Editorial Comment:

Bookninja.com celebrated its first birthday in August, and we’d like to thank everyone -- contributors, readers and discussion-board ninjas -- for making this such an informative and fun site.

We've snowballed into something more than we ever envisioned and are quite proud of the site we've created over the last year. It's a home to writers, editors, publishers and readers from Canada and around the world. We're receiving about 5000+ hits a day and are linked to from some of the largest book and news sites on the web. Aside from numerous online mentions, we've been cited in the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, Eye Magazine. It's a great place to hang out and has become the go-to site for literary news and gossip in Canada.

We’re working on making it even better by finding ways to increase the original content on the site. One of the more popular features of Bookninja has been the original essays/articles/rants/oddities we publish. We’ve been happy -- and honoured -- to provide a space for writers like Rob Payne ("Being Young and Bright," "Report from the Brisbane Writers Festival," "Interview with Nick Earls"), Kevin Chong ("Mr. Wordwise"), Dana Cook (the insanely difficult "Who’s Meeting Whom" contest), Zach Wells (various poetry smackdowns), Todd Swift ("Britain’s Next Generation Poets"), John Stiles ("Literary tour of London, England"), Jonathan Bennett ("Defence of the Short Story"), Nathaniel Moore (profile of Soft Skull Press), Richard Outram ("Poetic Practice"), Alex Boyd ("In Defence of Graffiti") and others. We’ve wanted to run more original material since we started the site, but it’s hard to ask people to give us their work for free, and we’ve felt guilty about not being able to pay people who deserve it. We make no money off the site -- in fact, it costs us a few hundred a year -- but we would like to be able to reward these talented and creative people for their work.

To that end, we’ve come up with a couple of funding avenues. You’ve probably already noticed the Google ads running down the right side of the site. We get a small amount each time someone clicks through those ads, so feel free to click away.

Now we’ve set up the Bookninja tip jar (see the PayPal "donate" button above, beside the Google box). It’s quick, secure and easy to use, and everything you donate will go straight to our writers. It’s voluntary, of course, and you’re more than welcome to keep reading the site if you’re not interested in donating anything, or if you simply can’t afford it.

But if you do wish to donate, we’re not asking people to kick in huge amounts. We figure it’s best if a hundred people kick in a buck or two every now and then rather than a couple of people donating a hundred bucks (but if you really want to kick in a hundred, hey, our writers thank you). In fact, we think small donations spread over a wide community of users is the way of the future. Given the fact that we have thousands of daily visitors, we could present a lot of original material for the price of a cup of coffee here and there among our readers (for you Vancouverites, coffee is what people drank before lattes).

We’re also starting to run selected ads/sponsorships from publishers, as you'll see. Don’t worry -- we’ll do it in a way that reflects the spirit of the site. If any publishers/magazines/breweries and/or whisky makers are interested in advertising, contact at us advertising@bookninja.com.

Rest assured we remain committed to keeping the site free and accessible to all. These changes are aimed at increasing the quality of the site and rewarding the people who make it what it is.

Thanks for all your support, both in the past and in the future. Enjoy.

Peter Darbyshire
George Murray

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The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners, organizers, or other participants.