Spiral Nature is launching a membership site to help fund its expansion.
In 2014 Spiral Nature began to offer advertising to our clients that matched our readership’s interests. These funds enabled us to pay writers for the first time, becoming on of the very few paying venues for occutlniks. By the end of 2014, we had a profit of $352, which enabled us to hire editors in 2016.
In the interest of transparency, we’ve published our financials for 2014 so you can see exactly where the money we raised went.
As we had a bit of profit in 2014, we hired two editors to help with editing and commissioning articles from our writers. With that extra help, in 2015 we published more articles than ever before. But by the end of the year, we had a shortfall of $50. We’ve also published our financials for 2015.
We’re deep into 2016 now, and we’ve stretched our advertising budget to its limit, but we’re still growing, and we’d like to grow more. That’s where you can help.
Things we’d like to do
Pay our writers more.
Right now our writers make $10 per published article or review. We’d like to start by increasing it to $15, and keep going from there. Our ultimate goal is $25 per post.
Publish more.
We’d like to start publishing more articles and reviews. Currently we publish one article per week, an we’d like to increase that to two per week. At the moment we publish one book review and one media review per week, but we’d like to increase that to two book reviews per week. More money for our writers, and more smart, in-depth content for you, our lovely readers.
Pay our editors more.
Currently our assistant editors receive an honourarium of $100 every quarter. We’d like to increase that to $50 per month. It’s a modest increase, but we think they’re worth it.
We have one of the best edited online publications in our niche, and no one else does quite what we do.
With the increased content schedule comes an increase in work. They deserve more.
(Note: Psyche, the publisher of Spiral Nature and its editor-in-chief, has never yet made an income from the site — they are not paid for their reviews, articles, or editing time. We’d like to change that too, but we’ll start with everyone else first, and see where that takes us.)
Other milestones:
- A podcast
- Ebooks
- Live events in Toronto
Click for the full list of milestones we’d like to reach, and when they will be achieved.
If there’s anything you’d like to see from Spiral Nature in terms of membership milestones, please let us know either in the comments below or by contacting Psyche. We want these milestones to be things that you want to see from us, and we welcome your input.
Exclusive members-only stuff
Our membership program breaks down into seven different membership levels:
- Lead (free)
- Tin ($5 per month)
- Iron ($10 per month)
- Copper ($15 per month)
- Mercury ($25 per month)
- Silver ($50 per month)
- Gold ($100 per month)
Each has access to an increasing amount of perks, such as:
- Premium forums
- Members-only content
- Free courses from Spiral Nature instructors1
- Monthly tarot divination
Click for the full list of membership perks.
If there’s anything you’d like to see from Spiral Nature in terms of membership perks, please let us know either in the comments below or by contacting Psyche. We want these perks to be things that you will get excited about and use, and we welcome your input.
What’s not going to change
Spiral Nature Magazine will always be free. The Spiral Nature Newsletter will always be free. The basic Spiral Nature Community will always be free (though there will be premium forums that are only available to paying members).
Please let us know if you have any questions, or thoughts about our new membership program.
We look forward to your support!
Image credit: Thomas Hawk
- Note: You will be able to purchase these courses individually if you wish to. [↩]
