Idea springing from Office Hours. A comment about the upcoming holidays and the possibility of “Substack Dollars” from an author whose name I’ve lost … plus

’s idea about a virtual book tour came together in this idea … a Substack Matchup.

Here’s the idea sketched out definitely with room for improvement. I would be willing to experiment with this if anyone thinks they would like to play.

***What if 10 collaborating Substack authors agreed to host a “Substack Matchup” where each author would be willing to give away a month of paid subscriptions for up to 10 readers.

Step 1. Identify 10 collaborating Substack authors who agree to Host the extravaganza and be willing to comp a paid subscriber month to up to 10 responding readers.

Step 2. Each Host would post about the Matchup (boiler plate wordage provided including bio and brief description of each author, as well as their email addresses) and invite readers to respond to the author of the Substacks of their choice … knowing that each author only had 10 available paid subscriptions. (Perhaps instructing the readers that they could only request two although I don’t know how that would be monitored.)

Step 3. Readers would email the Author of their choice with their request.

Step 4. Hosts would enter the free subscriptions into their own systems … and notify Matchup Lead Host about results.

Benefits: Readers of each host author would feel like they’re getting something extra and a chance to explore a Substack they’re not already subscribed to.

Authors would be exposed to the readers of all the other authors and might wind up with some continuing paid subscribers assuming there was a fit between readers and subscribers. If the average of the 10 authors was 400 subscribers, that means each author would be introduced to 3600 new readers (assuming minimal overlap in readers).

The mix of 10 would probably be best if the content focus differed and the total number of subscribers was in a similar range: under 1000; 1000 - 3,000, etc.

I would be willing to lead a group of 10 authors with under 1000 readers if anyone wants to try this.

Definitely open to suggestions, improvements, possible pot holes.