How I "evolved" beyond my natural author ecosystem

This article is all about scaling your author career beyond your natural ecosystem by walking through a case study analyzing my own evolution. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, Spinning a great idea into book marketing gold, and How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack to give context to this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

If you’ve taken our Author Ecosystem quiz, or know anything about the Author Ecosystems at all, then it’s not hard to recognize that I’m a natural tundra. I’m a seasonal launcher who took to Kickstarter like a fish to water or a polar bear to hibernation. I’m a world-class hype man who knows how to build excitement around a launch, which has served me well for the last decade.

However, over time I started to cap out on what I could do inside my natural ecosystem. This happens to most authors who have a healthy ecosystem. They find a natural limit to how much growth they can have doing the same thing over and over again.

I could predict a launch down to the dollar, but I didn’t grow substantially between 2017-2020. I was still a six-figure creative during all those years, but just barely.

On top of that, the landscape was constantly changing under me, and it became harder and harder to get people excited about every new project I had coming out. Even though I didn’t know the word back then, it was time for my ecosystem to evolve beyond just my tundra instincts.

Evolving is the process of taking a healthy ecosystem and adding elements of the other ecosystems to help fuel growth. It should only be attempted once you have a stable ecosystem that is rocking and rolling predictably. One of the biggest causes of authors having an unhealthy ecosystem is that they try to evolve too soon.

I’m going to say it again because I know writers are stubborn. Evolution should only be attempted once your ecosystem is healthy and stable. Your ecosystem absolutely must be able to run predictably without much variation because you need that stable income to fuel your growth, and you need the brain space available to start taking on new tasks that are outside of your comfort zone.

Almost all authors that fail at doing this end up evolving too quickly and destroying their ecosystem. This happened to me, as well, and I had to spend years rebuilding my processes after they collapsed. It wasn’t until my ecosystem was stable and predictable that these strategies started to work for me.

If you evolve too quickly, your existing ecosystem will devolve quickly, and you’ll have to abandon your growth plans in order to nurse it back to health, wasting time and effort. Instead, first focus on stabilizing and nurturing your own ecosystem so that it can operate nearly independently from you.

Even though I know for a fact that many people reading this, even with my warnings, will think it’s a good idea to evolve before they are ready, three warnings are all I have time for today. So, I’m going to move on and explain the strategies I used to build out my business beyond my ecosystem.

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How I stabilized my own ecosystem so I could evolve like a tundra

Like many authors, I tried to evolve beyond my ecosystem before it was stable and success kept slipping out from under me. Whether it was writing to market, rapid releasing, expanding beyond books into other formats, building interconnected books, forming communities, or trying to “own a topic”, none of them worked because every time I stepped out of the thing I was good at, everything I had built would crumble under me.

Now I know the reason I failed is because I kept trying to move beyond my natural ecosystem before it was stable and predictable, but back then I just thought I was a failure.

Over time I learned all about the benefit of launching in seasons from JA Huss and Marc Jacobs, with quick bursts of live launching followed by long periods of recovery. This is the natural happy place for a tundra.

I created a system where I would launch four main campaigns a year, with time to recover and rebuild my email list between them. Since I couldn’t hype up Kickstarters for a full month each campaign, I also started to cycle my campaigns at varying lengths from 5 days all the way up to 45 days depending on the marketing demands and budgets of each campaign.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read all about it in This is NOT a Book, but here is the relevant section:

I eventually settled on doing a novel launch in January, a graphic novel/anthology launch in March, another novel series launch in June, and a comic book launch in September, with an experimental mini-launch in November for a small fandom-specific project.

Varying up my campaigns and keeping to that schedule stabilized my income and allowed me to start thinking about expanding. It took a couple of years to stabilize, but by 2022 I was ready to expand out from my tundra roots and evolve into something new. Below is the order in which I evolved that worked for me, though every ecosystem has its own evolution path.

I talk about my natural ecosystem's happy place in this article about gaining validation for your work.

I can’t stress enough that this worked for me because I am a tundra. Building out a healthy ecosystem will be different depending on your type. However, once it did work of stabilizing my ecosystem, I was able to move on to evolving beyond my tundra roots.

How I started to think like a brand manager and evolve like an aquatic

The biggest strength of an aquatic ecosystem lies in their ability to develop systems to expand across different formats and involve different partners to grow their entire ecosystem. Unhealthy aquatics expand too quickly before the scaffolding is in place, but a healthy aquatic understands how to build out their brand without collapsing under the weight of it.

This idea is naturally appealing to most ecosystems because they can rely on other people to help them build their brand. Unfortunately, for other ecosystems the books drive everything else, including growth. For aquatics, their growth is fueled by their entire brand, so they should be branching out into other formats well before everyone else.

Meanwhile, tundras like me need to point back to successful books in order to be taken seriously by brand partners. I had been trying to put together brand deals for years, but it wasn’t until I started to focus on launch books continuously that those successful launches started to bear fruit.

In the end, I didn’t need to do much beyond showing my books were popular to open dialog with board game companies, coffee brands, and RPGs. Often, they came to me, even, once I showed my brand had a critical mass of interest on a platform.

The growth of the game and publishing categories on Kickstarter certainly helped other companies take an interest in my brand, but only because I dug in deep on making my books popular on Kickstarter first, drumming up excitement, and using that to catapult my business into its evolution.

The key to my expansion was rooted directly in my tundra ecosystem. The key to evolution isn’t abandoning your ecosystem for another one, it’s in using your natural state to fuel your expansion.

It turns out that even though I didn’t know about it then, I talked about this exact thing in my post about how to land a book publishing deal:

For me, the first successful expansion of my brand came from Monica incorporating my work into her Book Sales Supercharged series, specifically through the launch of Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. 

Even though this was expansion through book licensing (more of a desert strategy), it still showed me what was possible working with a successful business. Before I licensed my work to Monica, all the deals that I had been part of fell apart. Working with her was my first foray into expanding my brand beyond my own company that worked.

How I started to go deeper with my work and evolve like a grassland

I started my career launching stand-alone books like the first volume of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, Katrina Hates the Dead, and My Father Didn’t Kill Himself.

Building excitement for a single book is one of the great skills of tundras, and for the first years of my career, it worked really well. However, it eventually became apparent that the lack of depth in my catalog meant there was nothing to keep people coming back to read more about the universes they loved, which stifled my growth as an author.

It turns out that while people do read cross-genre more than anyone gives them credit for, they didn’t do it enough to make a decent profit on a short fantasy series. For genres outside of romance and thriller, it generally takes four to five books before you can reasonably expect to make a profit on ads, which meant I had to write more books in the same series in order to fuel growth.

Since I didn’t want to write in either of those genres, I decided that I needed to write a 10+ book signature series that could keep finding new fans for the rest of my career. In my article about designing a signature series, I talk about how to go about doing this for your own career:

There is no doubt that this is a grassland strategy as they are all about going deep on a few topics. However, I used my ability to gather excitement to launch not one but three signature series on Kickstarter (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga). Instead of launching each book individually, I chose to launch multiple books with each campaign to garner more attention from my audience and direct the narrative.

While you can find Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter on retailers, neither The Godsverse Chronicles nor The Obsidian Spindle Saga have even launched on retailers and yet I’ve already earned back all the money I spent on creating them and built a nest egg for marketing. When they do launch, I can use my skills as a tundra to build excitement again to help that launch succeed far into the future.

How I started to interconnect all my work and evolve like a forest

As a tundra, I’ve developed a whole lot more successful stand-alone books than most other ecosystems, but in order to have long-term reader growth, I needed to connect them all together like a forest.

In order to do this, I first needed to find my “shade trees”. These were the books/series that stand out above all the others and attract readers into your ecosystem and make them fall in love with your work.

Luckily, because of my work building out three deep series like a grassland, (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga) I had three different shade trees to attract readers. However, they were all pointing to different universes without much interplay between them. In order to get readers excited to read my whole back catalog, I needed to find a way to connect them together.

I found that interconnectivity by creating The Cosmic Weave, a unifying concept I built around my books to connect my three biggest series together with my standalone work in an effort to increase reader retention.

I’ve created the mechanics for nearly all my books to connect together into one singular, satisfying experience for readers. It will take one more book to fully explain the concept, but once that capstone book launches, I’ll have nearly everything interconnected for the rest of my career, building the bonds of my series like a forest.

I talk about bonds in my post about the secret to self-publishing success:

This interconnectivity is my attempt to evolve like a forest, but it is fueled by my ability to build excitement and launch like a tundra. Being able to launch a book successfully and break even on it allowed time for a lush forest to grow with dozens of entry points that can drive audience growth for years.

How I started to follow the trends and evolve like a desert

Of all the ecosystems, the one I struggle with the most is thinking like a desert. Their superpower is finding attention arbitrage where demand far outstrips supply and delivering experiences readers gobble up with gusto.

This ability defined the career of pulp writers for generations, but I struggle with it. I have a deep-seated desire to embed my personality into everything I do and focus solely on the things that catch my interest even if nobody else cares about it.

For deserts, knowing the hot tropes and delivering a satisfying experience that audiences respond to is the goal, even if it means being invisible to the reader. Deserts make great ghostwriters, journalists, and licensed content writers because they can separate themselves from the work and be proud of whatever they are paid to write, even if they have no interest in it. They get excited to write a book optimized to hit as many hot trends, or client requirements, as possible, even if it means their own voice is muted. Getting the story to pop with readers is the most important thing to deserts, not infusing themselves into every page.

I envy that ability. I have no patience for or interest in optimization. I’ve gotten in my own way when it came to money countless times for innumerable reasons. I’ve eschewed big genres with massive paydays because my artistic muse flitted to some obscure topic or another. I’ve turned away from life-changing offers because I didn’t care much about the work. I even blew up successful companies just because I didn’t feel like doing it anymore, even if it meant disappointing lots of people.

My friend told me once “what does it matter if you like it as long as people want to pay you for it”, and I scoffed at them while my bank account withered up.

It literally took 40 years of my life for me to understand that when money comes easily, the rest of your life gets easier. So, I’m trying really hard to embrace my inner desert more these days.

I don’t talk about it much, but I’ve been burnt out on writing fiction for a long time. I haven’t even started a fiction project in almost a year. Every time I do, I suffer debilitating panic attacks.

To help me get back on the horse, I’m working with my agent to identify genres I can write well, that are highly saleable, and don’t take a lot of my emotional labor to finish. Hopefully, divesting the work from my emotional connection to it will allow me to move forward in a way I haven’t been able to in a while.

Let me be clear, I care very deeply about doing a good job with all of this stuff. It’s just that my whole essence isn’t wrapped up in other people liking it or not, and that frees me up to find even bigger and better hits.

In my article Five steps to writing freedom, I talk about finding your hit books.

I’m trying to be better about finding hits in top genres now. Even when I’m writing in my favorite genre of portal fantasy, I’m trying to think of ways to optimize my work to find the most readers. These days I’m combining my tundra ability to launch well with a desert’s natural instinct to find large pockets of fans and deliver a satisfying experience to them, amplifying both skills to take my career to a new level.

While everyone has an ecosystem where they feel the most comfortable, most successful authors will eventually reach a point where they must evolve beyond their natural state to achieve the success they crave.

I talked about that much more in my article about Kesha and personalized marketing.

This need to evolve also makes it difficult to analyze the ecosystems of very successful authors because they incorporate aspects of different ecosystems into their businesses.

Neil Gaiman is most likely a natural forest. However, he found astronomical success with his long-running comic book Sandman and knows more about mythology than just about anyone on Earth; two traits that are pure grassland.

He’s also turned much of his work into other mediums, including movies and tv shows, which is an aquatic trait.

It’s very hard to be an uber-successful author without evolving beyond your natural ecosystem, but it’s also critical that you know your natural ecosystem, because when all the chips are down, you will revert back to your natural state in order to regroup and regain your balance.

And what if you fail during this evolution? You will, and I talked about that, too.

I have started so many businesses that eventually failed, or that I shuttered, that it’s staggering. There’s one thing about failure we don’t talk about a lot.

The time you spent doing the thing you failed at has real, tangible value. 

I recently shuttered my Verizon dealership after nearly 10 years. It used to account for as much as 80% of my revenue, but those days are long gone.

Those years where it carried my business have value. The relationships I made running it have value. The skills I built running that business have value. Most importantly, the money I made during that time had value.

People often only want to try new things when they are sure they’ll be successful, but some things only serve you for a season.

That season, though, it might save your life. Additionally, the time you spent doing that task might have immense financial value in another season.

I stopped running book marketing in 2021 because it didn’t serve me, but then a year later an opportunity came up I couldn’t deny that fit perfectly. Now, that one client makes me more money per month then my other sources combined.

Twenty years ago, I was a substitute teacher. I hadn’t been in a classroom in over a decade, but last year I brushed off the rust and started substitute teaching to get me through a rough patch. I have no shame about doing any type of work when things get rough or if I think it will serve me, even if it only lasts for a month.

Writer MBA sells courses and non-fiction books, but it’s not my first time doing that work. In fact, I licensed all my work to Monica in 2020 because my previous attempts were miserable failures. I never thought I would do non-fiction again after that.

Look at me now. We’ve made more in the past year than I did in all my previous attempts at this combined. Those years I spent building those old businesses had value, even after I gave it up, and they helped me succeed years later. I made tens of thousands of dollars on those “failed” businesses before I shuttered them.

That Verizon dealership came from a partnership that blew up in my face, but I was left with the means to carry my business for years.

This also happens in fiction. My best-selling series was an abysmal failure when I first launched it, but retooling and relaunching it on Kickstarter brought new life to it. Now, that series is the lynchpin of my whole fiction business.

Somebody once told me that 99/100 businesses won’t make it past 10 years, but 99/100 people make it past 40, which means people had rich lives before that business and after it. That resonates with me deeply.

Just because those businesses failed doesn’t mean the years they spent running them didn’t have value. They served their owner until they didn’t, and that’s okay. You can have a deep, meaningful life even if something fails. It can mean a lot to you even if you decide to give it up.

It’s not that failure is a life lesson. You get more out of even failure than just a lesson. Sometimes, you get a lifeline. Other times you plant the seed for success in the future. Most times, it gives you enough money to survive until the next thing.

Even if all you get is clarity on what you don’t want to do with your life, that time has way more value than we give it credit for, especially financially.

All three of my main sources of income are built upon the burnt ashes of businesses that failed. Even before they failed though, they served me…just for a season, not my whole life.

If any of this sounds interesting, then I invite you to take our quiz and get more involved in our community so that we can help personalize an experience for you.

If not, then at least it’s over.

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If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.