Fantasy Café is now on Patreon! Patreon is a site for funding content creators, and those who support a creator receive rewards based on the tier they selected. Visit the General Questions page on their site to learn more about it.

Since moving Fantasy Café from Blogger to my own domain a few years ago, there have been costs associated with maintaining the site and help with those would be appreciated—especially since I recently switched to a more expensive hosting plan to resolve some server issues. Despite these costs, I’ve always wanted to keep Fantasy Café free of paid advertising and clear of any appearance of the conflicts that paid advertising may bring—not to mention the potentially annoying ads themselves.

In addition to the hosting costs, my much larger commitment to the site is in the form of the time it takes to run. I love it, and I’d like to do even more with the site than I have been doing over the last few years! My work hours were cut somewhat recently. While that’s not ideal financially, it does give me the opportunity to branch out and try new things with Fantasy Café. I would also like to spend some of those hours when I was previously working my day job to get more into the world of writing. That’s why, in addition to the low cost awards you might find on many Patreon campaigns, I’m offering a somewhat different reward at a $100/month tier. Although my current job at a marketing firm has primarily been focused on website development, I’ve also become a go-to person for proofreading and would like to do more of it. I’m going to experiment with offering to proofread up to 7,500 words a month—which can be a short story, a chapter, or even a series of blog posts. If you are interested in having me work on a larger proofreading project, please contact me (kristen at fantasybookcafe dot com).

Of course, there are also other rewards that do not cost nearly as much like bookmarks, voting on books to review, exclusive monthly content, and more! Below is a complete list of the tiers with the rewards that I’m offering for each:

• $1 per month – You’ll receive a Fantasy Café bookmark and my thanks for your support.
• $5 per month – You’ll be able to vote on a poll determining the content of a post for the following month. Most of the time this will be a poll of books, and the one with the most popular votes will be reviewed (in the case of a tie, I will select one of the books with the most votes). My plan is that most of these books will be books not covered on many review sites, such as older books, books by fairly new authors, or books released from smaller presses, with a focus on books by women—although this may not be the case 100% of the time! You’ll also receive the $1 tier reward.
• $10 per month – You’ll be able to read a monthly post exclusive to patrons. More books are brought to my attention than I can possibly read, and this will be your chance to read about a few of the books I choose not to read and review and why! You’ll also receive the $1 and $5 tier rewards.
• $20 per month – You’ll receive a small (11-oz.) Fantasy Café mug. You’ll also receive the $1, $5, and $10 tier rewards.
• $30 per month – You’ll receive a large (15-oz.) Fantasy Café mug. You’ll also receive the $1, $5, and $10 tier rewards.
• $100 per month – I will proofread 7,500 words once per month. This can be a short story, a book chapter, a series of articles, or anything else that is no more than 7,500 words in length. This includes looking for typos and basic grammatical mistakes and checking spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. It does not include structural edits—the piece should just need the final polish at this point in the process! You’ll also receive the $1, $5, and $10 tier rewards.

Since rewards follow a monthly cycle, you will receive your first reward(s) the month after signing up. In the case of items being shipped, it may take longer to receive them depending on the destination, but I will be mailing rewards toward the beginning of each month.

In addition to the individual rewards, I have also set some goals. If specific milestones are reached, I’ll be adding the following additional monthly features to the site:

• A book giveaway with North American eligibility
• At least one Women in SF&F post a month in addition to the annual April event
• An international book giveaway

If you enjoy my reviews and the other features on Fantasy Cafe, please consider contributing to help support the site. Thank you!