I know my Author Ecosystem. Why do I even care and what do I do now?

People are often stumped as to what to do once they have their author ecosystem. This is a guide all about what you do with it to get to success faster than you ever thought possible, and it's a lot.

Aug 28, 2024

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One of the most common questions I get asked about The Author Ecosystems is, "Great. I know my ecosystem. What do I do now and why do I even care?"

The answer to that is as simple as it is complicated, but there is really only one reason why the Author Ecosystems exists; to help you find the quickest path to continuous, replicable, predictable success to create a stable, properous, sustainable career.

Getting to success quickly is the cornerstone of the Author Ecosystem strategy. That doesn’t mean haphazard success, though. In the end, we only rise to the level of the structures we have in place. Yes, we might find success before we have the structures or language to support them, but it won’t be lasting unless we build the mechanisms to find that success repeatedly.

The Author Ecosystems are meant to give you the language to contextualize your success and build the structures to support it.

If you’re a Desert, for instance, you don’t need to spend a lot of time building a mailing list. In fact, since you change your voice so often, it will probably be a drag on your success, because people will only stay with you until you change your voice again.

You might change your voice and genre every 3-6 months for years, and meanwhile you’ll be pulling along people who don’t resonate with anything you’ve written for a long time. Since you focus on virality and hijacking trends to help propel your message, you could have a very nice career without a mailing list at all.

Meanwhile, if you’re a Forest, who mainly only writes one theme for their whole career and never focuses on trends, you would be silly not to put a ton of energy into your mailing list and community, but you probably don’t have to ever look at social media to see what’s trending because you will never, ever catch that trend (except by luck).

This whole archetyping system is meant to show you five different success paths you can use to go from zero to success quickly, how to build out the right foundations for that success, and then how to expand your business using the other ecosystems when you are ready to scale.

It all starts with finding one success path that delivers consistent, predictable, repeatable revenue.

Finding one path to consistent revenue allows you to build a strong foundation for your career.

This focused approach reduces the complexity and drag that can come from juggling multiple strategies simultaneously. By channeling your efforts into a single, well-defined path, you can achieve critical mass more quickly, paving the way for future diversification and growth.

Mark Manson breaks creator business success into three phases.

Stage 1 - Single platform, single revenue stream
Breaking through and building an audience is extremely hard anywhere. Therefore, when starting, you want to narrow your focus and put 100% of your energy into winning on one platform. In this case, “winning” means building up enough of an audience to monetize it sufficiently that you can at least eat and pay rent. That could be through sponsored posts on IG or YT.
Or it could be through selling courses through Twitter or LinkedIn. A Stage 1 creator is already living “the dream” but they are incredibly vulnerable to algorithm changes, account shutdowns, or major cultural shifts.
Stage 2 - Multi-platform, single revenue stream
Once you’ve monetized an audience on one platform, the next goal is to diversify your audience across many platforms. Your audience and recognition on one platform will give you a tailwind on every other platform. But aside from growth, there's a practical, defensive reason for this.
The more diversified your audience is across platforms, the less any single platform influences your business. Over the years, I have seen so many creator businesses die a swift death because of an SEO update or a Facebook algorithm change and they were not diversified. Side hustles can live at Stage 1.
But I would say for any creator who seriously wants to do this as a career for a long time should try to get to Stage 2 as soon as they're making decent money. This usually means repurposing tons of content across many platforms.
Take your most viral tweets and turn them into Instagram posts. Take your best short-form videos and repost them to TikTok and YouTube. This also usually means hiring a team for the first time. The model here is to build audience on multiple platforms and mediums and push them all to a single point — usually your newsletter, where you then monetize them.
Stage 3 - Multi-platform, multiple revenue streams
Once you have diversified your audience, you should now diversify your revenue streams as well. This makes your business more resilient but also maximizes your earning potential. Don’t just do sponsored videos, but create your own physical products as well as promote affiliate offers. The strategy here is the same as the audience — the more diversified you are on the back-end, the more resilient you are to shifting market conditions and the more likely you are to survive.
Reaching a Stage 3 creator business generally requires a larger team than Stage 2.
It also likely requires some sort of funnel of content generation in order to service all of the platforms and mediums. Creators who make it to Stage 3 are likely making 7-8 figures and are anti-fragile enough to remain around for decades if they choose.

By progressing through these stages, creators can build a more stable and profitable business, reducing vulnerability to market changes and increasing their chances of long-term success.

This maps very well onto the five levels of The Author Ecosystems, though Manson identifies a different axis to view your career, and is way too focused on platforms instead of strategies.

These are our levels.

Level 1 - Inert. Authors at this level don’t even know how to start doing things because it’s so overwhelming. They are pulled in every direction and feel like they are drowning in information from every direction. In order to get out of this level, you need to start doing something and it doesn’t much matter what you do.
Level 2 - Developing. Authors at this level have started doing things, which is great, but nothing is working. They are following all the best practices as best they can, but they are failing at everything they try. If you want to get to the next level, you have to find something that works and latch onto it. NOTE: You probably won’t know your ecosystem until you get out of this stage, and that’s okay. Until you know what works, you are just using what feels right to you. Once you know what works, then you’ll have a better handle on it.
Level 3 - Emergent. Authors at this level have found something that works, but they are also doing all sorts of other things that aren’t working. To get out of this level, you need to shed everything that’s not working and double down on things that are working for your ecosystem.
Level 4 - Evolved. Authors at this level have fully embraced their ecosystem and are making money, but they are capped out at what they can earn without evolving beyond what they’ve been doing. In order to exit this level, you need to integrate other ecosystems into your author business.
Level 5 - Expanded. At this top level, authors have found ways to integrate new bits into their business that help them continuously grow.

Everything we’re doing in The Author Ecosystems is helping you find that one repeatable revenue stream that will keep delivering you results no matter what. Once we nail it down, you should be able to pull that lever every time you need a cash injection and have it deliver for you.

Each of these success paths has a “stack” of tools and strategies necessary to succeed.

For a Grassland, having at least a weekly blog and guesting on podcasts consistently are probably essential parts of their stack because they need to be seen as an authority in their niche, while a Tundra would only need to do that during a launch to help build excitement.

Everyone has a finite amount of energy, and if you’re focusing on bits of other stacks that don’t actually move the needle for you, then you are going to spin your wheels and burn yourself out. It’s not that any of this stuff doesn’t work. It just possibly doesn’t work for you.

That’s the whole point of our unofficial slogan “You’re not doing marketing wrong. You’re doing the wrong marketing.

Deserts probably need to spend all their time writing the next book and catching the next trend, so they don’t have a lot of time for podcasts, mailing lists, social media, Facebook groups, etc. If they start doing those things, then they either won’t have the energy for what matters, or they’ll burn out trying to do everything. Their quickest path to success is writing the next book, while for an Aquatic, they need to be out in front of their brand acting like a ringleader, and probably hiring Deserts to work in their worlds to help fill it up with content.

For an Aquatic, they need to make everything an event that delighted superfans love, which takes all their energy, giving them very little back for their actual content, unless they hire well to build out the structures of their universe.

Do you see how important this is now? You shouldn’t be doing 20% of all five ecosystems because then you won’t get anywhere. All you’ll do is burn out and negate all the work you’re doing because you these actions are canceling each other out.

However, if you give 100% energy and keep doubling down on the actions that work, they keep compounding on themselves.

That is why your base ecosystem becomes the basis for your business. For me, as a Tundra, launching something on Kickstarter is the basis of my business. When I’m designing my year, those launches go in first and they are meant to deliver enough revenue that if I did nothing else they could keep me going.

My year looks a lot like a fashion designer. I have months where I rest, months where I launch, and months where I build. I’m a Tundra, and that process of Build, Launch, Recover is the essential rhythm to how I operate. Your ecosystem dictates the rhythm of your business and everything else radiates from it.

Even now that I’ve evolved into a more complex ecosystem, I still think about the Build, Launch, Recover cycle as an essential component of how I grow.

A Desert’s rhythm involves hitting more singles than I do, and launching more often, but with a smaller spectacle than me with each launch (because they can’t expend the same energy on each launch as I do since I’ve been resting for months). They probably release a book every month or two without a lot of fanfare, packaging those books into omnibuses every three books, and then packaging them all together every six books into a massive series omnibus. They are also likely using Vanessa Vale’s Box Method and hiring a team to bring their work into other formats.

A Grassland is almost always in low-power mode, putting out content on a continuous, maybe even daily basis, guest blogging, guesting on podcasts, and caching amazing SEO for years as they build their dominance and help their niche become the next big thing. It looks like they are everywhere, but they are slowly putting pennies in the bank every day, while Tundras are tossing in hundred dollars bills every couple of months.

Tundras have the Build, Launch, Recover cycle. They are very seasonally ambitious who disappear when they aren’t launching. We rest a lot because launches take a ton out of us. Our entire worlds tend to stop while we’re in the launch part of our cycle.

Before I move on you need to know that Tundras are the biggest “augment” to other ecosystems. Most other ecosystems don’t know how to launch well, so they tends to tack on the Tundra launch methodolgy to their existing ecosystem in an effort to launch better.

I’m still not convinced anyone is a “true” Tundra. So, if you’re thinking “I feel like I’m a Tundra and an X” that’s normal. You probably aren’t a true Tundra. Even I, the model Tundra, wake up many days thinking I’m really an Aquatic who needed to make money so I learned how to Tundra. I still adopted the Tundra methodology for success, though, in order to break through. If you are a Tundra+X, then you need to pick one style or the other to form the base of your business. There is a big difference in picking up Tundra launch strategies and living that Tundra “Build, Launch, Recover” life.

Forests are mainly focused inside their communities, hyping up their diehard fans and providing them the language and ability to feel seen. They aren’t out in the wide world much because they are giving everything to their community and turning them into ambassadors for their work. Then, when they launch, they rely on their communities to get the word out.

Aquatics are constantly finding new partnerships and delivering their universe into new formats. They are also planning events that get their fandom, and the broader world, excited about their work. Their partners do a lot of the heavy lifting during a launch with them in a support role much of the time, which means they can launch a whole lot more than anyone else, except maybe Deserts, since they are borrowing other people’s audiences to do it.

Do you see how being half a Grassland and half a Tundra will burn you out? Their success paths are almost completely opposed to each other. Grasslands give a little bit all the time and Tundras give a ton in small bursts. I know because that’s exactly what happened to Monica and I during our first year in business.

Writers, by and large, do not have any rhythm to their business, so they are always flailing and wondering how they’ll make money. The Author Ecosystems is meant to give you the stability and focus to find the rhythm that you can dance to for the rest of your career.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s figure out the next steps.

1. Do you want to embrace this author ecosystem?

The biggest misconception people have about The Author Ecosystems is that it is a personality test.

This is not Myers-Briggs. This is not Enneagrams. This is not even CliftonStrengths.

Instead, each one of us embodies all five ecosystems at all times to varying degrees. We can turn them on and off at will. So, once you identify your dominant ecosystem, the first question is whether you want to embrace it. You can wake up tomorrow and decide to transition from a Desert to a Forest if that aligns better with your goals and lifestyle.

Why would you do that? Maybe you don’t like the rhythm of that business, or maybe you see that you can’t sustain it. Maybe you are worn out and want to try something new, or maybe you got into a rhythm when you were first becoming an author, and it doesn’t work for you anymore.

Heck, maybe you just think another ecosystem would be more fun. Either way, you aren’t beholden to any ecosystem. However, whatever you choose, be prepared to go all in on it for the next 6-12 months because in order to break through the noise and get where you want to go, that’s what it’s probably going to take, following one path to success.

If you choose to change, congratulations! This marks the first day of a transformative journey.

2. Embracing your ecosystem

Each ecosystem offers unique strengths and weaknesses. Understanding these can help you leverage your natural tendencies while addressing potential pitfalls.

Desert Ecosystem

Deserts excel in trend-spotting and quick production. They are adept at making unemotional business decisions, riding trends, and optimizing their processes. However, they need to balance short-term gains with long-term sustainability. The key for Deserts is to maintain a "camel hump" of resources to weather market changes and avoid overreliance on a single trend or niche.

Dan Brown and E.L. James are prime examples of successful Deserts. They capitalized on specific trends and delivered what readers wanted at the right time, achieving significant commercial success.

Desert Success Path

Harness Virality: Watch social media and other outlets for signals on what is hot and harness it for your own success. Lots of romance authors are Deserts, and look at them all blowing up on Tiktok.
Write the next book: Don’t get distracted by other tasks that aren’t about harnessing virality and writing the next book.
Build a Publishing House: Partner with other Deserts to create a stable of writers who can help you dominate a genre.

Grassland Ecosystem

Grasslands are deep delvers, focusing on popular topics that align with their interests. They become experts in their chosen fields and produce high-quality, best-in-class content. Grasslands need to avoid spreading themselves across too many projects and should focus on building a strong foundation in one area before expanding.

George R.R. Martin exemplifies the Grassland ecosystem. His deep and detailed world-building in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series has created a dedicated fan base and lasting legacy.

Grassland Success Path

Leverage Content Marketing: Expand your reach by creating a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel centered around your niche.
Collaborate with Experts: Partner with thought leaders in adjacent fields to enhance your authority and reach.
Expand Your Series: Develop long series, spin-offs, sequels, or companion books to deepen your audience's engagement.

Tundra Ecosystem

Tundras are natural launchers and trend stackers. They excel at creating excitement and maximizing the impact of their launches. However, they need to manage their feast-and-famine cycles effectively and ensure they have enough resources to sustain them between launches.

Tim Ferriss and Sherrilyn Kenyon are notable Tundras. They have mastered the art of launching projects that capture significant attention and generate substantial revenue.

Tundra Success Path

Stack Evergreen Trends: Incorporate multiple evergreen trends into your launches to maximize their impact.
Optimize Your Launch Process: Refine your launch strategies based on past successes and failures.
Explore New Platforms: Experiment with platforms like Kickstarter or Patreon to diversify your income.

Forest Ecosystem

Forests thrive on interconnectivity and personal touch. They often juggle multiple pen names and genres, injecting their personality into all their works. The strength of a Forest lies in the shared language and consistent nurturing of their projects. However, they must avoid spreading themselves too thin and focus on leveraging their personal brand to build a loyal audience.

For example, Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson have successfully created vast interconnected worlds that captivate their readers. Their ability to maintain consistency across different genres while staying true to their unique voice is a hallmark of the Forest ecosystem.

Forest Success Path

Cross-Pollinate Your Projects: Use your different pen names and genres to create interconnected worlds and series.
Develop a Strong Personal Brand: Focus on building a close relationship with your readers through personalized engagement.
Leverage Fan Engagement: Utilize platforms like Ream or Patreon to foster a strong community around your work.

Aquatic Ecosystem

Aquatics are versatile creators who thrive on building immersive experiences for their audience. They often work across multiple formats and platforms, tailoring their strategies to their fans' preferences. The challenge for Aquatics is to avoid spreading themselves too thin and to maintain a coherent brand across different formats.

Michael Crichton is a successful Aquatic, known for his expansive worlds and ability to engage readers across various media, including books, audiobooks, and graphic novels.

Aquatic Success Path

Expand into Multiple Formats: Offer your stories in various formats, such as graphic novels, audiobooks, and web series.
Develop Immersive Experiences: Create a rich multimedia experience for your audience, including merchandise and fan events.
Build a Strong Team: Delegate tasks to a team that shares your vision to expand your creative output.

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3. Have you maximized your ecosystem?

Unless you're already earning six figures or more, it's likely that you haven't fully maximized your ecosystem. Achieving Stage 5 within your ecosystem requires doubling down multiple times on your strengths.

Most authors fall into Stage 2 or 3, and it's only when you've thoroughly figured out your ecosystem and cut out the actions that don’t serve you that you move to Stage 4.

The core objective of The Author Ecosystems is to propel you from Level 1 to Level 4 as swiftly as possible.

Success with The Author Ecosystems is about finding one reliable income path, focusing hard, and excelling at it. Multiple paths create drag, delaying or preventing the critical mass necessary for success. Once you achieve stability, diversification is essential, but the initial focus should be singular.

To maximize your ecosystem, choose one of the five success paths and commit to it. Develop a competitive edge, exploit it, and ride it to success. Eventually, you'll reach the limits of this path, and that's when you expand by incorporating other ecosystems to exponentially increase your income.

How I "evolved" beyond my natural author ecosystem

Russell Nohelty

July 5, 2023

Read full story

4. Evolution and expansion

As you grow and potentially cap out in your primary ecosystem, the next step is to evolve by integrating strategies from other ecosystems. This strategic evolution can exponentially increase your income and broaden your audience. Here are the evolution paths for each ecosystem, which you can find more about in this article.

Desert

Forest - Forests are the most antithetical to Deserts, but creating a shared language and making your books stickier solves one of the biggest Desert weaknesses, creating ephemeral books that stop generating revenue quickly. Forests are great at creating a shared language, and we think you should be incorporating that part earlier in your journey.
Aquatic - Most Deserts want to evolve into Aquatics first, but Aquatics are the hardest and most expensive to get going, and the most superfan focused. That said, you know how to drive traffic, and now that you’ve gotten your books hookier, you can start turning all those casual readers into superfans.
Grassland - Since both Deserts and Grasslands are data-heavy ecosystems, it’s relatively easy for Deserts to start incorporating longer series and content marketing into their businesses.
Tundra - Since Deserts are TOFU experts and Tundras are BOFU experts, you’ll supercharge your ecosystem by being able to create irresistible offers that your newly minted superfans will love.

Grassland

Tundra - Grasslands are all flywheel, and Tundras are all funnel, so it makes sense to start your evolution journey by embracing your inner Tundra. The biggest problem for a Grassland is standing up and saying “Did you know you could buy this?” That is the biggest strength of a Tundra.
Forest - Forests are all about shared language and developing a community of readers who can communicate with each other, which would be a huge asset for a Grassland, who generally have the ear of influential people and can move the direction of an industry already because of their intense grasp of their topic, but don’t have a shared language to bring people deeper into their universe.
Aquatic - Aquatics focus heavily on slow growth and super-fandom. They are building their own category across many years, which aligns with a Grassland’s desire to be future-focused. However, Grasslands are moving the industry to a point on the horizon that is inevitable, so that when the industry arrives there they are the authority. Meanwhile, Aquatics are shining a light on something that nobody even knows they need, which is almost antithetical to the ethos of the Grassland. For that reason, it probably makes sense to leave Aquatic evolution toward the end of your journey.
Desert - Grasslands are very long-term focused, while Deserts are concerned with immediate success. While we don’t think Grasslands should immediately start embracing the short-term wins that come easily to a Desert, being able to capture attention by using existing virality can help funnel readers into the largesse of a Grassland’s catalog.

Tundra

Aquatic - Aquatics take the longest to spin up for most ecosystems, but Tundras are great at injecting cash infusions into a business, so it would make sense to start this work from the beginning of your evolution journey. You should also be thinking about creating your category across every launch from the beginning of your career. It will just take a long time to bring everything together, but for a Tundra, you should be thinking about your category from your first launch, and how to make each one feed into an overall whole. The more you can use your launches to complement each other, the better you’ll be in the long run.
Grassland - A Tundra is a funnel without a flywheel, and a Grassland is a great flywheel, especially when it comes to attracting new people into their orbit. Tundras desperately need somewhere to send people who get through their funnel and to warm new people up so they’re excited for their next project. Whether it’s a Grassland or an Aquatic, Tundras grow best when they have one huge universe or topic to pour all their work into so it keeps growing over time. Even if you’re writing a lot of disparate things, think about putting them under one umbrella so that all your effort isn’t wasted after each launch.
Desert - Deserts are masters of the opt-in while Tundras are the masters of the irresistible offer. Once you have your ecosystem solid, then it’s time to keep funneling people in and learning how to do it on autopilot.
Forest - Creating a shared language between your launches will help you craft a narrative to bring your disparate projects together in an umbrella everyone can use to get excited about your work.

Forest

Grassland - You have a pretty great retention and escalation path for people to fall in love with. However, you’ll get a lot out of taking your shared language and creating longer series with better content marketing around them. Studying data like a Grassland will help you make better long-term decisions once you have some stability under you.
Desert - Since you already have great engagement, now it’s time to bring people into your universe. Combined with your inner Grassland, a Desert will constantly bring in leads and readers into your orbit.
Tundra - Forests take a long time to grow, but they grow quicker if they can create big spectacle launches that help bring attention to their work, and the more you can use evergreen tropes to help draw attention to your work. Both of these are huge strengths of a Tundra.
Aquatic - Forests are great at engaging with fans, and Aquatics are the ultimate superfan ecosystem. They are all about delighting their fans, and creating a huge epic universe across many formats for them to play in once they join up. While your ecosystem grows slowly, you can be using Aquatic tactics to help monetize them across many different mediums.

Aquatic

Desert - Getting better at opt-ins is something that will bring a lot more people into your universe. You already know how to turn casual readers into superfans, so let’s start by driving people into your ecosystem en masse.
Tundra - It’s really expensive to be an Aquatic, and Tundras are great at bringing cash infusions into their businesses. You need that since your plans are generally so epic in scope and span many modalities.
Forest - Once you have money coming into your business, you need a better way to engage with your readers by creating a shared language between them and facilitating ways for them to talk to each other. This is the strength of a Forest, and embracing that evolution can broaden the appeal of your work.
Grassland - Grasslands are all about depth, and a big, massive universe needs a ton of depth. Whether it’s world bibles, shared universes, RPGs, or any number of formats, embracing your inner Grassland will help give your world depth that will delight readers and bring them deeper into your universe.

Understanding your Author Ecosystem is just the beginning. By asking the right questions and strategically maximizing and evolving your ecosystem, you can achieve sustainable success in your author career. Embrace your natural tendencies, focus on your strengths, and methodically expand your strategies to reach new heights.

Start doubling down on the strengths of your ecosystem today, shed what's not working, and pave the way to your ultimate success.

The journey to mastering your Author Ecosystem is ongoing. Embrace change, stay committed to your goals, and remember that success is about finding and optimizing the right path for you. Whether you're a Desert, Grassland, Tundra, Forest, or Aquatic, there's a clear path to thriving in the ever-evolving world of authorship.

What do you think?