An Urgent Message from Electric Literature

Dear Electric Literature Members,

I am writing you today with a urgent request.

The short version of this email is: Medium is cancelling publication memberships with almost zero notice, and we need you to move your Electric Literature membership to its new home on Kickstarter’s crowdfunding platform, Drip, as soon as possible.

Please help us keep the support we depend on by moving your Electric Literature membership to Drip today: https://d.rip/electriclit

Here is the long version:

Yesterday, Medium let us know that it will be retiring publication memberships on its platform, and has given us one week to notify our members and make other arrangements. Since Electric Literature was recruited to move to Medium in 2016, the company has made several such abrupt changes, causing considerable disruption and financial hardship to all of its partners (including us).

While other publishers jumped ship, Electric Literature has stuck it out, as moving the site has not yet been an efficient use of our limited resources. In light of this latest development, we will be stepping up our efforts to find a new home for EL. In the meantime, we need your help to overcome this significant financial hurdle.

Our 450 Medium members contribute $2,100 a month, or $25,200 a year, to Electric Literature. For a small nonprofit like ours, this is an incredibly meaningful sum. We can’t get by without it.

We’ve set up an alternative membership platform on Drip, Kickstarter’s crowdfunding platform. Please continue to support Electric Literature by moving your membership to Drip today: https://d.rip/electriclit

For just $4 a month, you will receive the same benefits as you did with your Medium membership, including:

1. Access to year-round submissions for fiction and non-fiction with a guaranteed three month response time.
2. A monthly eBooks sampling of Recommended Reading’s rich archives, on topics such as magical cities, family conflict, gender and power, and more. (Medium’s abrupt cancellation of membership means that the full Recommended Reading archives will be temporarily unlocked, but we may lock them again in the future.)
3. Early access to The Blunt Instrument, Elisa Gabbert’s advice column to writers, and a special members-only bonus column every other month.

And for $6 a month, you’ll get all of the above, plus a Read More Women tote bag!

Your Electric Literature membership through Medium will be automatically canceled this month, so after you have signed up for Drip, there is no need to take further action. However, if you’d like to cancel your Medium membership manually, instructions to do so are here.

As always, please feel free to email editors@electricliterature.com with any questions. We appreciate your support — it is, quite honestly, what allows us to keep going. If you’d like to make an additional donation to help ease this transition you can do so here.

Thank you for sticking with us through this upheaval!

Yours,

Halimah Marcus
Executive Director, Electric Literature