Brother, Can You Spare a Click?

It is my intention to make Southern Gothic Online a professionally paying market for fiction and poetry by January 2007. But to make this happen, I need your help.

First and foremost, you can make a tax-deductible donation by visiting the site and clicking the Paypal link at the top of the page, or by writing to me. Second, you can help by clicking the Google Ad links that you find on the site. Each click averages about 16 cents in revenue for the magazine. Third, you can tell you friends and professional relations about Southern Gothic. The more people who visit, the more who click those links, the closer we get to our goal. And while they're there, they can take a gander at some of the best fiction and poetry around.

Our goal is to raise $10,000 by the end of this year. On average, only one visitor in 38 takes the time to click on one of those ads, so you can see how long this is going to take without your participation.

Why $10K? Because I am applying for an NEA grant, and NEA grants only go to those able to raise matching funds. Since the smallest grant they'll seriously consider is $10K, we need to raise $10K or be disqualified from consideration.

So far this year, we're a little short of this goal - $9966.79 short. If 30 visitors a day click on three links per visit, we'll be halfway there. If just one visitor per day were to donate just $15, that would take us the rest of the way.

What can we do with $20,000? A hell of a lot. With $10,000 in revenue and a $10K grant from the NEA, we could publish 400,000 words at a professional rate of 5 cents per word. That's two 2,500 word stories a week, every week, for a whole year. And no, I'm not excluding you poets, just using these as examples.

So anything you can do to help will be greatly appreciated by the authors who are published at Southern Gothic Online. Clicking an ad or three is a small price to pay to help Southern Gothic Online move into the professional market and continue to publish the best southern gothic fiction and poetry around.