The Rumpus is an independent magazine that publishes original works of fiction, essays, poetry, author interviews, comics, book reviews, and more five days a week. Our magazine is primarily volunteer-run and focuses on publishing emerging writers and historically underrepresented voices. Donations made here through our nonprofit fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, are tax-deductible. 

Reaching this goal will allow us to triple our current monthly contributor budget from $400 to $1,250. This will allow us to set a payment minimum of $50 for original work. $15,000 will allow us to pay the 300 contributors we plan to publish between August 2024-July 2025 with any additional funds raised during this campaign going toward 2025/26 contributor funds. For example: 

A tax-deductible donation is meaningful at any level you’re able to give—every dollar counts.

A few years ago, The Rumpus established a monthly contributor pool of $400. After we accept a piece, we ask authors whether they’d like to opt-in to payment. Depending on the number of people who opt-in each month, current payments usually range anywhere from $18–36/piece. We know establishing a minimum payment is a more equitable and transparent system for potential future contributors deciding on where they submit their work. It’s an acknowledgement that writing is labor, and we want to be a part of a creative community that compensates writers to the best of our abilities.

We’ll be real here: a $50 minimum payment is unlikely to change someone’s life. It is a token honorarium and ideally should be closer to $100 or more. However, this would be significant progress. We know many other indie literary magazines (those not associated with a university, larger publishing group, and without the backing of a wealthy benefactor) are also volunteer-run and absolutely exhausted trying to get by. Raising funds through donations allows us to continue publishing at the same pace and keeps us from exploring options like submission reading fees or a drastic decrease to the amount of work we publish. 

Every piece that comes through our regular no-fee open reading periods is read by at least two or three staff editors, who provide feedback and edits. We work with each contributor to help them present a version of their work that we all feel good about presenting to our audience; sometimes an accepted piece just needs a quick copy edit, and sometimes it goes through multiple revisions with developmental edits provided by our editors. 

The Rumpus is highly visible and has a relatively large readership, with roughly 80k unique visitors to the site every month and over 1 million a year. Every piece we publish is highlighted at least once in our weekly newsletter (which reaches 20k subscribers) and all work is promoted on our social media channels.

We also regularly nominate the pieces we publish for awards such as the Best American anthologies, Best of the Net, and others.

All of our contributors retain the rights to their work, so they’re able to publish their pieces again without any contractual hurdles (or fees to us) if they land a book deal or other opportunity. 

We love to celebrate the success of the authors and artists we publish! Often we’re someone’s first major byline, helping them find an audience, and making connections in the community is the whole point of the work we do. 

Over 90 percent of the magazine’s funding—including our monthly contributor pool—comes from reader support. We have a Membership program, a couple of subscription programs (including Letters in the Mail from Authors), host online events, and sell merch, and we make a very small amount of money through advertising. These currently have us almost breaking even on our very basic expenses. While The Rumpus’s revenue improved in 2023 from previous years, fundraising and donor support are a new important part of our model. There’s still a large gap between the funds we bring in and the amount needed to run a magazine we’re proud of. 

We have two paths. The simplest but most painful option is to decrease the number of pieces we publish by 50% or more. The other option might be to less drastically eliminate work we publish by around 25%, set a $25 minimum payment, and tier out payments by type of content (for example, a piece of original fiction might receive a higher minimum payment than a book review). 

If you prefer to send a check, please contact our Publisher, Alyson Sinclair at hello@therumpus.net for mailing information. 

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About The Rumpus: Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest-running online literary magazines around. We’ve been independent since the start, which means we're not connected with any academic institution or part of a larger publishing company; no rich investor is paying the bills.

Our magazine is primarily volunteer-run and focuses on publishing emerging writers and historically underrepresented voices. In recent years, we’ve paid special attention to the latter demographic with the addition of our Rumpus Original Poetry section as well as columns dedicated to marginalized writers such as ENOUGH (devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, and fiction by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence), Voices on Addiction (devoted to personal narratives of addiction), and We Are More (for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and SWANA diaspora writers). We are committed to supporting the literary community at large, and also regularly publish interviews with authors and book reviews of both poetry and prose titles.

If you are not already familiar with The Rumpus, you can find us here.

We're also on X and Instagram @the_rumpus, so please tag us if you give! We'd love to share why you're supporting us as a reader, contributor, or another part of the literary community on social media.