For the last three years, Clarkesworld has been providing free and unrestricted access to the many wonders our authors and artists have created. In that time, we've never asked for anything in return.

Today, we ask for your help. Today, we start our Citizenship Drive.

Citizenship? What?

Anyone who donates $10 or more to Clarkesworld Magazine becomes an honorary Citizen of Clarkesworld. It's a nice little way for us to identify the generous people who support us.

What are you doing with the money?

Just because it is free, doesn't mean it is without cost. At Clarkesworld, we believe in paying all our authors a professional rate and by doing so, we’re able to attract the high quality of talent you’ve come to expect from us. We pay for most of this by publishing an annual anthology of Clarkesworld fiction, Realms. Every penny we receive from Realms goes back into magazine; paying authors, artists, and related expenses.

During this Citizenship Drive, all donations will be put towards the printing costs of the next volume of Realms. This may seem a bit unconventional, but we’re asking you to invest in us. Unlike most investments, however, this one is not speculation. We already know from advance orders that we'll get more money out of this project than we put in. So every dollar you send us becomes more than a dollar for Clarkesworld thanks to Realms. This investment will move us one step closer towards our goal of being completely self-sustaining. 

What is your goal?

Our goal is to recruit 400 new citizens. Can we find 400 people willing to donate less than the cost of a single year's subscription to a paper magazine? We'll see, but with over 10,000 readers, I'd like to hope so.

Does citizenship truely have its privileges?

The whole Citizenship concept is an evolving program. As a citizen, you will counted in the annual Clarkesworld census. The names of all citizens are cataloged and published in an appendix of our annual anthology. Worried about confidentiality? We'll gladly substitute a pseudonym.

Down the line, we intend to offer special discounts on books from Wyrm Publishing, hold drawings for books, and more. We even have plans to offer higher ranking citizens their own colonies within Clarkesworld... become evil (or good) overlords, recruit/shanghai their own townsfolk and have some fun with the whole concept.