You don’t just need to own the means of production. You also need to control the means of distribution.

In other words, publishing independently is good. Distributing independently is where your real power lies. But how do you do that without a tech platform intermediary?

Through. each. other.

One promising example of this is how the worker-owned media movement comes together to promote each other’s work. Recently, when Aftermath held their subscriber drive, 404 Media, Hell Gate and Defector joined them live to amplify it.

I want that network effort for everyone reading this.

So, we’re starting our own cross promo network. And we’re inviting you to take part in a challenge to put it to use right away promoting your work.

This is for all paying members of this newsletter and their friends so become a paying member (if you’re not already) or make friends with one!

Read about how this works below.

P.S. Coming Saturday: Help! I already didn’t want to charge my readers and the New York Times says people can’t eat because they’re buying too many newsletter subscriptions. Why writers are thinking about reader subscriptions all wrong.

Introducing the Cross Promo Challenge

Cross promotion is very simple. You promote me. I promote you.

It works best when there’s:

1. Good audience overlap (my audience wants what you’re doing and vice versa)

2. Similar audience size (so the results are comparable for the effort)

3. Easy ways to plug someone into your channels (predefined “promo” spaces)

You don’t need that many cross promo partners to make a big impact for your growth. Kaitlyn Arford, who writes Freelance Opportunities, and is one of my promo partners, has sent me over 700 subscribers. You might be one of them!

Throughout the Cross Promo Challenge, I’ll share a few ways you can make the promotion of other writers easy on yourself (and therefore get more promotion too). I’ll also be matching you up with each other better than Tinder ever could.

Take part in the challenge

Your cross promo challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to find two partners to swap links with and to ship those promotions. 

How are you going to do that? We’re going to help you!

This post is part of the Paid Sub Playbook