It's fund drive time again!

As regular readers will know, this is the time of year when we ask you to donate to the magazine, to help us raise funds for the next twelve months. Strange Horizons is a non-profit organization run entirely by volunteers: it's your donations that enable us to keep publishing each week, and to pay our contributors. We're looking to raise $11,000 this year—and we have a few specific ideas if we can raise more than that. You can find all the details on the main fund drive page.

For those of us working on SH, it's been an exciting and energising year. After one of our most successful fund drives ever, last year, we were able to raise our pay rates for poetry and reviews, and add podcasts for our fiction and poetry. This year we've been pleased to publish stories by authors from Japan, Sweden, and Sri Lanka as well as the UK and US, and we've got a special issue focusing on Indian SF coming up later this month. This summer, we've started reprinting notable critical articles to supplement our other non-fiction output, and have already published work by Judith Berman, Gary K. Wolfe, and John Rieder.

We've had stories selected for four different Year's Best volumes, and were delighted when Molly Gloss's story from last autumn, "The Grinnell Method," won this year's Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. And, of course, the magazine itself was nominated for the first time for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award—a huge honour that meant a lot to everyone working on the magazine. Many congratulations to Clarkesworld, which ultimately won the category; along with Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed, it was fine company to be in.

So we want to continue, and do more. To encourage you to donate, as usual all donors will be entered into our prize draw—check out the first batch of prizes, which includes books by Lauren Beukes, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Lavie Tidhar, among others. More prizes will be added each week!

We've also put together a special bonus issue of the magazine, with extra stories, poems and, articles to be revealed as we hit certain thresholds. You can check out the full table of contents here: we've got new stories by Rose Lemberg and Nisi Shawl, an interview with Helen Oyeyemi, poems, reviews, and an essay on "Recentering Science Fiction" by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.

Our target of US$11,000 is enough to allow us to continue publishing at our current schedule, paying our current rates, for the next year. But we do have a couple of additional goals, if we can raise more than that:

• If we raise $12,000, we'll add new readers to our monthly poetry podcast, to better represent the range of voices we're publishing.
• If we raise $13,000, we'll add artwork for one story each month, starting January 2014.

(Anything above these targets will go towards more general improvement of the magazine—enabling us to publish more long stories, and to host more events at conventions, for instance.)

We hope you've been enjoying SH this year, and if you have we hope you consider donating—and spreading the word about the fund drive. It remains an honour to be part of Strange Horizons: please help us to make it bigger and better in 2014. Thank you!