In a bid to make Brittle Star much more self sufficient…

…and to help free up some of our own time to dedicate to it, we’ve joined Patreon, a new donation website that enables you – our lovely fans and subscribers – to support what we do for as little as just over £1 a month*.

As many of you will know, we’ve been running Brittle Star for over 15 years and publish two issues a year. We’re a very tiny team – just two people – me, Jacqueline Gabbitas, and Martin Parker – and we run it around our day jobs. Any money Brittle Star makes from subscriptions and sales goes back into the magazine’s print costs.

Over the years we’ve learned through lots and lots of trial and error that when we give the magazine some proper time and attention beyond the editing and production, the rewards are bountiful! Just one to two dedicated days a week on admin, promotion and outreach boosts sales of the magazine, subscribers and submissions. And this is why we’ve turned to Patreon.

What Patreon is, is a website that helps creative people collectively fundraise to be able to make the things they do – in our case our magazine. It’s patronage in the way artists and writers used to be supported, but much more community-driven. There are some brilliant projects and businesses on Patreon all sponsored by fans and supporters who want to give just a little a month to be able to help. And we think it really will help.

It’s a new way for us to thank our supporters, keep in touch with writers and readers, and be paid for the creative work we do for the magazine. We also want it to be another way of donating and subscribing to the magazine at the same time (with a few perky perks thrown in just for our patrons). If you’re already a subscriber, you might think about becoming a patron to take advantage of the exclusive rewards! And we have some lovely rewards – from access to our Patreon pages to exclusive e-magazines to behind the scenes sneaky peaks.

And as an extra bonus we’re giving the first 50 people who donate at the ‘Something lovely in the post…’ tier a free, randomly selected item from Stonewood Press 

And here’s something slightly bonkers – if only 5% of people who follow us on social media donated $2 (about £1.60) a month we’d be half way to hitting our first goal of £750! (And you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook too, if you don’t already!)

If you’d like to become a Patron of the Arts (this sound super-posh!) in the old-fashioned way, then please do join on www.patreon.com/brittlestar.

*Patreon charges VAT and an admin fee of about 20-25p (depending on the exchange rate).