A Kickstarter Of Our Own

Hello, dear readers! Today we have some big news–we want to talk to you about our first ever Kickstarter!

As you may know, we Book Smugglers celebrate our tenth anniversary in 2018. Whether you have been around since 2008 (OMG, thank you!) or have just started reading us (Hi! Welcome!), you may have noticed that we like to keep ourselves busy over here. We started The Book Smugglers back in 2008, and have dedicated ourselves to daily reviews and essays focused on SFF and genre fiction for all ages. In our time as reviewers and members of the SFF community, we’ve striven to discuss and call attention to diverse and underrepresented books, authors, and voices in speculative fiction fandom. With over 10 million visitors since 2008, The Book Smugglers keeps going strong.

In 2014, we embarked on a new venture–we became publishers of original short fiction. With free short stories published on this blog, and additionally made available as standalone ebooks for purchase, we established a new vertical for The Book Smugglers. It felt very natural for us to do so: finding kickass stories from and about diverse voices has always been our passion, after all.

So far, we Smugglers—that is, Ana and Thea—have done all of the work on our own. We write original reviews and essays as well as organize and edit guest posts for The Book Smugglers every day. We also handle all of the aspects of our short story business, from reading submissions and acquiring content, to editing, proofing and production, as well as all aspects of distribution, sales, and marketing. It’s a whole lot of work—and we love every minute of it.

BUT.

We want to do more. We not only want to publish more content each year, but we also want to write more reviews. We want to reach more people. We want to pay the writers whose work we acquire a higher fee. We want to get more paid contributors to the blog so that we can continue to grow. We want to get a new snazzy look for the website. And for all of that to happen, we need help.

Hence this Kickstarter! Starting today (September 5) and running for 30 days, our first ever Kickstarter is out there in the world with the mission to raise $16,500 that will go toward those goals – and so that The Book Smugglers can get bigger, better and stronger. We’d really appreciate your help: remember that every little helps including simply spreading the word out there. Thank you so much for reading and for your support.

And with that we declare this Kickstarter officially KICK-STARTED. Go over there to check it out!