I have an absolutely delusional goal I want to hit, and I've decided to recruit you. Because that's what I do. I bring my foolishness to the community and invite you to be a part of it.

But I have to be honest, today's is perhaps my most outlandish. But stay with me.

I've been telling y'all for ages that one of my goals is to grow our community so that we can get more aggressive with our publishing efforts. And I feel like this is the moment. We have such incredible momentum going and I am eager to learn into our success and push out more projects.

Right now:

• Our first book is a finalist for a major literary award

• Our second book was an instant best-seller

• Our third book was an Indies Introduce Pick

As a community, we currently have the capacity to publish two books a year. And we are managing to ensure that every one of them is a major success. Which is incredibly impressive (and largely due to YOU). My goal is to push our community to the point where we are launching a new book every three to four months instead, so that we can take this incredible success and keep that momentum alive. This way, every time we drop a book, there is one right around the corner. It enables us to build upon each success and push each project even further than the last one.

My goals are about far more than publishing more projects. I want to capitalize on our success to keep conversations about the direction of the publishing industry alive. As we have talked about so many times, I believe that for publishing to change, we have to do the work to remove exploitation and to introduce radical community. And that is exactly what we have done here at Left Unread. Now our goal has to become proving just how successful this model can be.

Which means we have to consistently grow.

Which means investing in more Black and brown authors. And effectively pushing them toward success.

Now, for the goal.

HOW DO WE GET THERE?

There are a lot of factors that go into building our publishing budget. But the only one we can directly control in the now is our subscriptions. Without factoring in everything else that goes into these decisions, we need to grow by roughly 500 paid subscribers to position ourselves to be able to successfully add a third book to our yearly rotation.

I would like to make that happen in the next few weeks.

WHY NOW?

Because I am currently searching for projects. Right now, we are looking for one project that will hopefully launch in fall of 2027. And I am delusionally believing that we can squeeze a second one out of this search. But for that to even be a possibility, we have to have the budget behind us to warrant it.

Which is where the community comes in.

Like I said, my current goal is about 500 paid subscribers in the next week or two.

There are almost four thousand people in this community, and tens of thousands who follow me on socials. So forgive me if I am not convinced this is an impossible goal. I think we could make it happen today if the algorithms are on our side.

So yeah, if you are in this community and you are interested in helping us to push this company forward so that we can invest in even more Black and brown authors and get louder and more effective with our efforts to challenge publishing standards, please consider upgrading to at least the $5 tier right now.

Every single dollar directly goes to:

• Making this work more sustainable

• Directly funding publishing projects

• Empowering Left Unread to get more aggressive in our publishing cadence

So please don't think you have to jump to that $25 tier to be useful. Not true at all. Literally every single dollar helps. So if you are in a position where $5 wouldn't negatively impact you and your family, please consider investing in this work.

I am eager to do MORE. And this is how we get there.

Thanks, y'all!