Hi, thanks for stopping by the Fortean Bureau for our December 2005 issue. We've been making a lot of changes behind the scenes here in the past several months, as well as developing a format for a hybrid model to keep the Fortean Bureau running into the far future. This issue, we'd like to tell you a little bit about that.

First, we've updated the Fortean Bureau guidelines, trying to make a few things clear and explaining how we're going to be working when we reopen to submissions January 1st, 2006.

We're also making numerous small changes to the way the Fortean Bureau works under the hood. Starting with this issue, the site will be backed by Movable Type. This allows us to make posts to the site much more quickly and allows all of our content to be searchable. It gives us RSS feeds and comments too.

Our goal for 2006 is to double the funding we have available for the Fortean Bureau without dipping into our own pocketbooks any further. That means that we need your help.

Paypal is the easiest way to contribute, but we understand if you can't spare a buck or two. We pay many of our authors via paypal, so this is helpful to us.

Beginning with this issue, we will be running advertising on every page. Google's advertising system seems to be fairly unobtrusive and mostly relevant, although the story pages can end up with some very weird ads. They're also rolling out a system that lets us sell ads specifically on our page, so if you are interested, contact us.

We will continue to have Cafe Press products for the true fanatics among you. In addition to the simple branding types of materials that we've had available in the past, Jeremy is working on a few other Fortean-themed products. We make very little (around $2) off of each purchase, but the prostlytizing that you do by wearing or presenting something with our URL is worth ten times as much. Above all else, we're about getting the fiction read.

Lastly, we have an Amazon Associates account. We'll try to use this when we have authors who have books in their biographies, and in Nick's columns.

So what will we do with the money from these sources?

First, we'd like to raise our pay to a maximum of $100 per story. That comes out to about $160 per quarter. With the other $140, I would like to feature illustrators, add additional content in the way of more nonfiction, and have the flexibility to squeeze in an extra story here and there.

Here's our promise to the readers on how their money will be spent. The first $1200 in income we receive will be spent to grow the magazine in the method described as above. The second $1200, we will use on the magazine but will result in an equal decrease in our personal money that we spend. Anything more than $2400 a year will go into extra issues, growing the magazine from a quarterly publication back to bimonthly and then monthly. Dare we dream of such a possibility?

That's pie in the sky stuff, we know, but we want to lay out the possibility. With the death of a big magazine like Scifiction, small zines like the Fortean Bureau become more important.

If you have any questions or comments on the above, contact us.

One last bit of crass commercialism-- we're open to the idea of complete site sponsorship. It probably works no worse or better than any of the other models out there, so drop us a line if you are interested in that sort of thing.

So if this has you ready and willing to provide financial support the Fortean Bureau right now, you can go here and pick your method. You'll have our thanks, and the thanks of the many authors we publish each year. We hope you have a good 2006, and read plenty of great speculative fiction.