five years.

And looking ahead to what’s next for us has meant a lot of looking at why we publish the way we do.

We’ve had the chance to be a home to stories that have a hard time getting picked up elsewhere – some for being too unusual, others too nakedly queer, others just not fitting the expected mold a primarily white publishing establishment wants from QBIPOC creators. Anathema, by intent, occupies a radical socialist queer space in the larger genre conversation. And in so doing we walk in the footsteps of giants, our own path fleeting and hope that the work we do can leave some lasting mark. But that takes funds. And we are not yet a self-sustaining entity. We earn some revenue through our website store, but most of our operating funds come from informal subscription drives and more formalized fundraising campaigns like this one.

And, see, that’s where you come in. Because we can be the home the incredibly talented, underrepresented authors in our pages need through the act of publishing and promoting the magazine. But without your support, those issues never get to see the light of day.

Now, as Covid rages round the world, claiming ever more lives and leaving devastation and grief in its wake, we find it difficult to once again put cap in hand, outstretched for whatever aid we can ask. There are so many causes, individual and systemic, needing attention as the world burns. And yet … this work is important to us, and hopefully to you. We’ve always tried to make Anathema a space for healing and access and representation: through providing a place for people to see themselves in the text; through publishing cries of righteous rage in poetic, cathartic verse and prose; through showing equally necessary quiet, beautiful moments of joy eschewing the trauma porn so many marginalized authors are required to peddle if they wish to publish; and through providing free access to everything we publish.

And so we ask, once more, for help putting these stories out into the world so the least represented among us can see themselves and know that they are not alone; that there is a community, a space, a home for them and for their work. That though we are a community flung far and wide, hiding for our safety and our lives in so many countries, we are here for each other, a lifeline sometimes figurative and sometimes literal.

Our Costs

Everything we make goes to paying our contributors and keeping the website running, so Anathema’s annual funding model is inexpensive and fairly streamlined. For our 2022 publication schedule, we’re raising our pay rates again! So the funding model will look familiar to those of you who’ve seen these fundraisers before, but the numbers are a little different this time round:

• $2,200 for fiction: fifteen pieces over three issues, all paid at a flat rate of $150 (CAD).
• $450 for poetry: six pieces over three issues, all paid at a flat rate of $75 (CAD).
• $900 for cover art: one cover each over three issues, all paid at a flat rate of $300 (CAD).
• $450 for production: cover layout, ebook production, and website costs.
• $300 for remaining 2021 production costs, specifically to cover the required funds to get our December issue out the door.

We’re budgeting only a small amount for physical mailing costs of rewards this year as we’re trying to stay away from physical rewards for the most part given global shipping delays and exponentially higher postal costs.

Our goal for this campaign is $5,000 (CAD) to cover the above costs for a year (and round out the last costs from this year). That’s including transit fees and bank transfer fees, IndieGoGo’s and Paypal’s fees, and to give us room in case of unexpected costs. And in publishing there are always unexpected costs.

We’ve chosen the flexible funding option on this campaign so that no matter what we get, we can put it straight toward paying for content. We still hope to be able at some point to shift to a sustainable funding model via subscription and individual issue sales and direct donations, but we’re not there yet.

The Rewards

In exchange for your support, we’re offering a range of perks from subscriptions to short story and novel critiques, and copies of our editors’ works. As always, we’re looking into more rewards to offer as the campaign gets underway, and we’ll be updating the campaign as we add things.

Stretch Goals

If we raise more than our initial goal, we’re looking to do the following:

• $6,350: this would let us double, rather than just raise, our current rates. So $400 for cover art, $200 for fiction, and $100 for poetry going forward.

And … that’s the only goal we’ve got in place this year. Honestly, it’s a pretty big one, and we would be ecstatic to hit it. But let’s work on getting that base funding (and raised rates!) squared away first. Then we’ll turn to loftier goals.

Risks and Challenges

As with any small operation, there are always challenges. You prepare for what you can, and wing the rest. Hell, we never saw a pandemic on the horizon, but we’re still here, making the mag work through staff illness and (our own paid) work deadlines. Every year brings content shortfalls, content replacement on tight turnaround, occasionally fighting our production software, and whatever else life has thrown at the three of us. (Yes, we really are just a team of three.)

But the advantage of being a small core team is flexibility. We pivot as needed and keep moving, overlapping skills among out team members making it possible to pick up the slack and keep moving as needed.

Our two biggest challenges remain, as ever, content acquisition and raising sufficient operating funds. The first we’re always working on. The second … well, once again that’s down to you.

Other Ways to Help

We spend a lot of time, while working on these campaigns, talking about operating funds and how they’re all-important to the work we do. And, yes, technically they are. But contributing to this campaign, right this very minute, isn’t the only way to keep Anathema alive and publishing. You can help us out by:

• Using IndieGoGo’s sharing tools to get the word out directly.
• Spreading the word on social media channels.
• Don’t want perks, but maybe just want to toss funds our way? We have a Donate page on the website for that!
• Anathema’s open to unsolicited submissions year-round, so spread the word.
• And if you’re considering submitting to us, please don’t self-reject. If your work fits what we’re looking for, we want to see it!