Summer is here and the sun is hot! Smoke blankets both the east and west coasts of North America as climate changes drives even hotter summers and drier forests. Now more than ever, the world needs solarpunk.
Solarpunk Magazine’s July News
Issue #10 ~Colorful Roots~
Our annual issue of all-BIPOC creators is now available for preorder and releases this coming Tuesday July 11.
Issue #11, our special themed “Solarpunk Myths” issue, will release Tuesday September 12.
2023 Utopia Awards & Climate Fiction Conference
Planning for the second annual Utopia Awards and Climate Fiction Conference is well underway. Nominees for the Utopia Awards were announced last week. You can click here to check out the nominees, read/view their works, and access the public ballot to join over 600 readers who have already cast their votes.
There’s about one week left to submit your name to be a potential panelist, or to submit your own panel or workshop idea for the conference. Click Here if you want to participate or submit an idea for a panel or workshop!
Click Here to get register to attend! Early bird pricing ends July 31.
Join Us in the Sauútiverse
Pre-orders for MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGY start on Tuesday July 18 through Crowdfunding by Backerkit. Published by our own publisher, Android Press, this anthology is the first that takes place in the Sauútiverse, which is a shared world created by all African authors and artists. The book includes over 100,000 words of African science fiction stories and dozens of images. You can sign up now to be notified when the preorder crowdfunding campaign goes live. The book needs to raise $10k to publish. We’re hoping all our followers will help make this amazing and much needed book a reality!
Changes to our Social Media Priorities
For a number of reasons, even though it’s the platform where we have the most followers, we’re backing off our usage of Twitter significantly. Aside from the problems with Elon Musk and the increase lack of safety on the site for trans folks and BIPOC, the new algorithms designed to prioritize paid accounts has meant a significant drop in our Tweets’ engagement and in the number of people even seeing our Tweets. As a result, we’ve begun prioritizing our Instagram and TikTok accounts. In addition, with the release of Threads, we’ve been focusing what we would normally do on Twitter in the Threads space as well. We will continue to post updates on Twitter for now. But it’s not a space where we’ll be interacting, responding to DMs, or anything else.
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Shift Away From Crowdfunding
For our first two years we primarily funded our magazine through crowdfunding on Kickstarter. That has enabled us to pay authors the pro-rate of 8 cents per word for fiction and has also helped us build a community around the magazine. Moving forward, we’re going to begin moving away from crowdfunding toward a more traditional subscription model.
Current subscriptions will stay the same, one subscription for all of 2023 that ends when the last issue releases. But going forward, we’ll be using the more usual open subscriptions where once you subscribe, you stay subscribed until you choose to unsubscribe. This will enable us to move away from crowdfunding, which to be honest is a ton of work. Again, this in no way affects current subscriptions. 2023 subscriptions will still end and no be charged for the next year. Toward the end of the year, current 2023 subscribes will receive a couple emails from us with instructions about how to subscribe for 2024 and ongoing.
Join us on Discord!
Related to that, we are also opening up our Discord page. Up until now its been reserved for people who subscribe to the magazine during our annual Kickstarter campaigns. But we’ve decided that instead, we want to do our best to build up our Discord channel and make it our primary social media platform. We’ve already been doing some things to make the space more active and interactive. We’d love for you to join us on Discord, which can do by clicking here!