Hi there,

When we first conceived of Midnight Breakfast, we knew that we weren’t going to be able to publish the diverse and accessible magazine we’d envisioned if we didn’t pay our writers and our illustrators. Even if the best payment we could offer at our launch was just barely enough to cover a trip to the grocery store, we wanted to show our contributors that we respected their work enough to give them some compensation. Of course, as working artists ourselves, we were soon at a loss, and so we reached out to our champions in the literary community and to the internet at large to help fund our first year of publication. It was a wild gamble that paid off, enough for us to pay for six illustrated works of fiction and nonfiction a month for an entire year. We could not be more proud of the work we’ve put out and of the magazine we’ve worked to build—that we’ve gotten to shine a light on so many talented individuals has been an absolute privilege, and we’ve had a blast doing it.

As we approach the end of our first year, we’ve come to understand that our publication needs a more consistent form of patronage than a one-time crowdfunding donation if we want to continue to publish engaging and relevant writing and art for free on the internet. First and foremost, we need to know that we can pay our contributors from issue to issue. Our staff also puts in long hours seeking out and working with writers and illustrators to ensure that each issue lives up to our artistic vision and yours, in addition to working on all the less visible moving parts that help keep the heart of our magazine ticking. Because of this, we’d like to eventually be able to compensate everyone on our team, too. We believe there are enough people who appreciate the perspective we offer and who we’re hoping are willing to donate to Midnight Breakfast to allow us to continue publishing and supporting the most extraordinary voices we can find.

And so we’re excited to introduce our Patreon subscription. By donating to us through this service you become an old-school patron-of-the-arts through new-school means, offering your steady support to a diverse group of writers and illustrators, whose work you believe will make the world a richer place, and to the dedicated staff that brings this work to life. Midnight Breakfast will remain free to all, but we plan to reward our patrons with our effusive internet love and a number of exclusive bonuses and opportunities, scaling from cool to super-sweet, depending on how much you can spare.

We’re really depending on all of you, our readers, to help keep our humble publication alive and well through our second year. The goodwill we’ve received since we published Issue Zero last winter has been nothing short of inspiring, and we hope to continue to impress and surprise you with your patronage. It’s incredibly idealistic, we know, to promise to pay our contributors and our staff for their work, but it’s an ideal we can achieve with your support. Help us keep the conversation going and please donate today.

Until we open up that literary breakfast nook,

The Midnight Breakfast Team