Gimme money for womens writers!!!! Every teen boys dream. To gain his dream, he’s going to practice socialist capitalism – paying slave rates to his crew!
Pseudo socialist Byron Clark is once again seeking cash, this time for his favourite cause, women. Specifically to join him in further establishing his publishing career.
But it is little wonder that few women want to become socialist corporate baby producers, simply to produce workers for the global corporates, after the socialists abolish the western family unit. Love, care, affection, commitment etc have nothing to do with anything. Producing babies for the corporate government to raise is all they’re good for, then get them back to work ASAP while their kids are indoctrinated in the corporate policy.
This from fightback voices:
Proposal: A crowdfunded issue of ‘Fightback’ dedicated to women’s writing
Proposal by Byron Clark (Fightback Otautahi).
Over the past few years Fightback has faced a number of difficulties: 1) declining subscriber base (somewhat offset by online readers) 2) a lack of content and 3) a difficulty to improve our diversity of writers despite efforts (the magazine remains written mostly by Pakeha men)
Fightbacks editorial board has done a lot to encourage more women to contribute content, but there has been limited success. As a small organisation producing a magazine on an entirely volunteer basis, we can’t remove all the barriers to women writing, we have given ‘moral support’ but can’t overcome things such as the gender pay gap and the fact that women do a greater share of domestic and emotional labour than men.
This leads to a situation where those with the resources to perform voluntary labour for the magazine are primarily men, this is problematic if we want to live up to our claims of being a socialist-feminist organisation. While at this point we can not entirely overcome these issues, we can alleviate them by paying woman writers for their labour.
For a long time its been difficult to get people to exchange money for writing, with everything online expected to be free, and sometimes people even expressing surprise the magazine isn’t free. However that “everything on the internet is free” idea is changing to the idea that everything is freely available, but needs to be funded, and people are having a lot of success with crowd funding (I raised $1,000 for my oral history project on Occupy Christchurch for example)
Crowdfunding allows people to make a one-off donation of a size they can afford, with the security of knowing that if the fund raising project doesn’t reach its goal they will not lose their money.
My idea is that we set up a crowd funding project to do an issue of the magazine entirely with women’s writing, and we pay those writers. Going by what’s considered a reasonable rate for freelance writers, this issue would give each writer $440 for a 1100 word article (40 cents a word). A fundraising goal of $6,000 would get us enough to to pay for 13 11,000 word articles (a 20 page issue) even after the 5% fee from the crowdfunding site was deducted.
Crowdfunded projects offer ‘rewards’ for funders, though for non-commercial projects most people donate with the understanding they are making a donation rather than buying a product, however I’d suggest the following rewards (or something like this)
$5 pledge – a copy of the issue
$25 pledge – 1 year subscription
$50 pledge – 2 year subscription
$100 pledge – name listed in the ‘thank you’ note published in the issue
$200 pledge -sponsor an article: article byline includes “this article was made possible by a generous donation form ________”
Of course this would mean we would need to absorb the costs of any subscriptions purchased, but spread out over one or two years I think this would be possibly with existing sustaining subscribers and pledges from members. To account for the possibility of not reaching our funding goal, we could fundraise independently and then pledge the shortfall ourselves, or if thats not needed could be used for other purposes. There is of course also the possibility that we raise more than our goal, if this looks likely we can add “stretch goals” for what we will use the excess for, such as lengthening the issue by soliciting more articles.
Quite possibly the fundraising campaign itself will raise awareness of Fightback and grow our readership.