Ambitions
/There are lots of things we want to do on here. It has been a continuous effort in the preparation stages of this project to restrain our imaginations and focus primarily on things we can hope to accomplish.
It's possible we'll only ever get to do what we've set out to do so far: 12 episodes across 1 year. But in the event that we get to keep going -- in the event that we get to expand -- we have a lot of thoughts on what we could do next. Our Patreon supporters will have access to polls that we'll use to guide the direction of the podcast* -- we won't ignore suggestions posted elsewhere, of course.
Increase frequency of episodes
The earliest we'd likely be able to start this is in June, in the month of episode 9, because college. More likely we'd be getting ready to do it starting year 2 -- although if it turns out this whole running a magazine thing turns out to be a lot easier than we expected (or y'all donate a TON of money and we can quit our day jobs) we might get started on that sooner.
Raise author pay
One of our big ambitions if this project works out is to raise our rates to be a SFWA qualifying market. For one thing, writers work hard to create this work and we believe that they deserve to be paid well for it. For another, paying more money and being a SFWA qualifying market will attract more submissions, and submissions from more established authors. This serves the dual purposes of this magazine: our straightforward goal, to bring you the best fiction possible; and our Machiavellian scheme, to steer the direction of science fiction, and thereby the world, towards narratives of sustainability, collective action, and the dismantling of oligarchical power structures. *evil laugh*
Produce parallel news & editorial posts and podcast
Between the two editors, we have way more experience working with news media than fiction. (Total between us as of writing: 2 associate degrees in journalism, 2 years professional journalism experience, ~5 years student journalism & editorial experience, 1 year paid web editor experience.) And since the main interest areas of solarpunk are areas that could use a significant improvement in reporting -- science, environment, and counterculture politics -- we think we could do some really good work here.
That said, if we took this on, producing as much news per month as we do fiction content would be a lot more work, and probably a lot more expensive, and we don't know for sure that anybody's very interested in that. This is one of the kinds of projects we'll only pursue if we meet or exceed our funding goals, and get a lot of support for it in the supporter polls.
Of course, like all of these goals, it's not a "Start this year or never" kind of thing. Maybe it'll get easier with the advent of new technology or organizational structures in the next few years, and we'll be able to take it on with less effort. Maybe it'll get support from the community only after we've met other priorities, like getting more stories out and paying our authors pro rates.
Assemble a year 1 print edition
We'd really like to be able to do this one. Even if we end up not having a second year, it'd be cool to be able to wrap up the year with a physical volume of the complete publications of Solarpunk Press.
My back-of-envelope calculations have led me to believe that I have no idea how to estimate how much it costs to print an anthology, so whether that's on the table will be determined as we do more research.
Whatever else y'all think is cool
You want comics? Merchandise? 45 minute live discussions on abjection as a framing device for the alienation between the people and the state? You got it!
By which we mean you can tell us. In the polls and forums. If you're a supporter. And we'll try our best to do what we can towards those goals.
Polls for Patreon supporters will run at least monthly, and we intend to add popular write-ins and discussion topics frequently, so we hope going forward into year 1 (and hopefully beyond) we'll get a nuanced idea of what y'all want from us and how we can provide it.
* To be really, really clear: we are not making our final decisions based exclusively on these polls; some things may turn out to be harder than we expected when start planning, some combinations of things may be impossible -- we don't want to disappoint anyone by having them discover after giving us money that their vote wasn't binding.
