Category Archives: Donate

Final Week of Fundraising

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We’re into the final week of fundraising for the contest and we’re nearly there! We have received two more donations-one from an anonymous and one from Darusha Wehm. A big shout out to Darusha for supporting the science fiction community and the creative commons.

We only need another $240 to make it to our goal. That means only 24 people to donate $10. Surely, there are at least that many Vinge fans out there? (I’m feeling a bit like NPR or PBS as I write this.) We’ll take any amount, even $1. The number of donations that we get helps increase our ranking on Indiegogo and in turn raises our visibility.

With full funding, we will have prize money for the winner, runner up, and third prize, plus a small honorarium for the judge. (I have lined up a very cool judge and will be blogging about this soon.)

Our first indiegogo donor!

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We have our first donor to the Indiegogo campaign.

Abram Hindle, a soon-to-be professor at University of Alberta, has given us an extremely generous gift of $50. He wrote, “I am donating because I love Sci-Fi and I want to further enrich the commons by supporting submissions licensed under CC-BY-SA.” For his contribution, we’ll be acknowledging him in the book, sending him a post card, and a button.

Now, how about you? Can you spare us a buck?

 

Two new donations for prizes: Cash and books, oh my

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Great news! I have received two gifts that I will be putting towards prizes.

1. I have received a cash gift of $600 from an anonymous donor. I will be putting $500 of this towards first prize. The remaining $100 will be used for photocopying and postage.

2. Tor Books will be giving one copy of either “Fire Upon the Deep” or “Children of the Sky” to all the contest winners.

It’s exciting to see this contest start coming together like this.

Why you should donate to Singular Source

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There are certain things in life that start out as a good idea and then they snowball. :)

When I started thinking about running a contest, I knew I could offer publication to the winner. I wasn’t sure if I needed to offer cash as well. I asked around a bit, but I didn’t get a good answer, as I don’t have many writers in my social circles.

After talking to Chris  Szego of Bakka Phoenix Books, she made it clear that a cash prize would dramatically affect the quality of submissions. Writing fiction is a labour of love. I think it was Frederick Forsythe who said that you can’t make a living writing, but you can make a killing. There are a few fiction writers who do extremely well (think Danielle Steel and John Grisham), but there are many more who are toiling away anonymously. We would need some cash prizes to make it worthwhile for people to enter.

Chris also said that the absolute minimum rate that professional authors receive is $0.03 per word. I did a quick calculation: 1 000-word short story would be paid $30. This seemed a pittance to me. Over the last year, I have looked into writing non-fiction magazine articles and doing freelance writing online. While these gigs pay enough to make a modest living, three cents a word is well below even these standards.

I realized that it was within my reach to make a real difference, not just to the winners, but to the science fiction writing community by offering significant prizes. I could have scraped up enough money to pay for some small prizes on my own, but running a fundraiser would get more people involved. This too would benefit the community by growing the pool of receptive readers.

So, I am running a campaign in IndieGoGo (we were rejected by kickstarter). I’m offering some fun gifts for contributing, such as acknowledgement in the book, glossy postcards, buttons, chapbooks, and the final hardcover book. Do me a favour and throw me a buck. It’s a gift not just to me, but also to the literary arts.