Borrowed Audiences

Swaps, Group Promos, and Renting Someone Else's Readers

An author with no readers can reach one who has some. The mechanism is old, cheap, and rarely documented honestly.

Borrowed Audiences is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. Newsletter swaps, group promotions, multi-author giveaways, and shared reader magnets — this book covers what a borrowed subscriber is actually worth, and what the borrowing costs.

Written from inside a house that has run these directly, including through the loss of a platform it depended on, this book says plainly what that cost.

What's inside:

• What a swapped or borrowed subscriber is genuinely worth, versus what it feels like they're worth
• What borrowing an audience costs in unsubscribes and list quality
• Why a giveaway list of two thousand can be worth less than a hand-built list of eighty
• How to tell a swap partner whose audience actually overlaps yours from one who merely exists
• What happens to a cross-promotion strategy when the platform running it disappears
• How to structure a swap so it builds your list instead of just borrowing attention briefly

This is not a promise that swaps and group promos will fill your list. What it will do is show you what borrowed readers actually cost, so you can tell a good swap from a wasted one before you run it.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.