YOU ARE MOST LIKELY A TUNDRA

• Challenges: Getting stuck in a feast and famine cycle, predicting the size of launches
• Motivations: Marketing for a limited and usually short period of time and making a lot of money at once

Every healthy business needs a way to produce new offers, a way to grow an audience, and a way to bring in sales. Here’s what might work best for those identifying as a tundra:

What Would Likely Work Best For Production

• Market research and trends

Tundras are really good at diving deep into one platform and dissecting how to become the biggest and baddest kid on the block on that platform. They know how to find the evergreen trends of the platform and they figure, why put just a few in my project? Why not throw them all in?

This type plans their marketing for a book long before they bother to write the book. They differ from other types because when they launch the book, they already have a pretty good idea of where it will land on the charts. Tundras have a strong sense of the mechanics that drive a product to the front page of a platform, and they see (and eventually, easily predict) sales over time.

Once a tundra understands the platform, they become determined to make a bigger and bigger splash on it. To do so, they stack everything—evergreen trends within the book or series, audiences, everything.

• Creating content and products

When tundras create content and products, they think in projects, and they do everything they can to maximize every project to get the biggest bang for their efforts. This means that they want every project to hit its financial ceiling during the launch, with the knowledge that after that, they are pretty much done with marketing it.

Because of this, this type will do best when they create shorter series, preferably 3-5 books in a larger project. Doing more than this is inefficient for a tundra, because launch numbers start to fall off as you go further and further into a series, and it’s hard to get new people into a project that is on much later books through a launch.

Additionally, for a tundra, writing more than that many books can actually burn them out. Because as much as they like creating, creating for them needs the same seasonality and rhythm as marketing does.

Russell, for example, wrote 12 books in a series because he was told that fantasy series needed to be long to be successful. But then, he launched that series like a trilogy on Kickstarter, which is a more natural marketing rhythm for tundras. After writing a few series of a too-long-for-a-tundra length, he ended up seriously burned out on the creative side.

• Pacing and scheduling production

Tundras are seasonal. At their healthiest levels, they have a period of time for creation, a period of time for audience-building, and a period of time for launching. Some tundras can get this down to two seasons by doing some automation and systemization around their audience-building. But at the beginning of their careers, they tend to ramp up these three things very quickly in order to establish themselves and what they are trying to do faster.

Most tundras can happily handle 3-5 launches every year. For those who are focused on retailers, that means they tend to only write 3-5 books each year. This allows them to put time, energy, and resources into each launch to make it as big as possible.

Most tundras want to write a project, launch a project, and then never think about that project again. We heard one tundra say that after only a few weeks on the market, they consider their book “backlist” and never do much to promote it again. Anything that is backlist usually goes through a systemized marketing process and gets a lift when subsequent launches come along.

What Would Likely Work Best For Audience Growth

• Finding AN audience

Everything is a project to a tundra, and finding an audience is no different. A tundra is the most likely type to go from 0 to 5,000 people—subscribers, followers, backers, friends, supporters, patrons, whatever—in a very short time period.

Once the tundra has a base of interested people, they are very good at talking up their newest project and finding the people in their audience who are most interested in supporting them on it. As they get to know and understand these people and what they want, they go back and try to find more of them through a promotion (like a viral giveaway) or through advertising.

Every new project becomes a data point to them, and they use those data points to keep making their projects bigger and bigger for the audience they’ve already collected.

• Nurturing AN audience

Tundras are an interesting type in that they don’t spend that much time talking to their audience between launches. In some ways, the launch itself is the main thing that nurtures their audience. Their audience enjoys showing up for them and enjoys the “show” they put on during launch. They stick around because there’s always another show coming up in a month or two!

In between launches, the audience doesn’t need much nurturing—instead, they need recovery! Launches are exciting, fun, and engaging. The time between launches is a time of rest. Most people wouldn’t want to spend the day at Disney World every day for the rest of their lives, and the tundra audience doesn’t want to be in launch mode all the time either.

Tundra audiences like to get excited and like to show up all at once and experience something together. It’s the difference between listening to music on Spotify whenever you want in your kitchen, versus going to a live concert. Tundras are ultimately performers rather than authors. And they definitely put on the best shows.

• Scaling AN audience

Tundras best scale their audiences through launches. There are two main ways that this happens:

The launch is so well stacked that it attracts more and more people and snowballs as it goes on. These new audience members then (hopefully) go on to explore the tundra’s backlist.

The tundra launches different but similar projects to capture the edges of their genre or niche. This helps them grow a bigger audience in an area that they’ve become known for, and they are confident that once they have this person in their purview, they can convert them to the next project.

Tundras scale faster when they start to connect all of their disparate projects under one brand—and we often see tundras who reduce down to one pen name after finding something that they can go all in on. This type sees its backlist as either an audience-builder or a launch stacker—which is a unique and different view from other types. And every project, whether it bombed or flew, becomes backlist once the launch is over—also a unique and different view from other types that might instead try to relaunch or plan a big promotion 6 months or a year down the line.

We also see successful tundras choosing to follow a single personal interest that has a high return. For example, the place where we see the most tundras is in contemporary romance, because it simply does better on retailers. This is one of the challenges for contemporary romance authors—most are not tundras, but most of the thought leaders and 7-figure authors in the field are tundras. What they do easily (and what they make sound easy) isn’t going to work for most of the authors they are speaking to.

As tundras develop their skills for launching, we see them “trading up” to a bigger genre/niche/platform. They love finding bigger and better games to hack. This is another way that tundras can scale.

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