How to fall in love with book marketing
A new way to think about building a thriving reader community and crafting a career that better aligns with your natural rhythms...
This article deals with the systemic flaws we are taught about building a sustainable community, how to thrive in the new era of personalized marketing, and introduces a new archetype framework we have developed to help authors carve a path forward. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading How to turn a great idea into book marketing gold, How to go paid on Substack without selling your soul, and "I am overwhelmed" to give context to this article.
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I have been listening to Kesha’s music since she was making trashy club songs and I was a trash panda getting wasted in bars every weekend. Her work provided the theme of my early adulthood.
She transformed her career into deeper, more soulful music at a time when all my bar friends moved away and I started to contemplate my life more deeply. While the legal case surrounding her lawsuit broke my heart, her fight to control her career, her IP, and her life resonated deeply with me as a creator trying to understand the pitfalls of massive success.
After not being able to release an album for years, the records that finally came out were some of the best I’ve ever heard in my life. I have big feelings about whether you must be sad to create great art. However, there is no doubt accessing that trauma allowed Kesha to create transformative music on a deeper level than in her early career. Of course, she could have made this music from the beginning if she wasn’t being micromanaged and sexually abused by her producer.
With her new album set to release Friday, I’ve been listening to the first two songs off it, Fine Line and Eat the Acid, on literal repeat.
Sometimes, I will zone out and listen to them for hours. I’ve listened to both songs hundreds of times, and they tell a cautionary tale about making creative work that continues to deeply resonate with me both as a human and a person who studies the intersection of craft and commerce.
There's a fine line between genius and crazy
There's a fine line between broken and brеakin'
Spent my whole life tryna changе what they're sayin' about me
Sick of walkin' that fine line. - Kesha, Fine Line
Suffice it to say, I am a big fan of Kesha’s work, from way back in the Ke$ha days, and feel deeply connected to her work on a spiritual level I reserve for very few people.
However, I am not a member of any online community for her work, and I don’t post about her music often. I have a few friends who geek out with me when a new song drops, and I get very, very excited every time she sends an email (which is only a few times a year). As far as I know, she doesn’t host a Reddit or manage a Facebook group, and she’s not focused on connecting members of her fandom together in the way we are normally taught how to do it.
I would pay an ungodly sum of money to watch Kesha read the phone book, and yet, by the parlance of how we talk about community, Kesha is awful at fostering a connection to and community around her work.
That can’t be possible, because literally millions upon millions of people care about her music and feel deeply connected to her struggle…
…which means that maybe, just maybe, everything we know about building community in specific and building a creative business in general, is built on a web of half-truths and faulty logic.
***Warning: this is a long article and your email provider will truncate it. In order to read the whole 6,000-word article without interruption, I highly recommend reading it at this link for the best experience.***
When I changed the name of The Author Ecosystem Substack to The Author Stack, I did it simply because I thought it would be good SEO. This is Substack after all, and I figured people would search for authorstack like they search for Booktok. I kind of couldn’t believe somebody didn’t take authorstack yet when I saw it was available.
The more I thought about it, though, the better it fit into what I am trying to accomplish with this space, which is to create a place where authors could learn about “the stack” of skills they could use to build a thriving creative business.
I’ve talked about “the stack” for years, pulling the idea from web development and marketing tech. The idea was that every industry has a “stack” that they are taught in order to be successful. In order to be a “full stack developer” you needed to learn it all.
For indie book publishing, authors are taught writing to market, book packaging, Amazon ads, Facebook ads, and newsletter management, among others.
For creating comics, you learn how to create a book that looks amazing, Kickstarter, social media community building, and convention sales, among others.
For non-fiction, you learn how to explain the scope of an opportunity, create courses, build sales funnels, release weekly content, and speak in front of a crowd, among other things.
For journalism, you’re taught the upside-down triangle, creating newsworthy content that gets people to stay on-site longer, and how to retain readers through subscriptions.
This is an oversimplification of the success strategies taught in each area of publishing I’ve worked in throughout my life, but if you squat in any forum about these topics for long enough, a “stack” of important principles starts to emerge that unites the community in a collective shorthand. It is the shared language we all use to communicate and identifies others “in the know”.
It is amazing to have that kind of shorthand, but it also creates a problematic culture that stifles innovation. When you spend too much in a specific community, people start to think that their way is the only way and start to lash out at other concepts that don’t fit neatly inside their neatly constructed model of success, fostering a culture riddled with survivorship bias that suffers from groupthink on a systemic level.
I have talked about authors using Kickstarter, for instance, since at least 2015, but was roundly told it could never work. Meanwhile, I was earning a profit on very niche books in an industry where almost nobody breaks even. It wasn’t until Brandon Sanderson raised $41 million dollars on Kickstarter that authors widely started to accept that Kickstarter might be a good idea.
Then, in short order, it became part of “the indie author stack”. Huge swaths of authors started incorporating it into their businesses…and things quickly went to pot as many authors found it wasn’t the gold rush they had been promised.
To be fair, by and large, authors have found tons of success on Kickstarter. Authors and publishers in our Kickstarter Accelerator course have raised close to $1.5 million for their projects, and we’ve changed countless more lives through our book and podcast, but it turns out that Kickstarter is not a magic bullet that suddenly fixes a broken system for everyone.
I admit my part in saying that all authors should use Kickstarter, but it quickly became apparent in the past year that while some people will crush it on Kickstarter, others will fizzle out, and even some seven-figure authors won’t be able to raise $500 on it.
But why though? Why is it a platform that literally changes the course of one author’s life completely blows up in another’s face? Why is it that even if you account for follower count, mailing list size, income, and effort, and you find two authors who study the same system and implement it in roughly the same way, their success on Kickstarter will vary wildly? And why didn’t I see it until it unfolded in front of my face?
I can’t be 100% sure about that last part, but it seems clear I was so focused on both my own success and the survivorship bias of those that crushed it on Kickstarter that I failed to understand a simple truth staring me right in the face…some people are better suited to how the Kickstarter launch cycles work than others.
It turns out that before the Brandon Sanderson campaign, for the most part, the people who used Kickstarter were the ones who already wanted to integrate it into their businesses, which propped up the success metrics for everyone. When everyone started using it whether they saw it as a good fit or not, more people realized that it didn’t work for them.
We still have almost a 100% success rate among our students, but a pattern of failure started to emerge, and we fell down the rabbit hole looking into what caused it for months.
I’ve been trying to build a community for years in the ways that “gurus” tell you to build communities. I’ve tried Facebook, Discord, Circle, and nothing has worked. I have applied hundreds of strategies to try to boost engagement…none of it worked, either.
Meanwhile, I have a mailing list of 20,000+ people with an open rate above 40%. Even when I send daily during a marketing campaign, people still open and read.
On top of that, when I launch a new book, people get excited to buy it. We launched a Circle community earlier this year to try yet again to build a community, and while it was failing spectacularly, I successfully launched four projects and a conference, making over $100,000 while my community died a wordless death.
So, it’s not like I have a dead list of people who don’t care. My fans care deeply. They just don’t engage with each other much in a community setting. On top of that, it’s not how I’m wired. I am particularly bad at fostering that kind of engagement…
…but that’s the only way we’re told a community can exist.
So, if a community is critical to success, and you can only build one if you foster engagement across the community, then why is my community thriving even though we almost never engage with each other?
It turns out, “the stack” we’re force-fed about building a community is completely wrong, and there are actually lots of ways to build a community around your work that aren’t talked about at all.
I only found this article by following
on Substack and going down a rabbit hole, and I only met Simon because I reached outside my existing networks to learn a new language.Then, right before doing my final readthrough of this article, I received this bit of wisdom in an email from Pat Flynn’s SPI Academy regarding a community-building challenge I joined through our Writer MBA Circle membership.
Before jumping into launching your community, it’s important to pick a business model that aligns with your current business and offerings. This will also help you identify the amount of time and energy you want to dedicate to your community.
The four most common business models are:
Paid membership communities. Members pay monthly, quarterly, or annually. The communities are perpetual and ongoing.
Limited time, Cohort-based communities. The community exists for a fixed period of time while the members accomplish something. (i.e. a cohort-based course community, a bootcamp, or a challenge with a start and end date.)
Product-centric community. Maybe a brand or a startup with a product — and the community is a place to learn about the product.
Shared interest community. Typically free or invite only — not directly monetized. -SPI Academy
The more I searched for community-building advice from outside my normal sources, the less broken I felt. Meanwhile, dogmatic adherence to “the stack” made me feel like a failure. While “the stack” acts as a shorthand to socialize members of a community, it also isolates them from new ideas. At its worse, teaching “the stack” actually destroys as many, or more, careers than it helps create by telling people there is only one way to do things.
Seth Godin says culture is about showing your community that “people like us do things like this”, but it turns out, like most things, the truth falls into a murky gray area not easily explored through ironic tweets and pithy comments.
I don’t even blame the experts. A culture quickly calcifies around certain ideas and rewards people who talk about those ideas in ways that reinforce the monolith of “the stack”. As I found out first-hand, it takes an incredible amount of effort to push that monolith even a fraction of an inch, and all the while the industry will do its best to return to the mean.
Because of my myriad chronic illnesses, I’ve spent a lot of time in doctor’s offices over the past 20 years, and I’ve been with Kaiser for the better part of a decade. If you come from a country with a functional medical system, then Kaiser is the closest analog I’ve found to the NHS in all the best and worst ways.
Kaiser is excellent at dealing with known medical problems. If your illness falls in the middle of the Bell Curve, then they can handle you with smashing success. If, however, you have an illness that presents differently than the norm, or if you have an illness that is not easily diagnosable, then the whole system breaks down.
As such, I’ve had to spend a lot of time with personalized medicine over the past few years trying to find ways to live inside this body, and what I’ve found is fascinating.
Did you know, for instance, that the same foods can cause different glucose reactions in different people? My wife and I could eat the same amount of food, at the same time, and have very different reactions depending on how our bodies process it.
Or, did you know, that the order in which you eat food matters? If certain people eat nuts before they eat fruit, they can cut off the glucose spike that comes from sugary food.
Or that for some people, ice cream is better than fruit because of the high levels of fat?
I could go on forever, but the point is that while there is a “stack” of medical knowledge that is broadly applicable to many people, in almost every case you should be personalizing the results for your own body.
Additionally, just because something works for one person in a certain way, chances are it will work differently for you if it works at all.
This is where experts and gurus can help. They can give us a broad scope of the opportunity and best practices to solve a problem. They also can diagnose a problem and tell us what not to do to prevent catastrophic failure.
I had to get my thyroid irradiated last year, and while the process almost killed me, I was sure happy the doctors could properly diagnose the problem, fix it, and put me on the right pills to manage it.
They got me 90% of the way there, but now it’s on me to find the right balance to make my life liveable.
Other patients might need way more personalization in their life. For instance, we know frighteningly little about most conditions, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Medical science can do almost nothing to help people with CFS right now. Doctors can help give some direction, but it’s 95% on patients to find ways to make their lives not miserable.
I’ve watched personalized medicine completely change people’s lives on both ends of the spectrum. We’ve now entered a world where a personalized “stack” is the way forward for authors.
and I have over 20 years of combined experience helping thousands of authors, and recently completed work on a new system to help authors develop a personalized ecosystem that works with their natural tendencies.Just like with personalized medicine, finding your personalized ecosystem will help some authors get that extra 5% to lock everything into place. For other authors, though, it could turn their unsuccessful business into a thriving one.
The rest of this article is a collaboration between Monica and me as we introduce the concept of Author Ecosystems to you.
After working with thousands of authors to help turn their love of writing and publishing into a sustainable career, we have observed five clear and unique publishing ecosystems (or archetypes) that closely align with author success. We believe that identifying your ideal author ecosystem and focusing on marketing actions that work with your natural tendencies is the surest path to thrive as an author.
We’ve mapped these archetypes onto the five ecosystem biomes on Earth (desert, grassland, tundra, forest, and aquatic) to provide a clear, easily visualized metaphor for each type and linked them to successful publishing strategies that work best for each one. We’ve also identified healthy and unhealthy habits for each type and have developed guidance to create a healthy ecosystem and foster a sustainable author career using strategies that align with your natural strengths.
While we’ve created this framework to work across the entire publishing cycle, including craft and mindset, our focus remains on sales and marketing, and this is where we think we can help people create individualized plans for themselves the most.
Some of the questions we hope the Author Ecosystem Archetypes can answer include:
Why am I struggling to turn my writing into a career?
What advice should I take (and what can I filter out)?
How can I prevent burnout while building my career?
Depending on your archetype, there will be certain things that resonate with you more than others, and you should be able to pull things out of “the stack” that help you to thrive and abandon things that don’t serve you.
If you want to find your perfect ecosystem, we have developed a free quiz to help.
I’ll be talking about this a lot more moving forward as it’s the direction we’re taking all our teaching modalities, but as this is already a lot of information, for now, I just want to introduce each of the five ecosystems and tell you a little bit about them.
Desert
Most important resource: adaptability
Superpower: being nimble
Examples of deserts: Michael Anderle, James Hunter
Deserts are pliable creators who excel at writing to market and identifying hot trends that audiences want to read at any given moment. They can make unemotional business decisions and “ride a trend” by delivering on the hot tropes in the market before it vanishes. If you’ve ever met somebody who seemed to always hit the right trends at the right time, they are probably a desert.
Because deserts are good at riding trends, they need to have a few different skill sets, including strong research skills, the ability to produce quickly, and a willingness to detach—both to double down on what’s working well and to cut activity on anything that’s not working. Deserts tend to put all their sustenance in one cactus and build a highly profitable pathway for readers to sales.
Deserts tend to do great, for instance, in KU, because their superpower is being able to find what huge groups of people are searching for at any given time and deliver something those readers want while their frenetic energy is at its highest peak. This brings more money in the short-term, though it can put their business at risk if any aspect of their system—audience, money, or market forces—dries up. Many deserts balance this risk by having multiple pen names or by maintaining a freelance career on the side that they can always fall back on in tough times.
Successful deserts thrive on writing to market and rapid-releasing books, but this doesn’t work for any other ecosystem. A desert’s ability to detach from the material and write fast to trend without the need to infuse themselves into the text allows them to work faster with less mental drain than other ecosystems.
We estimate that a significant percentage of struggling KU authors are other ecosystems trying unsuccessfully to be deserts. Unfortunately, since they either incorrectly judge upcoming trends, can’t write fast enough to capitalize on trends without burning out, or infuse too much of themselves into their books to capitalize on trends, it does not work for them.
This is not helped by the fact that in order to be at the forefront of emerging niches it behooves deserts to play their cards close to the vest and observe much more than they speak.
Healthy Deserts maintain a camel hump (or several) where they can store away their “riches in the niches” to sustain them between oases where water is plentiful. They watch the warning signs that the market is changing and they pivot when necessary—to another genre, to another source of readers, or to another platform.
Unhealthy Deserts stray too far from a water source and end up thirsty when one or several of their money makers dries up. Additionally, they have a habit of “planting” a book and running away before that series can take root. Even though succulents can survive on very little maintenance, they do need to be watered well until they take root, while unhealthy deserts are always on to the next trend.
If you want to see if you’re a desert, then take our free quiz.
Grassland
Most important resource: focus
Superpower: going deep on a topic
Examples of grasslands: Monica Leonelle, Mal Cooper
Grasslands are focused, deep delvers who seek out popular topics that align with their interests. These are the industry thought leaders who correctly predict emerging trends and then become such experts that they literally know everything about it. Once they effectively “own” the topic, they get an outmoded benefit of both SEO and word of mouth that compounds over time.
These are the authors we follow to understand a complicated topic. Unlike deserts, who are encouraged to keep their cards close to the vest in order to maximize a trend, a grassland finds true value in explaining complex emerging trends to “own the space” and drawing attention to it so they reap the benefits of backlinks to their work and referrals from other professionals to fuel their growth.
Grasslands plant a lot of seeds to feel out a topic, but when they find something that takes root with a large potential audience, they quickly go extremely deep with it—deeper than anyone else has the energy to do.
Monica is a grassland, and the amount she knows about certain topics is exhausting and unrivaled. If you always turn to the same person when you need to understand the nuance of a specific topic better, they are probably a grassland.
Grasslands tend to consider every angle of their genre, niche, or topic so that when they put something out, it tends to blow people’s minds and rise to the top. Like with deserts, a key to grassland success is that they are right about the emerging trends which will captivate their audiences for years to come.
A ton of authors we speak to think they are a grassland, but no matter how much attention they give to a topic, the trend either never emerges or they don’t “own the topic” when it does. Being right and going deep are marketing tactics that grasslands use to separate themselves from everyone else in the field. Meanwhile, the sheer length of time they can talk about a topic prevents competition from emerging to challenge them.
Grasslands are capable of becoming the absolute best-in-class at whatever they do, which is why they need to choose new potential projects carefully.
Because grasslands are intense and obsessive about their chosen topic, they must stay focused to see the fruits of it. It does not serve them well to have multiple projects going at once because they don’t have the energy to devote to each one. It also doesn’t typically work for them to cross over audiences between two different interests, unlike some of the other types.
Healthy grasslands find fertile soil to take root in and grow the tallest, most epic tree in the garden. They also dedicate so much of their energy to one area that they become above reproach. Unhealthy grasslands plant a lot of seeds but never gain momentum in any one area, struggle to deliver on deadlines they’ve set for themselves, or try to plant too many trees than their ecosystem can support.
If you want to see if you’re a grassland, then take our free quiz.
Tundra
Most important resource: excitement
Superpower: building hype for launches
Examples of tundras: Russell Nohelty, Melanie Harlow
Tundras love to build cool things and launch them, and they are extremely well-versed in turning a ton of attention to themselves and their project for a short period of time. They are the type to study a platform and see what trends they can tap into to make their next launch bigger, and they are most likely to know how they are going to market and sell something before creating it. Once done with a project, they wipe their hands free of it and rarely think much of it again—the launch is over!
I am a tundra, and this is absolutely true with every tundra I have ever met. We are naturally able to understand the evergreen trends in a genre and stack them on top of each other in a way that gets people super excited. While a desert focuses on current trends and leaps between them often, and a grassland focuses on emerging trends they can sink their teeth into for years, tundras generally focus on evergreen trends and find ways to use them in unique ways that will get everyone in their target market excited for a new launch.
Because Tundras survive on a feast and famine cycle, they need to be able to peel as much meat from the bone as possible. Tundras become stackers—stackers of trend, stackers of value, stackers of audience. They are comfortable with having a lot of one-off projects and comfortable with building a diverse audience that only likes a portion of their catalog—though they welcome superfans who enjoy everything, too.
This is why Kickstarter is naturally perfect for tundras—because we are launchers and know how to get a small, niche audience excited about something cool. While Kickstarter is also great for other ecosystems, tundras are naturally wired to understand how to use it. While deserts are great at riding trends and grasslands have stickiness, tundras tend to have a preternatural ability to hit #1 in the Amazon store and use that excitement to keep their books selling.
Healthy tundras have a firm understanding of their feast seasons and build safeguards to make sure there’s never a point of starvation. They also learn to connect their body of work—usually somewhat disparate projects—under one banner so that every launch offers a bigger feast on their backlist. Unhealthy tundras struggle to create enough feasts to get through the famine periods, leaving them burnt out and under-resourced before the next launch.
If you want to see if you’re a tundra, then take our free quiz.
Forest
Most important resource: interconnectivity
Superpower: building engagement between all their books
Examples of forests: Claire Taylor, Bryan Cohen, RJ Blain
Forests march to the beat of their interests and put their own unique spin on everything they do for their readers. They have a close relationship with their fans largely because they inject so much of their own personality into all their books. They could write a murder mystery, a sweet romance, or a cozy comedy and readers will gobble it up because it’s their unique take on a genre.
The biggest problem with forests is they always think they are some other ecosystem. Forests really want to be “in on the party” so they act like deserts, but they write too much of themselves in their books to maximize trends.
Forests also really like digging deep into their own nerdy interests so they think they are grasslands, but when they try to share their interests nobody cares outside their own community.
Forests also really like providing cool stuff for their audience, so they try to launch like tundras, but they haven’t stacked enough tropes to build excitement outside their own community to get people talking.
When they focus on their superpower of building interconnectivity between all their work and finding people who grok their own slant on the world, they thrive.
Because forests are multi-passionate, they tend to have multiple pen names going at once. Whereas this might overwhelm other types, Forests are good at watering each of their trees on a consistent schedule so everything grows steadily. They are extremely competent and tend to stack an impressive number of skills to deliver high-quality work across everything they do. Forests are good at being top of the class and being part of the conversation.
To do this, forests must be consistent, hard-working, and patient, as it takes time, energy, and money to stand up each of their trees (and they still need to do so one at a time to get a bit of momentum in one area before moving on to another). This is also the ecosystem that takes the longest to get momentum, so it’s very important to have at least one standout series that can draw people in as you build your community. However, once they are rocking and rolling, there is usually no stopping them.
Healthy forests survive by cross-pollinating their work across all their interests. The key connection is their personality, and their fans gravitate toward them for who they are rather than what they do or write. Unhealthy forests chase trends, focus too much on their existing community without bringing in enough new readers, and don’t pay close enough attention to the marketplace to ensure enough readers will share their interests to draw them into their ecosystem.
If you want to see if you’re a forest, then take our free quiz.
Aquatic
Most important resource: vision
Superpower: creating a brand beyond their books
Examples of aquatics: Marvel, Hasbro, Star Wars
Aquatics are excited about everything and want to create an immersive experience for their fans. They know exactly what their fans want and this dictates both what they create and how they market it. If their fans want to see their bestselling novel as a comic book, they create it for them—even if they have no idea how to do a comic book.
The key with aquatics is that they are brand managers. Their loyalty is on the overall brand and servicing their fans with different types of products. Aquatics see books as a means to service fans of their brand, but they are equally excited about RPGs, pins, movies, and everything else that can exist beyond the books.
Because aquatics build their business to maximize customer lifetime value across an entire brand by leveraging many different formats, they must be competent at many skill sets, like building large stories and worlds, delegating responsibilities, building a functional team that understands the bigger vision, maintaining a strong connection to fans, and expanding slowly and as time, energy, money, and other resources allow.
Often, an aquatic is intentionally overshadowed by the brand they are growing. Usually, your first introduction to an aquatic is through one of the many tendrils they have extended pointing back to their brand. Whereas, a forest is almost always central to their brand, an aquatic often disappears into the background.
Healthy aquatics thrive by creating cool new products that both service their current audience and help them grow a larger audience in different pockets of fandom. Unhealthy aquatics create too many products without having a team in place to help share the load, spread themselves too thin and lose momentum by growing too fast, or create products they want to exist instead of focusing on what their audience wants to buy from them.
If you want to see if you’re an aquatic, then take our free quiz.
Each of these ecosystems is deeply committed to fostering a devoted audience and building a supportive community for them. However, they do it in very different ways.
Only forests would find exceptional value in having a traditional Reddit forum, Facebook group, or paid membership community, and fostering interactions between their fans. Their superpower is imbuing interconnectivity between books and their career grows more successful with every member they add to the community, so of course that’s what they love.
I’ve watched healthy forest communities in action and they are a site to beyond. However, that doesn’t mean the other four ecosystems are broken or unable to build brand loyalty through their own community.
Tundras generally like to share cool things with their audience, so creating a mailing list to curate interesting things they find is perfect for them to interact with fans around common interests. Tim Ferris has used this exact strategy for years. Tundras also love marketing in short bursts, so conventions work particularly well for them. They might also benefit from a limited-time, cohort-based community focused around a launch.
Grasslands create a community around a topic, as everyone nerds out about the same thing with focused attention. They build community by leading people and being there to catch them when they fall down. Content marketing is a perfect avenue for them to build community, using their own Substack, Medium, website, or another platform where they get the advantage of SEO and backlinks for years to come. Since they are always right about emerging topics, they can benefit the most from network effects, too, as the topic grows in importance and more people talk about it. They might also get a lot of value from a shared interest community built around their topic.
Aquatics are interested in creating lots of products to further the brand, so while they might have a community like forests do, the way they interact with them will probably be by providing new experiences to their fans, not necessarily interacting with them on a personal level. Perhaps they could also build a product-centric community around their brand.
Meanwhile, if deserts want to create a community at all (and of all the types deserts are least likely to want to do that) then they should probably join communities filled with readers where new trends are happening so they can interact directly with readers to collect data on what readers actually care about right now.
These are all communities and ways to develop deep, meaningful connections with people. They are all also equally valid depending on what works for you.
When I think about building a healthy ecosystem, I often circle back to the 5 Love Languages.
I am a tundra and my love language is a combination of gift-giving and acts of service. So, when I think of my ideal ecosystem, it involves making things for people and demonstrating how much I care by sharing it with them in a grand gesture like a launch.
That is not the only framework I think about, though. I sit at the intersection of many different ones that inform each other. I’m a trailblazer in Becca Syme’s Author Success Archetypes, which means I’m always out in front of new things. I’m also an Enneagram 8w7 non-conformist, which means I’m always challenging the status quo. My top five CliftonStrengths are Command, Strategic, Achiever, Communication, and Connectedness.
All of these combine together to make me the kind of creator I am, and they work in tandem to inform my decisions.
I don’t think I could live any sort of peaceful existence if I didn’t know all of those things about myself. It is the convergence of CliftonStrengths, Author Success Archetypes, Enneagrams, Love Languages, Author Ecosystems, and more that show me the overlapping Venn Diagram where I exist in ikigai.
We live in a world of personalization, and if that is true, then “the stack” is mercifully dead, or at least evolving. I see a future where “the stack” means a collection of strategies you could use to be successful, but they need to be tailored to you. I hope “the stack” morphs into “the stacks” and, like the main bookshelves of a great library, represents a collection of potential paths forward, filled with endless possibilities to explore, instead of an oppressive pile of tactics that must be absorbed and regurgitated.
There are countless ways to be successful, and our goal should be to find the things that are uniquely relevant to us. I personally like the idea of a community flywheel, where the community is the center point of our creative livelihood, but the way it’s described in this article would never work for me. I need to adapt it to work for my business and recognize that others might not resonate with it at all.
Moreso, as a fan, the idea there is only one right way to be a good fan is insulting. I do not want to engage with random humans about the music I love. I want to buy the album, listen to it by myself, geek out about it for a minute with friends, and then sit with how it will fundamentally change my existence as I listen a hundred more times.
Most of the fans who financially support my work never email me. They do not reply to emails. We do not engage online. They don’t answer polls. That is not the relationship we have, but it doesn’t mean we don’t care about each other. I show them cool things I’ve made, and when those things resonate with them, they buy them if they can or show some enthusiasm in some other way if they can’t. We connect through the work, not because of it or on top of it.
That might not be your ideal process, and that’s okay because we live in a world where both are equally right, and wrong, depending on how they are deployed in your own business.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to Gag Order a hundred more times before Friday. If you’d like to join me, sound off in the comments.
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Wow, this is so timely. I was discussing this topic today with a fellow writer, how everything we've been taught about mailing lists and funnels just doesn't work for us and feels icky. I've come to understand that there are many ways to reach people but finding a way that fits who I am and not working unethically is really important to ensure its sustainable. I'm off to do the quiz. Thanks for this 🙌
I love this so much and it’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about for a while now. I’ve just moved most of my back catalogue back to wide after a few years of KU and in that process I stumbled across the understanding that in fact I’m better suited to wide. I made a lot of money in KU and still do but marketing wise I don’t wanna have to do alllllll the things I had to do for that KU money. Im a Forrest and have a large super invested and engaged community and I realised I just needed to double down on that because that’s what I adore going. And it fuels my creativity. And lol you’re spot on about Forrests thinking they’re other ecosystems 🤣