As of yesterday, over the two weeks since the paper was printed, we’ve sent out approximately 625 orders, totaling over 90,000 copies, and the PDF file has been downloaded from this website about 15,000 times. These are sort of absurd numbers, for a group opposing mass-production and centralization, but the evidence so far is that these papers are being used to create local dialogue — for example, the pastor at the Presbyterian church that housed anticapitalist demonstrators in D.C. last weekend preached her Sunday sermon from texts in Fighting For Our Lives, as she spoke to the congregation about the value of what the demonstrators were doing.

Now for some other absurd numbers. Thus far, we’ve spent about $14,000 on production costs, and a little over $3500 on mailing (so far). To offset these costs… we’ve received approximately $500 in donations. Now, we were expecting to lose money on this project, and to fund it in part from the surplus from book sales and so on; but anyone can do the math and determine that an anti-profit collective like ours, which distributes most of its publications for free already, can’t pull $17,000 out of the air. We’ve been able to make it this far on this project only because our printers offer us credit. Of course it would have been ethically and environmentally repugnant to sell advertising or anything like that to fund this — so what it comes down to is: we depend upon donations to pay for projects like this, in part, and right now we are drastically short of having enough. If any of you want to help us, please do, in whatever way you’re able, whether that means setting up a benefit show, taking up a collection, or sending us a couple postage stamps. We’re doing our best to raise the rest of the money somehow, but we can’t do it alone. Thanks very much. (donate online, or send money through the mail to our Olympia address.)

On another note, while the demand for Off the Map has remained very high, the number of people sending us copies has dwindled slowly down to no one, so please try to help out if possible.