Kickstarter Goal and Thanks!

Thank you to everybody who has supported our 35th anniversary Kickstarter! We hit our stated goal of $25,000 in under a week!

As I explained after the first day, we’re not stopping here.

There are a lot of unknowns for our project. Building a new website has a “sliding scale” aspect to it, where the scope of the project (and the speed with which it can be realized) is directly affected by the budget. And the same thing is true for our Best of FSM book.

A lot of comes down to whether we have the editorial tasks prepped on a volunteer basis or can afford to actually treat it like paid work.

FSM was, from day one, underfunded. I was a high school kid, and when it was clear I wanted to keep publishing a newsletter (then magazine) to the people who had written me expressing interest, I chose a subscription price (which was probably too low, as I didn’t want to turn people off) and spent whatever I needed to spend to get the first issue done. Then as more subscriptions came in, I used that money for the second issue.

This basically continued for the 15 years I was doing the physical magazine. And it continued for the CDs, too.

I kind of lived in mortal terror that I was operating a Ponzi scheme and didn’t know how I would ever wind it down. Talk about catching a tiger by its tail!

I remember one time—this is true!—Brett Ratner wanted to buy Film Score Monthly. I had to explain, Brett, there’s nothing here. We don’t own the music on the CDs. The magazine doesn’t make money. (Fortunately Brett had a short attention span.)

By some miracle, it all kind of averaged out...but it was always dicey.

But it was, to this day, underfunded. And that has been, shall we say, stressful.

On the other hand, I appreciate the our audience is starting to feel tapped out by all these various Kickstarters. Is “starting” the right word? Yeah, it’s a lot.

And not to name names, but when a Kickstarter doesn’t deliver...it hurts us all.

Oh, wait, I will name names: what happened to Star Trek Axanar? Jeez!

So we’re going to keep pushing this campaign and truly appreciate all the donations, as well as the positive messages and shout-outs on social media. (Want to lend a hand, and it’ll cost you nothing? Plug us on social!)

And I promise that all of the money we raise is going to be put to good use. The more we raise on Kickstarter, the more we can increase the size and scale of the new website, and do podcasts, YouTube shows, etc.

Thank you for your decades of support, truly, from all of us here!