IndyWriters Development Roadmap
Enabling newsletter platforms to offer easy and fair cross-promotion to their writers.
To gain access, connect with Ben J. Clarke at LinkedIn.
Enabling newsletter platforms to offer easy and fair cross-promotion to their writers.
To gain access, connect with Ben J. Clarke at LinkedIn.
The core function of IndyWriters is cross-promotion between similar newsletters. All writers who use IndyWriters can perform this cross-promotion without monetization. However, there is scope for writers to increase their reach through paid placements, and earn money by accepting paid placements. This will not affect IndyWriters' core functionality.
Paid placements will work in the same way as paid ads - i.e. a newsletter pays to be shown to more potential new readers that it would otherwise reach. Likewise, any newsletter that chooses to earn through offering ad placements will be paid per click.
There will be minimal UI overhead on either side of the equation. Newsletters that choose to buy placements will set a budget and their existing cards on IndyWriters (image, title, tagline and topics) will be shown more often. Newsletters who choose to offer paid placements will simple declare that they wish to do so, there cross-promotion link can then be used as normal - paid placements will be set automatically.
Paid placements will only render in the cross-promotion lists for newsletters who choose to offer them. Writers who only want to perform unpaid cross-promotion will not be forced to accept paid placements.
Paid placements will only render to readers of appropriately similar newsletters. Just like IndyWriters matches unpaid cross-promotions to similar newsletters, it will match paid placements in the same way.
There will be four, possibly five, stakeholders in paid placements:
Revenue should be shared between all five. The mechanics of this are yet to be worked out.
At present, newsletter writers have no control over who they cross-promote with - IndyWriters works as a fully-automated system in this sense. Some writers, however, have expressed interest in gaining some measure of control. Four areas have been requested: